Sublime

Grace Macaulay, then: seventeen, small and plump, with skin that went brown by the end of May. Her hair was black and oily, and had the hot consoling scent of an animal in summer. She disliked books, and was by nature a thief if she found a thing to be beautiful, but not hers. She didn’t know she couldn’t sing. She was inclined to be cross.

A child is expert at frightening himself,

Though technically fat, she presented more as simply huge, extrudent in all three dimensions.

In my head on this particular day are Tomasini’s String Quartet in B flat major IV, the sound of a thousand butterflies dancing in a field one late summer, the cover illustration from a Penguin edition of Our Mutual Friend, a recipe for Key Lime cheesecake, the text of an A-level Geography book, and a pocket watch.

In a prime spot just across the yellow-tape road from the lemon trees, he tended his own dark grove of bookshelves, and beside them a field of legal boxes, which held thousands of menus from restaurants famous and obscure. Whenever I passed Horace’s collection, there was someone flipping through the menus with the furious intensity of a DJ digging