BOOKLOVES

A princess stands at a state ball with her face arranged into nothing. A man on the far side of the room has just been hurt, badly, and she felt every part of it in her own body, because the two of them are tied together in a way that would end both their lives […]

A woman sits in a recliner that was bright blue in another house in another state. Her daughter has just filled two bin bags in a kitchen nothing has been cooked in for years, and she will not let them leave until she has been through both. She feels every corner. She lifts out an […]

A woman kneels in a dead garden on a cliff in winter and puts her bare hands into frozen mud. The vines have had years to dig in and they fight her; the thorns open her palms; the mud goes black under her nails. She has no gloves because she did not look hard for […]

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An elderly woman in Staten Island sits crocheting with five cats asleep on various parts of her body. Her grandson, a federal agent of forty who has not taken unplanned leave since a funeral eight years ago, paces her living room listing why nothing can happen with the man he has met. He is twenty-six. […]

Fifty feet up, in a city whose rulers would execute her for being inside it, a girl is inching along a branch that has started to creak. A spider crawls over her wrist and she cannot flick it away, because letting go means falling, and falling is the one thing she is genuinely afraid of. […]

Twice a day, an elderly woman walks from her neighbourhood down to the sea and back, and both times she passes a small stone house above a shuttered shopfront. For roughly twenty seconds she stops breathing. A longer route exists that would avoid the street altogether, and in fifty-four years she has never taken it. […]