How swift, the slippage from keeping it together to losing it.
Mathilde saw her own face reflected in the window, but no, it was a barn owl on a low branch in the cherry trees. She could barely master herself. She had never expected this. These women, such kindness, their eyes shining in the dim room. They saw her. She didn’t know why, but they saw her, and they loved her even still.
In they’d come, integers; out they came, squared.
She could be happy growing old, moving among people when she wanted, but alone.
Lotto once said to her, and she laughed and conceded that she was. She wasn’t sure just then if she was telling the truth or if she was lying. Great.
She is frightened of her children, because now that they’ve arrived in the world she has to stay here for as long as she can but not longer than they do.
Only when she smiled at him was he finally able to relax.
Anger’s my meat; I sup upon myself, And so shall starve with feeding. Volumnia says this in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. She – steely, controlling – is far more interesting than Coriolanus. Alas, nobody would go to see a play called Volumnia.
His only extravagance was soccer, though he called it football, of course, rooted for Tottenham. His mother, you see, was Jewish; she loved how Tottenham fought back against anti-Semitic slurs and called themselves the Yid Army. The Yiddos. For Leo, he said, it had also been the name, so meaty, so metrical. Tottenham Hotspur, its own tiny song.
It was mathematical, marriage. Not, as one might expect, additional. It was exponential.
She had been led to this conclusion by forces greater than she. Conquers all! All you need is! Is a many-splendored thing! Surrender to!
Each, when invited to talk, was secretly relieved that someone saw them as important as they were.
A mother’s job is to prop open all possible doors for her children.
He was enough of a lover of forms to understand the allure of such a strict life, how much internal wildness it could release.
She was crushed with gratitude.
The others took a step in, bowed their heads to listen. Holy Communion of scuttlebutt.
Girl scrubs your toilets for twenty-three years, you begrudge her the life she had when you weren’t around.
She buries her failure in this, as she buries all her failures, in reading.
It would probably be softer, less muscular, like sexual yoga. It’d at least be novel.
Doomed people celebrate peace with sky bombs.