Sublime

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of

not ugly, but small-windowed and melancholy-looking: the sort of house that must have children, many flowers, open windows, and little vistas of bright things, to make it seem a joyous home.

In 2019 the Emilia Report (named after England’s first published female poet, Emilia Bassano) analysed coverage of male and female writers and found that women were twice as likely to have their ages referenced – or, in the case of Sally Rooney, her appearance, ‘like a startled deer with sensuous lips’, according to one Swiss critic.

She tries to smooth down the creases in her shirt with her hand and for a moment through the thin material she brushes the uneven skin of the scar running above her right hip. She stops suddenly then, and cautiously looks around, but nothing happens and, relieved, she leaves the room and enters the kitchen.

The baby was offered to Rachel behind the blue curtain that kept her from seeing her own organs splayed across her chest, but she said she felt too unsteady holding her in her supine position, paralyzed from the chest down.

And Ma and I—what if months later we sit here and watch a dusty vehicle climb the hill, bouncing a sack of meat in the back seat that was once you? What if…” But she couldn’t go on giving name to her terrors. Instead, she said, “If you go, know that we as we are now will be gone forever.” He shuddered. “We were gone when she was gone. We were shatt

the concept

had one, too, though at that date I wasn’t sure this father was still what you’d call “alive.” When I was four or five, my mother told me she’d changed him into the garden gnome that sat beside our front steps; he was happier that way, she said. As a garden gnome he didn’t need to do anything, such as mow the lawn—he was bad at it anyway—or make an