The Guest: ‘The tension never wavers’ (GUARDIAN)

In retrospect, she could have been more accommodating. Been more vigilant. She had started to believe that it hadn’t been an exchange.

Maybe he was good at pretending, too—she had never considered that possibility.

“Sugar eats your bones,”

The dog was gone, truly gone. The sadness was instant, piercing—her eyes watered. But then, almost as quickly, the fact of the dog’s absence seemed, all at once, like just a fact, another thing that she could not change, a thing she could not help.

The ocean looked calm, a black darker than the sky.

It had an ascetic taste, like water gone sick. All the girls had ordered this, the drink of the female martyr.

She put the sunscreen in her bag. A party favor, useful for later. Like her new sunglasses: she’d found a pair in a bowl on the living room table when she’d gone inside to pee, big tortoiseshells whose green lenses sharpened the world into shockingly precise detail.

the world winnowed to this immediate moment.

So many nights she remembered only as a sour feeling,