Sublime

Little by little, her body was teaching her how to be quiet again.

He had decided now that to break would be much easier. He would eat, then, by himself and could read a book with his meals. They would eat by themselves. He would see them through the safari on a very formal basis—what was it the French called it? Distinguished consideration—and it would be a damn sight easier than having to go through this emotion

the old woman’s injunction to “be proper” kills off any opportunity to expand.

As she pushed off, she knew no one would ever see this sandbar again. The elements had created a brief and shifting smile of sand, angled just so. The next tide, the next current would design another sandbar, and another, but never this one. Not the one who caught her. The one who told her a thing or two.

1. 玩

On her fourteenth birthday, he gives her a bowdlerized translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis.

“Before an author destroys the natural qualities of his writing—that’s

Because she saw that he was, in essence, alone. In his vast solitude she would find hers—and with it, the freedom her overbearing parents had always denied her.