Kiki Ortega, age 23. fonca scholar.
Room #1

It had to be She, a She, with eyes like two big, sinister, ripe pechiches, with nails like seashells and the tongue of a mollusk, a tongue like an octopus tentacle, chin-length black hair, dark black, five foot five, no, five foot four, how much do fourteen-year-old girls weigh? she wondered as she leaned back against the wall’s wrinkled skin. To write means renaming the space around you, describing it as if it were something else. For example, when she wrote, she liked to picture herself surrounded by ramparts, which wasn’t the same as picturing herself surrounded by drywall—that was the inappropriate, imagination-flouting word. Few things were as important as finding the right word; no, those kinds of words don’t exist, only the expressive ones do, she remembered, chewing her nails. Reformulation: few things were as important as finding the expressive word. The wall expressed her reality: a stomach full of fingernails, pica, cannibalism. The wall behind her, therefore, was a wall, not drywall. The four ramparts of her room protected her from the language of the others; there, inside, unlike any other place, she could fashion herself by forming lines, long sentences to snort. She had to be a peephole, a tiny hole through which the desire to desire would enter; dark, perverse, much more of a crater than Them. The four ramparts made it possible to break syntax, the word order that always alters the product, to create her own landscapes, to paint with a boy’s voice. They would be marionettes by choice; the eyes that would peer out of the tiny hole. Sometimes, when she wrote, greenish flakes would sprinkle onto her hair, the skin of a reptile-wall peeling off from the humidity and covering the bed and floor with chips of dried paint. There isn’t a standard height for fourteen-year-old girls; they aren’t copies of one another, she thought; height doesn’t matter, it isn’t proportional to age. She brushed her hand over her head like a feather duster. They would be fourteen too. Her name would be Nella. They’d be Diego and Eduardo.

The blank page on the screen, though virtual and imaginary, was as tangible and destructive as any other. The blank page doesn’t actually exist, she thought. That nominal emptiness could exist nowhere but in her imagination. Diego would be pale as the night. Eduardo would have freckles. How hard could it be to write a novel? Reformulation: How hard could it be to write about the sexuality of three children? A novel about cruelty, a novel meant to disturb. Something like The Confusions of Young Törless but mixed with Story of the Eye. To disturb means throwing a stone into a smooth pond. They’d be students at a boarding school, and She’d be the new girl. To disturb means sleeping next to someone with your eyes open. At first, Diego and Eduardo would be the corrupters, the stone in the pond, the eyelids open while sleeping. To disturb means staring at a stranger without blinking until your eyes burn with tears. The reader would have to unravel the characters and then see horror in Nella. To disturb means scratching the paint so that sounds of life outside could be heard in the next room over. She would be the spider. To disturb means writing with half your body submerged in a swamp. They, the flies.

There wasn’t even the slightest breeze outside. Nella would read Marquis de Sade and, like Kochan from Confessions of a Mask, She’d understand physical love through pain and death. The tree looming through the window—the same one that filled with black birds pecking at the panes in the mornings—stood still and gave the impression of not existing, being only an image, a representation. A photograph on a postcard. Nella would like torturing little animals in her amorous rituals. She opened a can of Coca-Cola, set the laptop aside, jumped off the bed, and stepped on the wall’s sloughed skin with her bare feet. A teacher would catch her driving needles into a kitten trapped in a plastic bag. She walked over the organic material toward the window and peered through the branches. That’s why She would have been expelled from her previous school; that’s why they’d have sent her to Diego and Eduardo’s boarding school. She thought Barcelona was a shithole, just like Mexico City. Filth everywhere, she thought, and a bubbling black drop slid down her lip. The boarding school would be strict, and it would demand obedience and discipline. The street was called Indústria, and the same old man was pissing on the same tire of the same red Renault. Nella would feel lost in that world of moderation. The women walked as if their legs hurt; the summer compelled them to wear floral dresses that made their bodies into crude gardens overgrown with weeds. Nella and the asphyxiation of the rules. She could feel dried flakes trapped between her toes. Nella and good behavior. The glass was an insect cemetery adorned with splatters of pigeon shit. Nella and her desires condemned to the electric chair. That’s how the world revealed itself to her inside; but there, surrounded by ramparts, the filth did too. She, the spider, would struggle to understand a morale beyond Her individuality. Where there’d once been the greenish skin of the wall, there was now grayish meat, the walls’ true face. Nella would still find a way to secretly satisfy herself. Gray was the color of stones, sharks, and clouds just before it rains. In hiding, She would find Them.

Scratching her head, she wondered when she’d last cleaned her sanctum, but she couldn’t remember. Everything would be written in first person. She squinted against the scent of sweat and humidity. Everything would be written from Nella’s perspective. That evening she would have to clean, get rid of her own waste strewn across the floor. No: writing only from Her perspective wouldn’t work. Among the shreds of reptile-wall skin were invisible pieces of her own skin, long black hairs, fingernail clippings that hadn’t made it to her stomach. The novel should also be told in Their voices. She looked at the floor like someone looking into a mirror. We’re falling apart every day, she thought, time erodes us, that’s why you have to deceive the reader. She’d better start writing now while the characters still burned inside her, while she was still able to sweep up her own remains. The reader couldn’t know the truth. To write in Mexico or Spain was absurd, pointless. You could only deceive the reader temporarily. She didn’t fully know what it was she wanted to say, but she wrote to find out; she said it was a pornographic novel about three children in a boarding school just to disguise the pressing need to speculate, to think, so the world wouldn’t say she was wasting her time. They and Their cynical voices would block out Nella’s true nature for a few pages. Thinking was an invisible activity that had to be made physical somehow. Diego and Eduardo would seem like the corrupters. Writing was the only way she knew to sculpt ideas. But the one with the spider’s web would be Nella. She wrote so the words wouldn’t speak for her, so the language behind the ramparts wouldn’t destroy her. Diego’s and Eduardo’s voices are essential. With metaphors, perhaps, she could save herself from the unfamiliar constructs. They would be the flies. All she wanted was to say it in her own language. The bugs that fall into a spider’s web aren’t innocent. All she wanted was to articulate herself. My characters will be the real and I a fiction.

She’d felt dreamt up before, when she was little and her parents took her to the circus for the first time. The backlit room is a basement. The actors were dressed and made up like caricatures of themselves, and their costumes didn’t fit. The room: an intestine. Some were stuffed into them, their skin marked and red where the clothing stopped, and others struggled, with the help of thick, colorful laces, to keep the outfits on. The room: a toothless mouth. That day an acrobat in blue stockings fell from the tightrope, and to the audience’s horror, his leg bone ripped through his skin and stockings to splash the floor with crimson. The room: a lizard’s tail. Two muscly men carried him away and immediately brought in the elephants. The room: a fortress. The people forgot about the acrobat. The room: a clearing. The tent filled with applause and sad-eyed elephants. The room: a placenta. She knew, looking out at the crowd, that she was the only one who wouldn’t forget the acrobat. The room: a blank page. She knew she was the only one who wouldn’t let the elephants distract her from the fallen man. The room: a twisted tongue. “The show must go on” really was a terrifying motto. The room: a stage. “The show must go on” was the formula through which people looked straight ahead, smiling, while someone bled out next to them. The room: a self-portrait. That was her first contact with the indifference of the rest of the world. The room: a cell. She understood it better when, years later, her father left home for a woman with graying hair; before leaving forever, he told her he loved her. The room: a wound. At the time she knew it wasn’t true but that it was part of the script dictating what a father should say to his daughter before abandoning her. The room: an aleph. She was revolted—because it was in the script of what a daughter should say to her father before he abandons her—when she responded that she loved him too and theatrically begged him not to go. The room: never a room. In fact, she remembered, she didn’t really care if her father left and, if she were being honest with herself, she loved him less than Chicho—a devil-eyed Doberman that died when he was hit by a sanctified van stamped with the Virgen de Guadalupe—but she told herself that she should love him, she should be sad, this was exactly how the show must go on. Her roomneveraroom. She was too young to understand that departing from the script wasn’t an act of perversion. Her room: a luminous cave. Later, grown up, everything was clearer and more complicated.

The light filtering into the room was tenuous, pallid, like the glow of a lava lamp. As with the circus, her room had a different kind of light, one that made her skin look like a disguise. Nella, the spider, would be a character cloaked in a thick mist. Many years ago, in the stands of a traveling circus, she fell in love with a juggler from Beijing. Diego and Eduardo would have known each other for a long time, and They’d be together like brothers, like lovers, like friends with the minds of twins. To write meant juggling with words. The boarding school would be big, with vast gardens, a forest, and a lake for good children, children like the ones in Musil’s novel. She only saw the juggler from Beijing once, but she remembered his long arms made for embracing and his hands moving through the air to diligently catch all kinds of colorful objects. At first, They wouldn’t be interested in Nella, the new girl. Were there circuses in Barcelona? But She would catch Them doing something forbidden. Anyway, she didn’t want to go to the circus; that’s what the street was for. And They’d torment her for catching Them. That’s what the six-room apartment was for. Then, involuntarily, They’d step into the mist.

She slid her hand across the wall, feeling the rough reliefs of the shredded paint that made her think of a crocodile’s spine, and knew this was the only way she could write a novel: surrounded by scales. Even though They were only fourteen, Diego and Eduardo would be sexually active. The smell of moisture in the room was sweet, like a platter of ripe fruit; it penetrated her nostrils and cloyed her throat. Before Nella came to the boarding school, They would have already had their first sexual experiences with girls from higher grades. She lifted her tongue and slid it like a snail across the roof of her mouth. They would have also explored physical pleasure with each other. In Mexico, writing had felt like walking on needles. Diego and Eduardo would fall in love as intensely as They desired the opposite sex. It’s impossible to write at home, she once told her mother, as long as it’s full of your shit. They would approach the girls in the boarding school like a two-headed serpent. Barcelona was also full of shit, but other people’s shit, shit that had nothing to do with her. Diego and Eduardo would be a single person. That was the advantage of living in Spain: she could write as a Mexican. Diego would have oil-slicked hair. Writing like a Mexican meant being a waterfall without a river. Eduardo would have the eyes of a vulture. She was never so aware of her Mexicanness as when she arrived in Barcelona. Diego’s eyes would look beyond things. The chauvinist motto of the unam, “The spirit shall speak for my race,” had never made so much sense. Eduardo’s hair would cover a centimeter of his forehead with blond curls. In Barcelona, she could write without having to prove who she was. Vasconcelos was a fucking moron. Abroad, few things were as true as the fact that she was. And also an asshole.

She walked back to the bed and flopped down next to the blank document. The circus was a dead metaphor. Last week she’d erased every line she’d submitted in her fonca application. The circus was childhood. Twenty scrawny pages, a .docx file of languid sentences in a voice that wasn’t hers, landed remorselessly in the trash can. She wanted to start from zero. “Remorse” was a curious word. She wanted to write as if zero were more than a hollow. It meant continuously gnawing at your own conscience, sinking your teeth into it like a piece of gum. She wanted to write as if zero were a starting point. The circus was an ouroboros devouring its own tail. But writing from zero is impossible. A novel could be an ouroboros. Why a pornographic novel? Why Nella? Why Diego? Why Eduardo? It had to be possible to create a language that didn’t devour itself. Her intention, the most honest of all, was to explore the most unsettling things; to say what cannot be said. Is there anything more human than desires and fears and the indifference to the desires and fears of others? In the forbidden was the full creative beginning. Literature can’t be distracted by elephants, it has to set them aside and look at the fallen acrobat, take an interest in his suffering, in his grimace of pain as he’s carried offstage, because it’s inappropriate, disrupts the harmony, makes the spectacle obscene. Social syntax cowered inside the forbidden. Writing only makes sense, she repeated, if it looks beyond the elephants. And yet the room was still a reptile-wall-sanctum where her voice echoed, indifferent to thousands of voices, where her voice blew out the others with a single puff, where she was deaf and blind but not mute, and her condition made her stammer into the void and chew her fingernails and know she was alone only by not hearing herself, not knowing whether the words came out of her mouth or ran like trains through her imagination.

Three knocks on the door made her snap shut like a clam. “Who is it?”

Iván’s voice, a hand grabbing her by the hair.

“Come on out of your bat cave, güey. They beat the shit out of El Cuco.”

__________________________________

From Nefando by Mónica Ojeda (trans. Sarah Booker). Used with permission of the publisher, Coffee House Press. Copyright © 2023 by Mónica Ojeda/Sarah Booker.

Managing Director of Private Markets Office
July 13 (unscheduled)

“Can you interview her, please?” Emily asked, still standing.

“Interview her for what? The intern of the year award? Do we have an intern of the year award?”

Emily didn’t smile. Normally, he could make Emily smile.

“I would say we need more permanent horsepower on the team.”

“Then should we get a permanent horse.”

Emily was the managing director of private markets. He was the chief investment officer.

“Why are you resisting?”

“Did I ever tell you what John Bogle once told me?”

“You have more than once told me what John Bogle once told you.” Emily smiled this time. As she always did, she immediately covered her gums, biting her upper lip.

The CIO looked closely at her, hopefully without being noticed. After five years, he had never figured out if that gum shame was self-consciousness or a strategy not to leaven an office with too many smiles.

“Ah,” the CIO said, “today apparently marks the day when I officially run out of material. Maybe that’s—” He didn’t finish. He didn’t want to talk about their—his—performance today. He didn’t want to know what Emily was hinting at with what more horses could do.

“Why don’t you want to interview her?”

“Because what kind of recent graduate is still hanging around campus, looking for jobs, in June? The endowment is not the University Department of Post-Graduation Fallback Plans.”

“There’s an explanation for—”

“There’s always an explanation for everything,” the CIO said, maybe talking about the intern.

Emily dressed more Business Person than he did, or was necessary on campus. She smoothed her navy skirt. The CIO checked his own khakis for any stains that were obviously recent.

“I would say that we need more people,” she insisted again.

“Is that true? Does Michael Hermann have more people? I think he trades from a cave in Bhutan, with a single goat by his side. And not even a particularly smart goat that provides excessive goat-power.”

“Then I would say that you should reach out to learn the investment secrets of Michael Hermann.”

The CIO felt a genuine laugh bubble up, warming from his lower belly. He was glad to see Emily laugh, too. She covered her gums.

He was going to joke again, about goats. But then suddenly the laughs smelled stale. Couldn’t the art and science of investing on this campus go a week without the thought—the concept—of Michael Hermann?

Who had nothing to do with anything on this campus. Emily said, “Please just interview her.”

“As always, Emily, I will do as am I told. But just not today.”

Intern interview Office
July 14

“Does that apply to late capitalism, too?” the intern asked.

The CIO liked her, even if he had no idea why any of them thought that this was the best use of their open sky. “Is that what we’re living in? Late capitalism?” he repeated, chuckling, a benign uncle. “Like, socialism, communism, capitalism, and mercantilism were told it was time for dinner, and capitalism showed up at 7:15 and missed the soup?” Her eyes had begun to dew. They were walnut brown, larger than her face needed them to be. He stared at her skin, trying to measure what made youth. “It was a joke. I assumed that you had already learned that there is an 80 percent chance that what comes out of my mouth is a joke.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize. That is not your personality trait. That is my personality trait. Maybe you face the facts head-on, without the need for irony. For which you should consider yourself lucky.”

She stared at him, the fact head-on, without a need for anything. The CIO should save this mask (if that’s what it was anymore) for the hedge fund and private equity guys pitching them. He tried again, head still on. “Tell me again why you want to remain here to embark upon a career in endowment management?” “I was really engaged by the projects I worked on during my internship. Figuring out whether a manager’s track record was good or not was like, um… endlessly fascinating.”

“Can I ask another question?” He tried not to mimic her uptalk.

Maybe he had succeeded. “Did you apply for jobs elsewhere?”

“Sorry?”

They both knew it had been two weeks since graduation. “Did you go to New York to let twenty-five-year-olds from Morgan Stanley ask you why manhole covers are round or to guesstimate the number of laundromats in Pittsburgh?”

She smiled, almost easily. “I’m not really interested in moving to New York.“

“Well, at least you were spared that experience. Maybe they are trick questions. Maybe there are no longer laundromats in Pittsburgh. And five hundred of your classmates are probably already in that channel of the meritocracy. Was there any interest in trying the other Golden Pole, seeing what life is like at a startup? One—I don’t know—using artificial intelligence to optimize burrata?”

“I’m not—”

“That was a San Francisco joke. Apparently not the best one. I thought it was pretty… Anyway, the purpose of the internship program is partly educational but also instrumental. To help people get jobs. Out there. Off campus. Not that this isn’t also out there, I guess.”

He rolled his fingers into fists and heard his knuckles crack. He had to release the not quite completed grip.

“I’m sorry.”

“Again, please don’t apologize. You didn’t do anything wrong. Maybe it’s my fault. A couple of years after I took over as CIO, Jim Pascarella, one of our trustees, kept asking me if we could improve our performance by moving to New York. I tried not to take it personally. These khakis may not be the most intimidating pants, but our numbers were pretty good even without being more snazzily panted. The fact is that we are one of the last—maybe the last, other than Stanford—large endowments to be located on campus. Christ, Dartmouth has moved out of state. Before you were born, a few endowments came up with the idea that, to succeed, you had to hire real Wall Street types, and those dudes belonged in the high floors of skyscrapers, where the weakened gravitational pull required suspenders.”

Nothing. Part of him wanted to let her stay if she really wanted to stay. Her sleeveless, eye color-matching dress was not quite casual but was also not formal, like Emily’s outfits. He continued, “Those type of guys are super unpopular now at endowments— maybe everywhere. I’m grateful for that. You really don’t want to see a guy in khakis with suspenders unless he is threshing wheat. But even nowadays, if you want classic LP types—that’s limited partner—the conventional wisdom is that it’s hard to hire a team if they have to live among the gothic towers and particle physicists. I accept the social reality at some of our bigger brother—sister?— endowments, in which the ‘managing director of real assets’ is paid three times the best particle physicist. It’s awkward to make eye contact when that fact becomes known. But I thought, screw it: if you work here, you have to make eye contact with particle physicists—if particle physicists are capable of making eye contact—because this is not some theoretical pool of capital we are managing. This is not particle physics.”

The CIO smiled, for himself. “I want everyone to come in here every day and see what we are tasked with: last year, providing 264 million dollars to everything that goes on outside there.” He hitchhiked his thumb to the quiet summer quad behind him. “That’s 264 million, with the understanding that it better be 300 and then 400 million within five to ten years. I know that’s an incredible amount of money—we’re not running Microsoft here— but the university’s operating expenses are three times that. And we cannot—I repeat, cannot—fail to provide that money. I’ll get off my high horse before I start talking about the advancement of ‘human thought and human character.’”

For a year after the Times article came out, he could give himself goosebumps with his words’ easy nobility. But even last year it wouldn’t have grabbed him so hard, how—why—he’d turned out on the funding side, rather than the receiving side, of human thought and human character.

And human? Versus monkey thought and beaver character? “So anyway,” he went on, “scholarships are expensive, art history is expensive, particle physicists are expensive. Their particles are really expensive, you have no idea.”

No reaction from her. He could feel his own attempted smile coming out crooked.

“Again, a joke. I have no idea how expensive particles are. You’d imagine that they are not terribly expensive. They are, after all, particles.” He pointed to the air. “I think that one is, like, only six bucks. The point I am trying to make, with the non-joking 20 percent part of my communicating ability, is that, unlike our endowment peers in New York or Boston or wherever, I don’t want our office to be merely decorated with coffee table books—Our College: Its Whiter Days—gathering mold in the waiting room.” He wondered if Emily, who was Black, would find that funny, unlike the intern, who was very much not? “I figure the trade-offs of awkward encounters are worth it to have us in this university, with the essential purpose of that call on 264 million dollars felt daily.”

She was staring at him. Was she asking for paved routes to meaning, happiness, identity? He swallowed hard and looked down at his pants.

He had taken only this route. He had been taken only on this route.

He rubbed his hand hard over his eyes, clearing them, before dragging it over his closely trimmed beard.

“But I should be asking you questions. Wall Street’s greatest product, as you may have already learned, is lectures on the way the world really works. Fifty percent of our job is listening semi-patiently to GPs—general partners, the asset managers—lecture us on how they have conquered fear, greed, and uncertainty in the more accurate prediction of the future. Not totally believing them is another 25 percent. The hardest 25 percent is figuring out what exactly to not believe. But anyway, back to you, why exactly are you avoiding the bright lights of big cities to work here of all places?”

She pounced: “There are the intellectual aspects to the work, which I find really appealing. And I think a career in finance is important. I learned both in classwork and in my internship how finance, as power, drives so much of the world. But I also need to be passionate about what I do. That’s probably why I never wanted to do investment banking at Morgan Stanley, in addition to not really caring about the laundromat situation in Pittsburgh.”

She smiled, not quite aware of the unnaturalness of her humor. He felt sad for WASPs for not being Jewish. But he also sensed values coming from somewhere planted. She went to a good school. She was a good person.

She continued: “And so I really admire you wanting the endowment to be on campus to be meaningful. That’s really important to me, too: doing well by doing good.”

“There it is,” he said of the phrase, more dismissively than intended. He needed to revive a jocular tone, his 80 percent. He tried to be very clear. “Let me be very clear.” That didn’t exactly—“The conflict of values is unavoidable. Everywhere. We are not in some Neverland here. Although you meet a lot of Lost Boys.” He rubbed his face again. There was anger he needed to pet calm, like a permanent horse.

For once, in one aspect of his life on Earth, he wanted to disprove the lies and hypocrisies that everyone told themselves were purpose.

To be, singularly, the disproof.

So why couldn’t he just explain to this child his disgust at the totalizing nonsense of doing well by doing good? (Could he point to the Lost Boys, who wanted only to do well?) Why couldn’t he start anew, on truthful grounds, for all of them, for his own children: a demonstration of the routes a career took you into yourself?

He didn’t know where to begin. So he began the interview again. “What was your major again?”

“Economics and history.”

“All you kids have double majors nowadays. In my day, we had only single majors. At this rate of change”—the CIO scratched the math out on some paper in front of him, the calming of arithmetic—“by 2080, students will all be octuple majors: economics, history, burrata AI, spaceship repair, apocalypse resilience, robot sociology… and phones. Just ‘Phones,’ sort of like ‘English’ now.”

She looked composed. Or she just looked like what beauty gave you when you were twenty-two.

“Why did you choose those majors?”

“Coming out of high school, I thought I wanted to be an econ major. But after taking U.S. social history freshman year, it became clear that a narrow economics focus wouldn’t allow me to understand structure. And in economics, especially macro, it all seemed so, um, bloodless unless you applied it to the real world.”

The CIO smiled, relieved. Would Hannah grow up to be this thoughtful? Jane told him it was offensive to compare every female college student to a ten-year-old. But would Hannah want to do well by doing good?

“That’s an interesting answer,” he said, leaning back. “I was a history major, too.” When he first landed on campus, he embarrassed himself by sharing that fact with too many faculty. “But even with a half double major, studying human motivation and coming to the best possible conclusions from ambivalent evidence is a good preparation for this work. Which is judgment. Correct judgment. Because that’s our job. We have sixty or so GPs across asset classes. Each GP manages 1 to 4 percent of the endowment. They are all pretty smart in some way or they wouldn’t—or, at least, shouldn’t—have gotten in the door. They are also all, with too few exceptions, the rich white guys that everyone is exhausted by in our quest for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. We try to not back the ones that are already too vilifiable. For what is our job? It’s not to judge the GPs as people. It is not to signal our own intelligence.” That wasn’t as accurate as he wanted it to be. “Our job is to judge the GPs’ sometimes brilliance—sometimes actual genius—and know when is the right time to replace one of them because their blind-spotted brilliance isn’t translating into our task of providing 264 million dollars to this educational institution.

“And we can replace them. There is an endless supply of asset management firms desperate to get some of this endowment to manage. Some of them are hustlers, some of them are creeps, all of them, deep in their hearts, believe it’s their divine right to become billionaires. We are, I hope, mainly dealing with the least creepish cream of the crop. So I doubt these firms will disappoint us by stealing from us. However, I don’t doubt as much as I want to that many of them—maybe most of them—will one day nonetheless disappoint us by being humanly fallible, limited, and leaving too much to luck. But, for now, we have an existing roster of managers. We add a few per year, drop a few per year, and spend a lot of time deciding how we adjust the ingredients—of how much capital each manager, each asset class should get. More salt, more pepper, more paprika—or, Jesus, no paprika at all. I’m making it all sound very interesting.”

She smiled. He looked at her and tried to break a habit of judging by what he saw. Beauty is just symmetry.

“You definitely are,” the intern said. “I got so fascinated by the GPs in my internship. I mean, these are literally the most successful people on earth. Everyone talks about them. People run for president to defeat them. They are the winners in our current social structure, and understanding them better seems—”

“I understand the epiphenomenon—is that the right word?” She nodded.

“The epiphenomenon of finance is interesting,” he continued. “When I was twenty-three, I started working at an investment bank after a year of graduate school. Credit Suisse First Boston: a crazy string of random words, right? And I found everything interesting. The people were funnier and edgier and taller and more alive—the hunters on the plain—than the gatherers of nuts I had just come from. But that was thirty years ago.”

She smiled at him.

“And I still can’t help speculating on why money management is debated by the wannabe leaders of the free world. Is it the amount of money nowadays? Or is it just that people have always been fascinated by the occult power to make money out of money?” The CIO spun up his hands, signaling, sort of, occult. “But if you get nothing else from this interview, if you decide that it is better to bolt to Palo Alto or Austin or wherever the hunters live nowadays and invent something tangible and great, remember what we’re trying to do in this little office: 264 million dollars is not about being a witness to the winners of late capitalism. And it doesn’t care if we are doing good. Two hundred and sixty-four million dollars is about being the responsible party on campus, to keep fed this experiment of intellectual freedom and exchange. Even if the art historians and the scholarship kids don’t know what we do. Even if they hold what we do in contempt. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain it to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it.”

No reaction.

“Jack Nicholson? A Few Good Men? I got to get newer references.”

Her walnut brown eyes widened, hopeful and never unconfident.

“Emily says you did a good job on the PMD project.” Emily had actually said a touch academic and maybe useless, but it was his duty to guide these kids out of the abstractions of late capitalism. “She also says that, with Edgar off to Makena, we could use the help.”

“Because we had a very bad year?”

They were looking at each other, and yet, somehow, she was avoiding eye contact. He squeezed hard his chin, trying to avoid moving his hand upwards.

Who are the people who get to be the disproof, who are not the lies and hypocrisies we adopt as purpose, who get to lecture us on the realities?

Weren’t those lectures his job, with the x-ray secret talent of a chief investment officer?

He hated—hated—to lie. Not lying is the secret talent of a chief investment officer.

He couldn’t give her the job.

“We did not have a very bad year.”

__________________________________

This excerpt of The Counting House by Gary Sernovitz is courtesy of University of New Orleans Press Copyright © 2023 by Gary Sernovitz.

I am Happy. Happy Singh Soni.

A Punjabi currently based in Italy, I am working full-time on Europe’s largest radish farm.

I am well experienced in all tasks related to radish farming: i.e., sowing radish seeds, transplanting radish sprouts, tending to the growing plants, injecting weed killers most expertly, spraying to death the ugly ones and caring for the beauties. By eradicating all uncertainty, the harvest is bountiful, always.

First and foremost, my labor is a labor of love.

I feel confident that I have reached a level of excellence in European radish farming. Hence, I want to widen my skill set and actively seek new challenges by exploring other aspects of farming in Italy. This is why I am applying for the open position as a shepherd on the island of Sardinia.

Also, I have to admit, my back would thank me if I were able to work in an upright position once more. The constant kneeling amidst the radish patches is killing my spine. I often catch myself these days musing among the vegetables, stretching my back, unable to recall who I am. For a brief moment, I exist in a blank space: a white cube smelling of lemony cleaning agent. Time expands and contracts. I pull myself back into reality by looking at my hands, greenhouse dirt underneath surprisingly rosy fingernails. The sight of my skin roots me. Brown skin with tiny pink injuries from tiny radish shovels.

What are the long-term effects of constant spine bending? Is spinelessness the desirable state after all?

I am empathic, flexible, and resilient. The journey from India, crossing deserts, mountains, walking through a vast forest I cannot name, and arriving via boat in Bari, certainly did take its toll. However, I am still alive, and I am at your service, or rather at the service of your black Sardinian sheep, pecore nere.

I can drive a tractor and a truck. I have never taken a taxi in my life, nor have I boarded a plane. I am excitable and impatient, charismatic, and single-minded. I anticipate, always. I look ahead. I identify the problem before you even know you have one. I am perpetually hungry, and I always need a snack. I miss pakoras. I miss my morning tea. I miss my mother. I tend to suffer from diarrhea more often than from constipation. My metabolism is as fast as my mind. By jumping two steps ahead, I tend to fall back three, ending up behind the starting line. But I always get back on that horse, as one should. Though I cannot ride a horse; I’ve only ever ridden a camel—once, at a fair, and I threw up right after. I am a Hypersensitive Introverted Extrovert. I did a test online. My love language is Words of Affirmation. I did that test, too. Most of the workers here are Sikhs like me, but, still, it tends to get lonely. I cannot say that I am happy, but I am lucky to be here, in Europe.

Strictly speaking, and I don’t want to beat around the bush, my

status of residency is not legal. Illegal? You may very well say so, but I couldn’t possibly comment. I am currently in between nationalities, but I am certainly doing my part for the European people: providing them with the cheapest, crunchiest, reddest, and raddest radishes, bulbous and disproportionately huge, to be chopped up into European salads and to decorate European sandwiches. Let’s forget about the taste for a moment, watery, carrying a faint sharpness, just a memory of its ancestor radish’s sapid glory: earthy and spicy, delicate in flavor. According to my research, radishes were domesticated in Asia prior to Roman times, growing happily for a long time in what is now China, Myanmar, Vietnam, and India.

I admit, I care too much. On a frosty night in spring, I was caught sleeping with the fledgling radish sprouts, covering them in Indian scarves and blankets. Some might say I cross boundaries; I say I am passionate about my job. Leave your emotions at home? I say bring them to the workplace. That’s the only way to get the job done. Crying is fine. People who cry at work are better workers, always. Those are the workers you want.

Before I came to Europe, I dreamt of Europe.

In my dreams, I envisioned my European home. German engineers, Danish designers, and Swiss cesspool specialists had joined forces to design this dream house, located in the center of Europe, somewhere pastoral and green. Out front stood a tree, an oak, with a trunk as wide as a healthy German man is tall, six feet, coincidentally, the same diameter of a Russian gas pipeline, just as sturdy and unyielding. On the crown of the tree, Dutch maidens with heart-shaped mouths were lounging, lazily spinning cotton candy out of their super long, golden hair while shitting grated gouda cheese directly into my mouth. The cheese production was as natural to them as breathing; there was nothing ugly about it. And I was standing underneath them with my mouth wide open, enjoying every morsel. The cotton candy clouds descended, hovering briefly, then covered my head like a golden veil. I was a bride, a cotton candy bride of Europe, well-fed on gouda in preparation for the wedding ceremony. Finally, the Dutch maidens turned into Dutch boys, who were frying up artisanal bacon. Somehow, they’d managed to bring state-of-the-art pans and tiny gas cookers up into the tree—I digress. Let’s just say, my foolishness is past. The dream was just a dream; radish is my reality. And I always dig where I stand.

If you were to inquire about my language skills, you’d be surprised to learn that, in addition to my ever-improving Italian, I speak a little bit of French. I taught myself back in India while watching Godard movies on my mobile phone.

My extensive experience with farm animals big and small, i.e., water buffaloes and Beetal goats, will enable me to handle the job of managing your pecore nere with ease and vigor. I am no stranger to loneliness and isolation, which will come in handy while working on those Sardinian hills alone. I will have my black sheep to keep me company.

If you would like to call my former employer as a reference, I would kindly ask: please don’t. They are ignorant of my wish to widen my skill set. The coordinators don’t forget and they don’t forgive a debt, ever. Take my word for it; I will be the best worker you ever hire.

Do let me know if there is anything else I could send to support my application, i.e., letters of recommendation, or writing samples, such as a nine-page screenplay entitled The Sad Dancer (Tawa Press, 2004). I do not presently have my certificates and qualifications with me, but I am happy to ask my mother to send them from India.

I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Happy Singh Soni

__________________________________

Excerpted from Happy: a novel by Celina Baljeet Basra. Published by Astra House. Copyright © Celina Baljeet Basra 2023. All rights reserved.

1.

Mizuhara decided to take his daughters to Kyōto to see the cherry blossoms.

A client who had settled down in the city after losing his home during the war had requested his services to remodel his new house and design a room for the tea ceremony.

“The Miyako Odori, the spring dance festival, is being held again for the first time in seven years, so he suggested I bring you both along to see the flowers,” he told his daughters by way of invitation. “I can take a look at the house while we’re there.”

Hearing this, Momoko exchanged a quick glance with Asako.

Later, when they were alone, she asked her, “Do you think he might have some other reason for inviting us along?

Asako nodded. “Maybe he wants to introduce us to our younger sister?”

“Introduce us? Why do you sound so grateful? I don’t want to meet her.”

“But you’ll come, won’t you?”

“I don’t want to.”

Asako looked at her sister sadly. “It was only Father and me who went to Atami. Are we supposed to visit Kyōto by ourselves too, leaving you behind like an unwanted stepchild? Poor Father!”

“You’re the one who wants to meet her, so you should go. I don’t want to meet her, so there’s no need for me to go. Isn’t that fair?”

“In that case, it should be you who goes. I’ll stay here.”

“Dear me! That would really make Father sad.”

“But if I don’t go, he won’t try to introduce you to her.” “What are you saying? It’s me Father wants her to meet in the first place. After all, you’ve already accepted her as your sister. You even went looking for her. Don’t you think it’s because I don’t want to acknowledge her that he’s trying to introduce us?”

Asako shook her head. “You’re making this all very difficult!”

“It’s a difficult situation.” Momoko laughed.

“Is it because of Mother? Because she was a stepmother to you?” Asako spoke lightly, but the smile faded from Momoko’s face. Nonetheless, she continued in the same tone of voice, “But since Mother passed away, it seems like your relationship with Father has only worsened. It’s almost like you really do believe you’re only a stepdaughter. I can’t understand it. It’s just so heartbreaking.”

“Now aren’t you the one who’s overcomplicating it?” Momoko paused for a moment to regain her composure before addressing her once more. “Asako. I won’t let what you’re saying bother me too much, because you truly do believe your mother was kind to me, even if I was a stepchild, don’t you?”

“Of course.”

“All right. Then I’ll go with you.”

“What a relief !”

“I would hate to seem so stubborn as to grieve a father already mourning the loss of his wife.”

“I’m mourning too.”

“And so am I.”

Asako nodded.

The image of her sister and the Takemiya boy, sitting together in the motorboat as it glided across the surface of Lake Ashi, rose in her mind.

“Maybe Father doesn’t mean to introduce us to her. Maybe he really does just want to take us to see the blossoms. It would seem too sad to go alone.”

“Maybe,” Momoko answered.

The three of them left Tōkyō on the Ginga overnight service at eight thirty in the evening.

As there were so few passengers in the second-class carriages, they took a four-seat compartment for themselves, so that one of them would be able to lie down.

Mizuhara was the first to take the double seat, but he couldn’t fall asleep, and so swapped places with Momoko as the train neared Numazu.

Later, after they passed Shizuoka, she said that she too was unable to sleep, and so swapped places with Asako.

“Father, why don’t you try to get some rest in a sleeper car?” Momoko suggested. “There must be at least one bed free. Why don’t you ask the conductor?”

But for Mizuhara, the opportunity to spend ten hours with his eldest daughter was a rare thing, and one that he didn’t want to let go to waste.

Asako was sound asleep.

“She really does look innocent, sleeping so soundly like that,” Momoko said.

“I don’t think she was able to sleep much when we went to Atami.”

Momoko was silent for a moment. She glanced up toward the luggage rack. “Look how used to traveling we’ve all become, what with such small bags!”

“Indeed. To be able to travel so easily. The world has gone back to normal, hasn’t it?”

“But you’re used to traveling too, Father. Why can’t you sleep?”

“I could, if I felt like it.”

“Then you should get some rest!”

“Don’t you think you should try as well?”

“But if I go, Asako will say I’m acting like a stepchild again.”

“Did she say that?”

“So I told her I wouldn’t be offended if she really did believe Mother hadn’t treated me any differently than her.”

Mizuhara remained silent, his eyes closed.

“We’ve given her a lot to worry about, haven’t we?” Momoko too closed her eyes. “Since Mother passed away, it seems like Asako has taken on all the household responsibilities herself. She’s trying so hard to do well by us.”

“She is, isn’t she?”

“It would be best for her if I left home,” Momoko said. But as though those words had come back to pursue her, she hastened to add, “Wouldn’t it? I understand that only too well.”

“Don’t say such things.” Mizuhara opened his eyes. “She might hear you.”

“She’s sound asleep,” Momoko answered without looking. “It would be best for her to find a husband soon. I wouldn’t want her to repeat my mistakes.” She felt a painful warmth beneath her closed eyelids. “But, Father, could you bear to let her go so easily? It would make you too lonely.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“It’s true. I’m sure of it,” Momoko said with a shudder.

She realized with horror that her father was torn between his love for Asako and his love for her. Just as he had been torn between their mothers.

No, she corrected herself. That wasn’t true. His relationship with Asako’s mother had only begun after that with her own had ended. He hadn’t been involved with both women at the same time.

These thoughts, however, weren’t enough to extinguish the strange fire that had been kindled in the bottom of her heart.

She was suddenly terrified, as though she could see the flames from beneath her eyelids.

Was it her fate to be possessed by the love of her mother, who had ended her life so many years before?

Had her love for her father and stepmother, and her love for her father and half sister, reached her through her own jealousy and that of her mother?

She pulled herself away from her father and turned to lean against the window. Mizuhara opened his eyes. Momoko couldn’t help but feel as though he were staring through her.

He soon dozed off, however.

Asako awoke as the train was passing through Maibara.

Being a good riser, she opened her eyes with a snap and broke into a smile.“Oh no! You were already awake! Were you both watching me sleep without getting any rest yourselves?”

“Young girls do like to sleep in late,” Momoko said with a laugh as she looked around.

For the most part, the male passengers seemed to have already refreshed themselves. Momoko too had finished with her makeup.

The water wasn’t running in the lavatory, so Asako merely wiped her face with a cream.

She unfastened a button of her blouse and washed the base of her neck. Momoko kept watch, worried that someone might try to steal a furtive glance at her younger sister.

“Turn around for a moment,” she urged before fixing her hair for her.

“It’s Lake Biwa. Look at the morning mist!” Asako stared out over the water.

“You know it will be a sunny day when the morning is as cloudy as this,” Momoko said.

“But there won’t be any rainbows with these clouds,” Asako sighed.

“Rainbows? Ah, are you thinking about the one you saw at the end of last year, on your way back from Kyōto?”

“Yes. The gentleman on the train said we might see more rainbows appear over Lake Biwa when traveling along the Tōkaidō.”

“Oh? The man who won your admiration for looking after his baby so well all by himself?”

“Yes. He said when the fields along the banks of the lake are flowering with rapeseed and milk vetch in spring, seeing a rainbow is happiness itself.”

Mizuhara too gazed out the window.

They could see Hikone Castle. Below it stood a grove of flowering cherry trees.

As the train entered Yamashina, the cherry blossoms became more numerous. At last, they had arrived at flowery Kyōto.

The streets of the old capital were lined with red lanterns for the Miyako Odori, and the sides of the streetcars were emblazoned with large notices for the gubernatorial election.

They went to an inn near Sanjō and took to their beds after breakfast to get some rest.

Asako awoke to find that their father had gone out. She spotted a note left next to her pillow.

I didn’t want to wake you; you were both sleeping so well. I’ve gone to the Daitokuji Temple. I’ll be back before evening. Why don’t you both go see the Miyako Odori?

To her surprise, her father had left two tickets to the theater.

2.

As soon as Mizuhara arrived at the entrance to the Jukōin, a subtemple of the Daitokuji, two black dogs ran out toward him. The animals were too large to be indoor dogs. They were almost identical, standing at attention beside one another as he stared down at them. They didn’t bark.

Mizuhara found the corners of his lips rising in a faint smile.

“Oh my, Mr. Mizuhara! It’s been so long!” exclaimed an elderly woman, the wife of the preceptor. “What a pleasant surprise!”

“Apologies for my long absence,” he said. “What interesting dogs. They came out to greet me, and now they seem to be standing like a pair of obedient novices. What breed are they?”

“I wouldn’t know,” the woman replied absently. “I’m sure they’re nothing special.”

The woman hadn’t changed at all, Mizuhara thought. She led him to a room inside, knelt to greet him formally, and rose back to her feet. “I’m sorry we can’t offer you anything to eat. At least let me bring some flowers.” With those words, she brought an arrangement of three large white camellias set in a simple bamboo vase.

Mizuhara was struck by their purity. “One of them looks like a double flower.”

The woman set the vase down on the corner of a small table.

“Have those large camellias in front of the abbot’s house bloomed yet? I suppose they’ve probably already wilted,” Mizuhara remarked.

In his mind’s eye, the camellias, along with the garden and Mount Hiei behind it, floated up before him.

“I’m sure they still have plenty of flowers. Camellias are long-lived,” the woman replied.

Mizuhara glanced idly at a solitary flower in front of him. “What variety is that?”

“I wonder. A fritillary, perhaps?”

“A fritillary? How do you write that?”

“With the characters for double and yam, I think? Perhaps it’s a potato that won’t stop growing?” The woman all but brushed the question aside.

Mizuhara realized that he had broken out into another smile.

“A double yam.”

It was green in color and looked like a cross between a lily of the valley and a bellflower.

“Are you alone this time, Mr. Mizuhara?” the woman asked.

Only then did he realize that she hadn’t heard of his wife’s passing.

“Actually . . .” he began uncertainly. “I’m hoping to see Kikue.”

“Oh?”

“A woman I came here with once, a long time ago.”

“I see.” The woman nodded.

“She was carrying a small child back then.”

“Yes, yes.”

“We’ve long since parted ways. So I thought it would be best if we could meet at a temple. I’m sorry to bring our worldly affairs into a place like this, though.”

“Is she coming here?”

“Probably. I think so.”

“I see.” The woman didn’t seem to mind. “Shall I wait for her to arrive before bringing tea? Let me call the preceptor. He’ll know we have a guest. I’m sure he’ll be delighted to see you.” With that, she left the room.

When the preceptor entered, he dragged one leg behind him as he walked. He looked to be suffering from partial paralysis.

Mizuhara was startled at the sight of his full head of white hair.

His round face, framed by whiskers and a long beard, bore a healthy complexion. His appearance was radiant. His white bushy eyebrows suggested the image of a Taoist hermit more than it did a Buddhist monk.

His flowing beard was braided like a young girl’s hair. It hung all the way down to his navel and seemed to glow with golden light.

“Impressive!” Mizuhara gestured as though stroking an imaginary beard.

“I learned it from the Ainu,” the preceptor said. “I visited Hokkaidō the year before last, and one of the natives explained that if I tied it like this, it wouldn’t get in the way. He was right. It’s surprisingly comfortable.”

The thick white hair, gathered behind his head in a braid, certainly did call to mind that of an old Ainu man.

“I’ve become a native myself! A native in the heart of Kyōto!” the preceptor laughed. “And I grew tired of going around bald, so as you can see  ”

“It looks good on you,” Mizuhara replied.

“I used to shave my head by myself, but ever since I took ill, my hand hasn’t been as steady as it once was. And the barbershop would want fifty whole yen to shave it all off. Money like that is hard to come by for us simple temple folk in this day and age!” The preceptor let out another laugh.

Beneath those thick white eyebrows, the preceptor’s large dark eyes glimmered with youth. Even that shady hue called to mind an Ainu native; but to Mizuhara, it carried a wave of refreshing purity.

“How old are you, if I might ask?”

“Oh, he’s around seventy, I would say,” replied the woman. Mizuhara spoke with the preceptor about their mutual acquaintances in Kyōto, but the old master seemed to have difficulty understanding what he said.

“Are you a little hard of hearing?” Mizuhara asked.

“When was it exactly? I lost my footing on the outdoor passage one day and fell into the garden. I’m sorry to say my ears haven’t been what they once were since. People used to say they could hear a bush warbler singing, but I couldn’t. But then, one morning, I pinched my nose as I washed my face, and lo! I could hear again.”

Mizuhara pricked his ears, hoping to make out the sound of Kikue’s soft footsteps approaching. “I can hear one singing now.”

The song of a bush warbler reached him through the silence.

“Whenever I come to Kyōto, there are always so many flowers. It’s always a relief to come here, to the Daitokuji. There aren’t many cherry trees on the grounds, are there?”

“Cherries would spoil the garden,” the preceptor said. “The petals would scatter all over the place, and the leaves would make a downright mess,” the woman added.

“Cherry blossoms are too gaudy for a temple,” the preceptor continued. “Think of the trouble it would cause if the monks got drunk on all those lively colors!”

The preceptor explained that there was only a single cherry tree at the Daitokuji, the Konoe Cherry, planted by a former head of that noble house long ago.

As he listened, Mizuhara tried to imagine Kikue walking along the stone path beneath the pine trees.

How, he wondered, might she have changed since he had last seen her?

__________________________________

From The Rainbow by Yasunari Kawabata. Translated from the Japanese by Haydn Trowell. English-language translation Copyright © 2023 by Haydn Trowell. Published by arrangement with Vintage, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

It was around noon when I got into the shower. The damp patch on the bathroom ceiling was spreading, making the paint peel and feeding a colony of fungi, initially green and then red, like a moldy tortilla. During the first year and a half of my daughter’s life, I used to let things like that just happen, too weary and overworked to worry about them, but now they’re beginning to irritate me.

I walked naked into the bedroom, chose some clothes, but before I had time to dress, I heard my cell phone vibrating. The screen showed a Facebook message from Valentina Flores. It took me a moment to remember that she was Citlali’s aunt:  I’m devastated, Mila dear, my heart breaks every time I write this. Citlali had an accident, she drowned in the sea in Senegal. We’re bringing her ashes back. I’m so sorry, Mila. She adored you and I know you adored her.

My head hurt like I’d been punched in the face. Like someone was trying to suck my brains out through my eyes. I don’t know how long I sat there on the bed, hugging my towel, trying to cry silently so my daughter and Andrés wouldn’t hear. Brief, painful images flashed across my mind, one after another like bats in a cave: Citlali’s face, her lips blue; her arms battling against the current; her open mouth swallowing salt water; her body floating amid strands of seaweed, spume, and plastic bottles. All this mingled with the laughter and shrill voice of my daughter: she was singing and dancing with her father to an album by The Breeders. My damp hair was dripping down my neck. It was hard to breathe.

After a while, Andrés left her playing with a toy and came into the bedroom. Which friend? he asked. You don’t really know her, I replied. You only met her once. Is she the one with the parvovirus dog? No. The punk? The engineer? The child-hating redhead, the blonde child-hater?

I smiled and, as I did, realized that my nose was bleeding. Andrés went to fetch cotton balls to stem the flow. I didn’t have the strength to explain who Citlali was. I didn’t even try, not until later, until that night.

Is she the one who lives in Spain?

No, that’s Dalia. Citlali was always moving around. She finally settled in Brazil but had to travel a lot because she worked for that environmental NGO.

Right, and I met her? Was she the woman with black hair and dark complexion?

No, that’s Dalia too. Citlali had short, fair hair and was really skinny.

She wore kind of masculine clothes, right?

Yes, that’s her.

And you three were childhood friends?

Well, we met in middle school.

But then you were at college with Dalia.

Same department, different majors.

Ah, I think I know who she is now.

I woke very late the next morning, and the first thing I did was text Dalia. Her reply came back after a few hours. It simply said, Yes, I know. I had no idea what else to say, and I guess she didn’t either.

*

The Spanish verb bordar is derived from the Indo-European bhar, meaning point, bristle, hole. This, in turn, has an etymological association with the Latin fastus, from which we get fastuoso and fastidio (lavish and annoyance). In both Spanish and English, the verb has a common root in the Old French brouder, meaning “the side of a boat” (as in starboard). And this is how it relates to embroidery, which was used to decorate the edges of fabrics.

The tenth-century Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book contains an ambiguous extract: Faemne aet hyre bordan gerised. The ambiguity lies in that bordan can mean table, embroidery, or, as above, edge. One possible translation is, “A woman’s place is at her embroidery.” A looser translation might be, “A woman’s place is on the edge of the abyss.”

__________________________________

From Cross-Stitch by Jazmina Barrera (trans. Christina MacSweeney). Used with permission of the publisher, Two Lines Press. Copyright © 2023 by Jazmina Barrera/Christina MacSweeney.

Where the European novel is concerned, there are few literary acts as originary as reimagining the life and death of Socrates. Cervantes referenced Plato in the first chapters of Don Quixote, Kierkegaard wrote his master’s thesis on the representation of Socrates in literature, Nietzsche called Plato’s dialogues “the prototype of the novel,” and Dostoevsky broke down in tears while reading Hegel’s lectures on the Platonic dialogues. But even these writers and thinkers, all of whom invoked Plato’s literary techniques in their own work, were not bold enough to take a stab at novelizing anew the leadup to Socrates’s death sentence and his decision to drink hemlock and die with his integrity rather than escape and become a fugitive.

Then came Babette Deutsch, a Jewish-American poet, writer, and critic, who in 1933—just as Hitler rose to power in Germany, Franklin D. Roosevelt became president of the United States, and Soviet Communism was making a play for power vacuums across the world—published a short novel that emphasized the personal cost of free thinking in times of social upheaval. As she wrote in her author’s note, “The foundations of society are more seriously shaken today than they were in Socrates’s time. . . . It seems worthwhile, then, to recall a man who under similar circumstances stood for the spirit of free inquiry, for the inviolability of the individual, with that lonely honesty and courage which are the badge of human dignity.” In a time when she was herself a potential target of political forces—having in the early 1920s published her writing in the New Masses and even traveled to the Soviet Union—Deutsch, who was not yet forty, gave new life to one of the most significant martyrs of the culture in which she was raised.

Today, Babette Deutsch is remembered mostly as the author of Poetry Handbook: A Dictionary of Terms, first published in 1957 and still in print over sixty years later in its fourth edition. But she was also the author of numerous poetry collections, critical studies, children’s books, and novels. Modern Times Publishing reissued one of her early critical works, Potable Gold: Some Notes on Poetry and This Age, which combines literary criticism with cultural criticism, Rogue’s Legacy, a novel about the ribald poet François Villon, and Mask of Silenus, a novel about Socrates. This is an excerpt from Mask of Silenus, exhibiting Deutsch’s ability to put readers today back in the time and place of vengeful targeting and social uncertainty.

*

It was a hot climb up the Acropolis. But Theodotus was dazzled less by the fierce power of the sun than by the whirl of his own thoughts. The promise of the banquet was wonderful. His absence from the sacrifice unforgivable. But how could he do otherwise? He could not imagine with what lie he would satisfy his father. And when he was gone for good, as now he knew that he must go, for he could bear his servitude no longer, the tanner would find his impiety a worse crime than his theft and flight. Antyus still believed that the desecration of the Hermes had been the beginning of the ruin of Athens. He hated Socrates no less for his dubious religious than for his political opinions. But what did he know of either? Only such scandal as found its way into the theatre where everyone was a butt for the comic writers, or from such bigots as the poet Meletus and Lycon the orator.

It will be nine days’ wonder when I’m gone, the boy said to himself, smiling bitterly. He wondered how Socrates would learn of it, what he would say. But he told me, thought Theodotus defensively, to keep out of the tan-yard if I could. There is no other way.

Why, what is the choice? That I steal my father’s money, or that he steals my life. For to rot in the tan-yard is to lose my life. And if I were to end up in the slave-marker, that would not be the worst. Suppose I were caught, not by my father but by some gang of outlaws, and sold for a slave: I might be ransomed, he thought with a leap of the pulse, as Phaedo was, and become the companion of some great man. Oh, Aphrodite, he whispered, frightened at his imagination, for love was sweet and almost as remote as fame itself. He wiped his wet forehead, and toiled on up the hill, not seeing the road, forgetful of his errand.

But where will I find a greater than Socrates, or such men as he gathers round him? Plato, Aristippus. … Oh, they are lucky, they have wealth, position, leisure. They come from great houses, mix with princes and scholars, while I … But he would see the inside of a great house tomorrow night, meet men, hear talk, different from the talk in the lyceum, even when Socrates was there to lead it. He would see the flowers of Athens, mingle with the noblest, though he was born the son of a common tanner and might die a common thief. Arrogance lifted him, flowed in his veins like wine.

And suddenly he was at the propylaea. The shrines and temples and treasure-houses that were the glory of the violet-crowned City lay before him in a thick splendor of bronze and marble, picked out in glowing gold and blue, with flashed of red and orange. The tall majesty of Phidias’ Athena, the brilliance of the Parthenon beyond the smaller buildings and images crowding the sacred hill, all washed in the luminous air of mid-afternoon, gave him a chilling delight. This was the home of the Goddess, this was his Mother City, worthy of adoration, not his only, but that of all the Greeks, even the dull Spartans who had conquered her. What did Sparta matter, what did the quarrels of politicians matter, before this matchless thing? Could Syracuse so take the breath? Could Carthage, Persia even, glitter like this? And must he, tiptoe and atingle with it, never so much an Athenian as when he was thus lifted above the vulgar bustle and dirt of Athens, submit to sink his vision in the routine of his father’s craft, as he must soak his hands in the stinking tan-vats?

He did not want to leave it. He wanted, his eyes fixed on the great frieze of the Parthenon, beaming where the sun struck it, he wanted to live wholly in the Athens this hill summoned before him, the City that rose and stirred vaguely behind the words of Socrates’ companions. If he could play a part there, not as a common juryman, or a mere member of the Assembly, but as a leader, a general . . . like Alcibiades, no, not like Alcibiades exactly. . . His day-dream became confused and his face clouded. He turned and walked hastily toward the Erectheum, thinking to find Meletus there.

A tall stringy figure stood with attentive gaze fixed upon the northern horizon. He need look no further.

Meletus greeted him kindly.

“Those birds,” he observed then, “are flying from the east. The omen is a good one.”

“You think so?”

The poet pulled at his thin beard and smiled.

“I do not presume to make auguries. That is the trouble with you young men nowadays, you think we invent these things. They are older than Athens herself. How is your father?”

The invitation to the sacrifice placated Meletus. But he was doubtful about the tanner’s son, knowing that he had been sticking like a burr to Socrates, though he honored the lad for his father’s sake.

As they walked down the sacred hill together Meletus regretted that he was not wearing an amulet against the Evil Eye. He would stop at the nearest shrine to lay a votive offering and say a prayer.

There was a fountain at the turn of the road, and beside it a weatherworn herm. An old crone crouched nearby, with a tray full of cakes baked in the shape of sacrificial animals. Meletus purchased a lamb of barley meal, and having washed with lustral water, laid it on the old stone altar, which was covered with broken fragments of similar tributes, and streaked white with the droppings of the birds that came for crumbs. He prayed briefly, while the withered cake-seller gestured to Theodotus—she was toothless and inarticulate—to buy an offering of his own for the shrine. He turned away. He could not join in Meletus’ devotions. The man froze whatever piety there was in him.

The poet dropped his arms and glanced inquiringly at his young companion.

“You had no prayer to make?”

“None.”

They walked in silence. Finally Meletus said, “I was at the booksellers’ this morning.”

He was wondering if the young man had yet heard the story about Socrates and Lycon. It must be a town topic by now. Of course, Lycon behaved stupidly, he was drunk as usual, but it was no affair of Socrates’. Theodotus said nothing, and the poet proceeded in the amiable, if patronizing tone of an older man who wishes to be attentive to his junior:

“There seem to be a number of new books on physics and philosophy. I suppose you’ve read most of them?”

“Books are expensive,” replied the young man with a meagre smile.

“There must be book-buyers among your friends surely. They’ve all the latest theory down pat, eh?”

“Oh, my friends …” murmured Theodotus deprecatingly. He felt that he was not actually of the inner circle of the elect: he was too young, and soon he would have abandoned them all, and there was no speaking freely with Meletus, who belonged to the tanner’s set. “I haven’t seen the scrolls you speak of.”

“I thought you were a student of these things.”

“Oh, I know a little about the atomic theory of course,” he admitted, disarmed in a moment. “But I’ve never been properly taught. I haven’t heard any of the really important men.”

“You go to hear Socrates a good deal, don’t you?” asked Meletus.

“But Socrates isn’t like a regular lecturer. He never takes fees.”

“So I’ve heard. Do you think it’s right? Do you think it’s fair to the men who have to earn their living by teaching?”

“Oh, he’s the soul of fairness!” cried Theodotus, his dark face flushing. “But he thinks if you do anything well you must not do it for money. You can no more sell wisdom than you can sell love. It’s prostitution. That’s why he wants a limited franchise: he says that if a man is rich enough to serve the City without pay he won’t think of his salary, but of justice only.”

“Ah, that’s interesting. That’s very interesting!” Meletus rubbed his long nose. “Let us sit here a moment, and you shall instruct me as Socrates has instructed you.”

They were close to a shrine of Apollo, and the poet dropped onto a bench which stood beneath the bay-tree set there in honor of the god. Theodotus, excited by the turn of the talk, and troubled too, a little, sat down beside him. Meletus spoke more genially than his father ever had. And it was easier to talk to this stranger than to his father, between whom and himself the very intimacies of family life had erected invisible barriers. Nobody who truly knew Socrates could resist the man. If he could make Meletus know him as he was, the boy thought he could leave Athens, yes, and rob Anytus too, with a clean conscience.

“And do you agree with Socrates?” asked the poet. “Come, you have an opinion. You’re a clever lad.”

“I think he may be right.”

“But have you considered that if we listened to him and you were born a poor man’s son, you would have no vote, no matter how sharp your brains were?” Meletus threw the young man a triumphant glance.

“I don’t think the property qualification matters so much. When it comes to voting,” Theodotus gave a short embarrassed laugh, “you might as well vote asses to be horses: the men we make generals weren’t born rulers, they were only voted such.”

“Is that what Socrates says?”

“No, Antisthenes said that. But Socrates didn’t deny it.”

“Well, there’s no fear of asses being called horses under a dictatorship: then it’s the other way about. What does the old man say to that?”

“He was against the dictatorship of course!”

“Of course,” said Meletus. “I was thinking of his young friend Plato. If I’m not mistaken, two of his uncles were among the Thirty.”

“Is a man responsible for his uncles? At any rate, Socrates has no uncles.” The young man laughed, and was silent, somewhat abashed at his own heat. Ashamed too of his inability to bring the figure of his master in all its living warmth and radiance before the eyes of his companion.

“He is no man’s slave,” he said after a little. “He obeys no one but his daemon.”

Meletus put up his hand to touch his amulet, but remembered sadly that he had left it at home. The air was alive with presences, how many of them hostile! This Socrates could evidently talk blasphemy as fluently as he could talk sedition.

“Just how does he describe it?” asked the poet, reminding himself of the good omen he had had on the sacred hill.

“You’d never learn about this daemon from Socrates,” said Theodotus. “You’d never learn anything about him from himself. It’s as though he were ashamed to speak of himself when …” When there were so many more weighty things to speak of, he would have added, but he did not finish, for there was something in the look of the man beside him that hushed the words on his lips.

“As though he were ashamed?” Meletus repeated.

Theodotus rose, and moved restlessly about, stopping once to breathe the fragrance of the bay, wishing he might inspire courage and eloquence from Apollo’s tree.

“His daemon is nothing so strange,” he murmured. “I have heard Plato speak of it as something like the power which moves a poet—a secret Voice that only he can hear and must obey. But you should know more about that than I,” the young man broke off.

“But Plato writes prose,” said Meletus, “and very little of that.”

“Oh, but don’t you find his prose the purest poetry?”

“No,” said Meletus, his vanity touched, “I don’t.” He rose and put a lean hand on Theodotus’ shoulder, looking at him with a fanatic fire in his sacred eyes. “Oh, my dear boy, when I listen to you I am afraid. By Zeus, I am carried back to the days of my own youth, when I too fell under the influence of impious and dangerous men. But I escaped, I repented my folly.” No one should ever learn how much he knew about the desecration of the Hermes. But no one could ever question his devoutness now. He cleared his throat. “I suffered Theodotus, as I pray the gods you may never suffer. I learned my lesson before it was too late.”

Theodotus did not meet his eyes.

“Evil companions corrupt the best of our young men. Be careful, my boy. You yourself do not know where you may be led.”

Theodotus had no answer to this. He would not look at Meletus, he detested the tall bony figure, the lean beaked face, the anxious voice. He looked at the sky, which had lost its bright intensity of color, though sunset was not yet. The dullness of the air, like breath clouding a mirror, befogged his spirits. He longed for a cup of unmixed wine, for strong talk and quick laughter, to dispel these silly solemnities.

“Are you rested?” he asked briefly.

“My legs are rested,” answered Meletus, combing his thin beard with nervous fingers. “But if I must be honest with you, my mind is not easy.”

“Don’t let me trouble it,” said the young man hastily, his tone gentler than either his words or his mood.

Meletus shook his head and sighed. The talk had wakened black memories and forebodings. So this was young Athens. It has been different in his own youth. Oh, they had questioned, they had insulted sacred things then, but in mere boyish bravado, not in dangerous earnest. The tanner’s son was a sample of what was going on. They were listening to the siren voices of sophists like the old stone-cutter and they would be dashed to pieces on the rocks, yes, and the City with them.

“Well, my lad,” he said at last, gloomily, “I shall see you when your father sacrifices.”

You will see me in Hades first, said the boy to himself fiercely, but he merely tossed the black hair off his forehead and stared at Meletus with a mixture of anger and despair.

“What is the matter?” asked the poet in amazement.

“Why, nothing, nothing is the matter. Good-bye.” And Theodotus swung round and was striding away almost at a run before he could speak again.

He shut Meletus from his mind with anticipations of the banquet.

Would the wine make him more alive? It might leave him drowsy, and then he would be sure to do something stupid. Oh, if he had Socrates’ powers! The old man used his body as clever bankers used their money, saving his energy or spending it so as to draw interest on it, as he pleased. And his mind shining secretly like all the silver mines of Laureion together. Ah, if one could plunder the glory hidden under that knobby skull, that cap of grey curls! If one could break open his soul, and snatch his wisdom, posses it utterly, as one possessed a woman! Theodotus, who has known only slaves, flute-girls, laughed at himself for a fool. Yes, and what a fool! Babbling away to Meletus, who would be sure to repeat everything to his father, and that whole crowd of swollen-headed patriots. Well, he would soon be out of it all, it would hurt him no longer. And as for Socrates being injured by it, that was absurd. He had come out safe in spite of defying the Thirty. He could hold his own against the men who had taken their place.

Theodotus, freeing himself from this tangle of fears and wonders, observed that he was passing the house of Lais, the courtesan. And approaching her door was, yes, no other than Critobolus. The two caught sight of each other at the same moment, and the younger shrank back, blushing furiously. Critobolus smiled at him without embarrassment.

“I shall see you tomorrow night?” he called.

Theodotus recovered himself, threw back his head, and summoned a great voice to shout back:

“By Hermes, but you shall!”

Critobolus nodded and knocked at Lais’ door. Theodotus passed on, in a dream. The promise of the banquet exalted him, he was ashamed of his blush, and he was afraid. O God, he thought, and they praise youth, and lament its passing. Can old age be bitterer than this? The sky was splendid with sunset but the evening wind blew coldly through his light tunic. What was it Meletus has said: “You yourself do not know where you may be led.” He shivered and hurried on.

__________________________________

From Babette Deutsch’s Mask of Silenus: A Novel About Socrates(1933), Copyright © Benjamin Yarmolinsky. Reprinted with permission from Modern Times Publishing.

The old woman upstairs had been dying since Helen could remember. She had lain like a wax woman in her sheets since Helen was a child coming with her mother to bring fresh fruit and vegetables to the dying. And now Helen was a woman under her apron and print frock and her pale hair was bound in a bunch behind her head. Each morning she got up with the sun, lit the fire, let in the red-eyed cat. She made a pot of tea and, going up to the bedroom at the back of the cottage, bent over the old woman whose unseeing eyes were never closed. Each morning she looked into the hollows of the eyes and passed her hands over them. But the lids did not move, and she could not tell if the old woman breathed. ‘Eight o’clock, eight o’clock now,’ she said. And at once the eyes smiled. A ragged band came out from the sheets and stayed there until Helen took it in her padded hand and closed it round the cup. When the cup was empty Helen filled it, and when the pot was dry she pulled back the white sheets from the bed. There the old woman was, stretched out in her nightdress, and the colour of her flesh was grey as her hair. Helen tidied the sheets and attended to the old woman’s wants. Then she took the pot away.

Each morning she made breakfast for the boy who worked in the garden. She went to the back door, opened it, and saw him in the distance with his spade. ‘Half past eight now,’ she said. He was an ugly boy and his eyes were; redder than the cat’s, two crafty cuts in his head forever spying on the first shadows of her breast. She put his food in front of him. When he stood up he always said, ‘Is there anything you want me to do?’ She had never said, ‘Yes.’ The boy went back to dig potatoes out of the patch or to count the hens’ eggs, and if there were berries to be picked off the garden bushes she joined him before noon. Seeing the red currants pile up in the palm of her hand, she would think of the stain of the money under the old woman’s mattress. If there were hens to be killed she could cut their throats far more cleanly than the boy who let his knife stay in the wound and wiped the blood on the knife along his sleeve. She caught a hen and killed it, felt its warm blood, and saw it run headless up the path. Then she went in to wash her hands.

It was in the first weeks of spring that she made up her mind to kill the old woman upstairs. She was twenty years old. There was so much that she wanted. She wanted a man of her own and a black dress for Sundays and a hat with a flower. She had no money at all. On the days that the boy took the eggs and the vegetables to market she gave him sixpence that the old woman gave her, and the money the boy brought back in his handkerchief she put into the old woman’s hand. She worked for her food and shelter as the boy worked for his, though she slept in a room upstairs and he slept in a straw bed over the empty sheds.

On a market morning she walked into the garden so that the plan might be cooled in her head. It was a fine May day with no more than two clouds in the sky, two unshapely hands closing round the head of the sun. ‘Ifl could fly,’ she thought, ‘I could fly in at the open window and fix my teeth in her throat.’ But the cool wind blew the thought away. She knew that she was no common girl, for she had read books in the winter evenings when the boy was dreaming in the straw and the old woman was alone in the dark. She had read of a god who came down like money, of snakes with the voices of men, and of a man who stood on the top of a hill talking with a piece of fire.

At the end of the garden where the fence kept out the wild, green fields she came to a mound of earth. There she had buried the dog she had killed for catching and killing the hens. On a rough cross the date of the death was written backwards so that the dog had not died yet. ‘I could bury her here,’ said Helen to herself, ‘By the side of the grave, so that nobody could find her.’ And she paned her hands and reached the back door of the cottage before the two clouds got round the sun.

Inside there was a meal to be prepared for the old woman, potatoes to be mashed up in the tea. With the knife in her hand and the skins in her lap, she thought of the murder she was about to do. The knife made the only sound, the wind had dropped down, her heart was as quiet as though she had wrapped it up. Nothing moved in the cottage; her hand was dead on her lap; she could not think that smoke went up the chimney and out into the still sky. Her mind, alone in the world, was ticking away. Then, when all things were dead, a cock crew, and she remembered the boy who would soon be back from market. She had made up her mind to kill before he returned, but the grave must be dug and the hole filled up. Helen felt her hand die again in her lap. And in the middle of death she heard the boy’s hand lift the latch. He came into the kitchen, saw that she was cleaning the potatoes, and dropped his handkerchief on the table. Hearing the rattle of money, she looked up at him and smiled. He had never seen her smile before.

Soon she put his meal in front of him, and sat sideways by the fire. As he raised the knife to his mouth, he felt the full glance of her eyes on the sides of his eyes. ‘Have you taken up her dinner?’ he asked. She did not answer. When he had finished he stood up from the table and asked, ‘ls there anything you want me to do?’ as he had asked a thousand times. ‘Yes,’ said Helen.

She had never said ‘Yes’ to him before. He had never heard a woman speak as she did then. The first shadow of her breast had never been so dark. He stumbled across the kitchen to her and she lifted her hands to her shoulders. ‘What will you do for me?’ she said, and loosened the straps of her frock so that it fell about her and left her breast bare. She took his hand and placed it on her flesh. He stared at her nakedness, then said her name and caught hold of her. She held him close. ‘What will you do for me?’ She let her frock fall on the floor and tore the rest of her clothes away. ‘You will do what I want,’ she said as his hands dropped on her.

After a minute she struggled out of his arms and ran softly across the room. With her naked back to the door that led upstairs, she beckoned him and told him what he was to do. ‘You help me, we shall be rich,’ she said. He smiled and nodded. He tried to finger her again but she caught his fingers and opened the door and led him upstairs. ‘You stay here quiet,’ she said. In the old woman’s room she looked around her as if for the last time, at the cracked jug, the half-open window, the bed and the text on the wall. ‘One o’clock now,’ she said into the old woman’s ear, and the blind eyes smiled. Helen put her fingers round the old woman’s throat. ‘One o’clock now,’ she said, and with a sudden movement knocked the old woman’s head against the wall. It needed but three little knocks, and the head burst like an egg.

‘What have you done?’ cried the boy. Helen called for him to come in. He stared at the naked woman whocleaned her hands on the bed and at the blood that made a round, red stain on the wall, and screamed out in horror. ‘Be quiet,’ said Helen, but he screamed again at her quiet voice and scurried downstairs.

‘So Helen must fly,’ she said to herself. ‘Fly out of the old woman’s room.’ She opened the window wider and stepped out. ‘I am flying,’ she said.

But she was not flying.

__________________________________

“The True Story,” by Dylan Thomas, from The Collected Stories of Dylan Thomas, Copyright © 1939 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

Nervous? Paul Mahon asked his wife, hoarsely. Tess stood looking out of their bedroom window, searching the river. Looks like another good one, she said, glancing over the tall trees as mackerel clouds slipped between the green tops.

Paul said: It’s to turn.

Right, she said, quietly.

You sure you’re OK?

Yes, Tess said.

Don’t overthink it, first day back and the beginning of term always makes you nervous, Tessy.

It’s just apprehension, Tess said, shivering into herself. She rubbed her hands quickly along her arms. There was a nip to the autumn air. A fat crow perched beside another on the telephone wire beneath their window. The wire stretched down under their weight.

Tess had been feeling panic for months now. Panic when she woke. Panic before sleep. She had blamed brandy for making her heart race, beer for making her groggy, Xanax for spacing her out, panic from adjusting her antidepressants. She had eaten carelessly over the summer months, a see-saw of bingeing sugar, then intermittent fasting with no routine or motivation. Mostly she blamed the injections, the up and down of it all; bursting-out-in-tears in one moment and in another, mad feelings of overwhelming elation flooding her. It was an unsettling see-sawing. I don’t care, it’s not for me, what’s for you won’t pass you, and then, mostly, who deserves a child anyway? State the world is in

until one thought dominated

who’d bring a child into this world?

It’s normal, Paul said, sitting up. He rested his head against the velour headboard. The thing with you, Tessy, is … and I’ve read about this …

Paul Mahon rarely ever missed an opportunity to tell someone a personal feature he noticed in that moment, an interpolation he backed up from a book he had read, with a title he could never remember.

Thing is, he said, you’re always like this on the first day back, worse than the students. Then, he said as he clicked his fingers, you’re grand. He folded his freckled arms. By evening you’re back in the swing of it. You work yourself up so much, Tessy—they’re just kids.

You’re right, Tess said in a thin whisper. Yes, you’re right.

And then he was silent. And this denoted agreement.

*

The last time she was at work in Christ’s College, Tess was pregnant.

Early. Eight weeks. Six days. Four hours.

Tess watched over the birds.

As long as I’ve known you, you worry. By October you’ll be floored and that’ll put paid to your anxiety. You’ll be right as rain then.

Right as rain or floored? Tess said.

Floored, Tessy, so floored you won’t have time for anxiety. He puffed up two pillows, and fixing them behind his freckled shoulders, he sat up.

A white feather came free and floated onto the floorboards where it lay quivering. The feather steadied itself. Duck or goose, she considered, which reminded her of a greasy roasted bird sat in the bowl Paul’s mother served Christmas dinner on. Every year the same faces at her dinner table. Every year the same ugly platter with large sunflowers handed down for dead fowl.

Mind the boys, she’d say, girls can mind themselves.

She would kiss Tess twice, awkwardly, like on a French film and not on the Irish west coast where people are never certain how to greet one another. Tess was set to inherit the platter. This is for you, Mrs Mahon said as she carried the heavy dish to the table, to mind my boys when I’m gone.

Her sons would clap.

The oldest son began every sentence with now this is just an opinion and monologued with such gusto you would be forgiven for taking every word as absolute fact. The younger son was a tech head and excused from general manners and often turned up stoned and obnoxious at family meals. He’s tired, Mrs Mahon would say and after dinner, the older woman, a stout woman with lashings of sweet perfume and a ruddy face, linked Tess to the kitchen where they washed and dried the dishes and where she talked incessantly about soap operas, online grocery stores, or the state of Brooke’s Hotel on the Square, how urgently it needed reupholstering.

Tess held her breath until the feather lay still.

Paul leaned out of bed, tapping his hand flat along the parquet floor until it landed on his laptop and he plonked it on his stomach. The bed sheet was pitched up by his knees.

Tess looked in her wardrobe and groaned.

Wear navy, Paul said, powering up the machine. You look good in navy.

*

In your marriage, and correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s been a couple of weeks now, and I’m sitting here listening to you both, and what I’m hearing is a problem shared really seems to be a problem doubled. Would you both agree? So we need to get past this, this needs effort on both your parts, problems need sharing, you need to be there for one another, retreating into yourself is not helping, Tess. I’m interested in your piece. Paul has articulated much these past weeks, and I would like for the next few weeks to hear from you, Tess. I understand your family environment was very different to Paul’s, I think we have all agreed to recognise that, but it is difficult for Paul to fully understand it, we need you to explain it. You are withdrawing again, Tess, and Paul, I think you need to let Tess in, you are overcrowding her, she has opinions and I think we might need to hear them. I understand, you like to fix things, offer solutions, but listening is a solution. I know you are here to save, to try to save this relationship. Am I right? Is this ultimately why you are both here? But you must find the right language for Tess. Maybe you need to, gently and I mean this with great respect, back off a little. If she is saying she is stifled, we should listen.

*

Paul disagreed with the counsellor and considered the sessions a challenge: a time to defend himself with rigorous rebuttal, and so he took to defending their marriage at every session, reiterating how good they both had it, even when time was up. Once he demanded a double session but the counsellor refused and Paul found it difficult to understand how she could not give up her lunch break for them, and even as he went down the stairs to the door of the industrial estate, he continued protesting. Even as he turned the key in the ignition of their Honda to drive from Galway to Emory, he stopped, looked at Tess and said: That woman is not well, Tessy, as he released the handbrake. We could teach her a thing or two about marriage.

That was their last session.

Tess had had a far more concerning childhood, so Paul suggested she avail of the lady-to-talk-with-on-a-one-to-one, it might be good for her.

Tess stood in front of their mirror now and lifted her shoulders up and back. She had developed a habit of hunching over. She twisted the top off a pot of cold cream, dabbed some on her cheekbones, patting it in under her eyes. As it melted into her skin, it made her eyes water.

You want coffee? Tess said, pulling on a navy sweater. Great, Paul said, tapping on his keyboard—no milk. Milk made him wheezy and occasionally it ignited a flare-up.

Tess pushed the balls of her feet into a pair of Converse without opening laces—a childhood habit—and she held the banister going downstairs, unsteady, cursing quietly.

Downstairs, light flooded the kitchen and last night’s takeout remnants were strewn across the marble island. Orange-crusted foil boxes, fried onions, yellow rice grains, chicken bones, red-wine rings on the countertop and beer cans folded over like dead birds were just heaped on a deflated plastic bag. Tess gagged as she picked dried teabags from around the sink.

*

Tess had convinced herself that she’d be pregnant again by the return of school. Even if she couldn’t visualise herself with a child. Even when the tests had had two lines, even when the tests had read PREGNANT. But this morning’s preparation and thoughts of school had blindsided her.

Alexa, play ‘Creep’ by Radiohead, Tess said, rinsing plates under the tap.

Playing ‘Creep’ by Radiohead …

Alexa Volume 8 …

I’m sorry I do not understand your command, playing ‘Creep’ by Radiohead from Spotify …

Alexa, Volume 8, Volu … Alexa … ALEXA. PLAY FUCKEN ‘CREEP’.

I’m sorry, Goodbyeeeeeee.

For fuck’s sake, Alexa, Tess said, stomping on the foot lever of the bin. She jerked out two sacks, dry recyclables and sweaty landfill. She walked into the back yard, banging the bags off the French doors. The landfill bag left a stain on the glass. Outside, green weeds sprouted through patio cracks. Paul didn’t lay weedkiller—he had conscionable objection to it and spent all summer on his hands and knees, loosening weeds with a little scraper and pulling lanky ones out of the ground, only for another to grow by morning.

Tess spent the summer in a lounger reading books and drinking beers. They had been unable to afford a holiday after the final round of IVF, which had resulted in three embryos. This retrieval was low, very low for a woman who had yet to reach her fortieth birthday, Dr Green said. After which, two were implanted. Tess miscarried, weeks of bleeding, pain and crying in bed, crying in the shower, crying running from shops when a baby would call out or a woman pushed a buggy in her way.

Paul’s sperms were flyers Dr Green said when he saw Tess back in Clinic, crying uncontrollably. Yes yes yes so painful, Green’d said again, and then, rather unremarkably, he announced it just was what it was.

They had one embryo left.

Somewhere in the hospital in a container were fragments of them both. Tess thought about it when she reached into the small freezer for a rubber ice tray, or parents said at the annual parent-teacher meeting, He’s trouble because he’s our last, a surprise, I had two already. Two is loads. Three is a handful.

One last shot.

Next round they said in the Clinic, as though she should order pints in the pub.

Tess had screamed at Paul as she was miscarrying: I’m fucking barren. Paul was horrified and went to his brother’s for a few nights to give her space.

Oh fuck you, she’d screamed as he left.

Tess liked the space, then, she even liked the word barren, though she never used it in front of the other women in the Clinic’s waiting room. There they said: It’s not happening, or, We’re having problems. Barren was an explosion, an active word that pounded out of her lips. She thought of the summer in the desert with her first boyfriend, the same summer her Granny Liz, who been there for her all her life, died while Tess was padding along in the stifling heat in another country, the same year her father, Jennings, disappeared into himself on the streets, the year she was so madly in love with Luke that she never wanted to return.

Good things can happen in dry places. Barren cacti, barren villages, fertile Vegas was one example. If anything sprouted inside her aridness, it would be cause for much celebration.

Or consideration.

But Vegas is not all winning. People come out broken.

Tess Mahon, you have an inhospitable womb, she had said loudly to herself in the Clinic. Some people had incomplete cervixes, sperm with low mobility, no tails, half tails, some had incomplete reasons and many, like Tess, defied medical science as to why the world did not want them to reproduce. As egotistical as this sounded, it was how Tess considered her infertility—the world’s conspiratorial way of proving that she and Paul were not meant to parent. She had once read an article about women who could not carry a baby for psychological reasons and when she admitted this Dr Green stopped talking to her about mental fatigue. Tess accepted fatigue as a reasonable explanation for her hostile body. And because she agreed with him, Dr Green said that Tess Mahon was a most unusual patient.

But she was not unusual. She was detached.

Take for example her mother’s death:

Tess was a toddler and too young to remember her mother, but she had no hesitation in talking about her death, if asked. Tess knew her mother was dead. She never felt the presence people speak of, only something of what it was to miss a mother on nights she watched her father wriggle across the kitchen floor ending in the corner against the stove in a ball, drunk. Tess accepted her mother was dead. Dead like dogs and goldfish and things on windowsills in arid heat, dead like orchids with sunburn crawling up their leaves.

She also accepted that it was prudent not to trust people.

*

They were almost a decade married now and to avoid misinterpretations in the way they communicated, they had grown polite and consistent with each other. To Tess, it was as though she had capitulated. She stopped giving Paul her point of view. And Paul had stopped worrying about what ailed Tess. He worked hard. She had stuff, stuff that was absent from her childhood, and in that sense, he was a good provider. In the end Tess fell silent. And not in an all-encompassing and awkward way, just in the way of gentle politeness, like how you might meet and greet the postman or a parent in school. However, lately, her body was less inclined to polite hostility. It was increasingly difficult to override the urges she still had to function, to be held, to cry, to fuck and recently, Tess craved sex without any purpose other than to orgasm and cry out.

Paul had similar feelings, though neither of them broached this with one another, and while language came readily to Tess when dealing with herself alone, having one-way conversations over all of her choices on her long walks in the woods, or on her way to school, now she no longer tabled these discussions with her husband. Together Paul and Tess Mahon had grown politely obtuse. A space, the counsellor said, was major red-flag territory. Though both of them disagreed. Sometimes it felt simply harmonious.

*

After cleaning the kitchen, Tess pulled a pan out from under the sink. She grabbed ingredients from the fridge. She cut a chunk of cold butter from its foil pack on a wooden chopping board and placed the lump into the ceramic pan. Then she cracked in four large eggs and watched the yolks wobbling. Turning up the heat, she whisked, left the eggs to cook. She lifted a silver coffee pot from the windowsill, taking apart the pieces and rinsing each, drying them carefully before she filled the pot’s belly with tap water, and scooped in spoons of coffee, tapping them down into the steel funnel, compressing the coarse powder with the back of the scoop. Tess screwed the parts together and placed it on the hob next to the eggs, and whisked. She chopped wiry chives, sprinkled them in and spooned in crème fraîche, before turning off the wheezing coffee. Finally, Tess served the eggs on two elaborate plates with gold edging and warm soda bread. She drenched hers in salt and it felt rebellious. Salt apparently interfered with her cycle: dehydration: ovulation: the plumping of ovaries: the pushing of eggs to the surface: the scraping for a small return and come mid-term: the dilating: the Petri dishes: re-insertion: last chance.

But just before eating, the memories surged in Tess, and she lost her appetite.

*

I’m off, Tess said, sponging make-up on her nose. Then she opened a box of cereal and shoved her fist inside, retrieving a free toy cat that she stuffed into her bag.

Bye, Paul, she said. Have a good day.

Paul came running and said: Oh, yeah, here … wait … here, wait up, love, and he planted a kiss on her lips. All best now, d’you hear me? Head up, Tessy. You’ll have holidays in no time. Best part of being a teacher, eh? he said, as she walked out of the front door.

Out on the footpath she turned right after the small garden gate that was left swinging in the gentle breeze.

There was a red sky in the distance.

Shepherd’s warning.

June, July and August, Paul called out after her.

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Excerpted from How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney. Copyright © Elaine Feeney, 2023. Excerpted with permission by Biblioasis. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

The death sentence for Maria Catarina Pereira Vaz Gato de Freitas came at her birth. She was left near the stone well of the old woman whose name had long ago been replaced with the title Tecelao dos Anjos. This was in Camacha, right outside Funchal, so the girl was in a wicker basket, since the local industry was to shape reeds into dolls, chairs, and bowls. Everyone called the woman Tessie, the nickname bestowed by the British who could not pronounce “Tecelao” but also used her services. Her job was to smother or drown unwanted newborns, weaving their immaculate souls into garlands while they were still angels, before hardships drove them to sin.

The baby—nameless at the hour of her execution—kicked off a blanket to reveal a lacy gown, as if she were dressed for a pageant at the palace in Queluz. Tessie’s fee bought her secrecy (for whatever that was worth on an island) about love affairs, about girls spirited into hiding as their bodies swelled, but this child had the most shocking parentage of Tessie’s career. The crank shrieked as she lowered the bucket and drew up water while the baby gurgled. Tessie dipped a clamshell and intoned, “I baptize thee in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,” while trickling water onto the baby’s forehead and racing through the sacrament, the denouncing of Satan and so forth. She was suffering double her usual hangover.

“Now you’ll fly to paradise,” said Tessie, but she paused. The mother was a silly rich girl now locked up in a nearby convent, but the larger-than-life father was a famous wielder of cruelty who claimed to be divine. Likely he would be grateful to be spared another bastard. Or would he order Tessie’s guts wound on a windlass? Her grandmother and mother had been Weavers of Angels, and she enjoyed being regarded with fear, which is far better than reverence, and how many women made enough money to buy freedom from other humans? Due to her sore shoulder, she figured pressing a pillow over this tiny face was easier than stuffing her in the bucket and working the pulley again.

The pillow’s underside was amber from the choked exhalations of the by-products of mortal mistakes, of nuns and priests or wealthy, straying spouses. Some angels were deformed, or unwanted girls, and sometimes commoners could not afford an eighth child.

Tessie was a spiritual midwife, a creator of instant saints.

Parakeets screeched overhead, swooping in parabolas.

She nestled the infant in a dirt indentation, grunting because a diet of firewater and goat made her inflexible. A pity that the last earthly sight for the babies was Tessie’s cracked molars and goitered neck. Her flesh got increasingly disfigured as she absorbed the crimes that the true guilty ones were too cowardly to own—part of the bargain. Under the raised pillow, the baby giggled, and that rocked Tessie backward, scared of what sounded like defiant amusement.

It would be sweet to think her pausing was on account of the baby’s being special, or especially lovely. But this angel held vectors of the highest corporal powers, and Tessie could sell her bloodlines to an eager parent for an excellent fee.

*

Augusto Pereira Vaz Gato de Freitas calls his new daughter Maria Catarina—to honor his wife, who died in childbirth two decades earlier as their son emerged strangled on the umbilical cord. His grief is well known. Delivered in a reed basket, Maria Catarina is his uncanny Moses, bearing back to him his wife’s lime eyes and black locks. He is forty-six, head gardener of the Botanical Garden owned by an aristocrat, though the flowers and trees, reveling in their view of the sea jostling itself into curls, whisper that they are really his.

The gargoyle who brought her offered a tall tale of parentage to maximize the extortive price—Augusto could laugh at the fairy-tale rudiments of a crone tottering out of the woods with the prettiest child in the kingdom—and caused him to investigate and conclude that it is possible his daughter has such a powerful birth-father that she might be kidnapped or killed. The birth-mother resides in silence-insuring shame in the convent.

A wet nurse gives Maria Catarina’s scalp an odor of milk and marzipan.

Upon exiting their cottage every cantaloupe dawn, the scent of honeysuckle so heavy she dons it as a coverlet, he sets her near custard-apple trees as he prunes the rosemallows before descending the hill to soothe her with the sight of black sand, a beach the shade of ground-up darkness, with sparkles; the moment is everlasting. When he carries her into the city, people fawn over this treasure in a widower’s arms. Everything is yours, darling, the manicured yards where dragonflies stitch up and down, the factories and kirks of the British invaders. The basaltic pieces called dragon’s teeth turn the sidewalks into mosaic pictures—O Meu Mais Do Que Tudo, let us stroll upon a black-and-white caravel, a compass. Observing the skiffs at the tideline, their hulls painted with Phoenician eyes to see through fog, he shares a lesson: Never sail away without a woolen hat, because if you get lost, you can wring the mist out of it to survive on unsalted water.

He brings her when he dines at one of the hotels along the beach, in the cool, pink-tinged dining room where utensils tap china and the pearls dangling from the throats of foreign women shoot off bite-sized panes scraped from a rainbow. His suppers are light, often clams in garlic broth.

Basting in the humidity, the tourists at the tables speak of leaping east across the water to Casablanca. Augusto tells Maria Catarina to listen to their news of the globe:

A place billed as the first nightclub is open in Paris!

Avoid Greece! A rebellion has ruined it!

Find a photography studio and buy an immortal image of yourself! An Englishman named Fox Talbot got a chemical from an astronomer and is producing portraits from glass negatives, and that heralds people captured forever, thanks to a silver liquid from someone who loves the stars.

When the wet nurse uses saliva to adhere filthy threads to the baby’s forehead, so that demons will find her too ugly to steal, Augusto snaps, “None of that foolishness under my roof,” though “my” is a stretch, since his cottage belongs to the estate’s owner. Augusto’s father in Aveiro, in the northern mainland of Portugal, is a municipal judge who despises superstition. When Augusto’s wife and son died, and he migrated to the steam-cleaning, pain-leaching languor of the subtropics, the reminders of his birthplace were the ovos moles his mother and sisters shipped from their shop—confectionary shells filled with yolk pudding—and a wish to better subscribe to his father’s belief in the supremacy of reason.

An attack on tranquility came brutally quickly.

Despite netting around her bassinet, Maria Catarina contracted malaria. Infusions of fenugreek did nothing; his talent as a magician with herbs deserted him.

While bargaining with a God he scarcely trusted, including an offer to swap his life for hers, Augusto rushed Maria Catarina to a physician named the Reverend Doctor Robert Reid Kalley, whose conversion of Madeirans to Presbyterianism was inflaming the powers that be. Jarred from the wicker sleigh that two giants had pulled up the slope, and with his child panting with fever, Augusto burst into tears the second he entered Kalley’s home, weeping that had been accumulating since losing his wife and son. Kalley steered him into a tapestry-covered chair. Sun enveloped the Reverend, turning him into an expertly shadowed portrait study as he said, “Your grandchild? My wife and I are not blessed with one of the Lord’s children. I needed to learn that everyone I meet is His offspring. Pardon me, Senhor Freitas! I speak Portuguese, too.”

Augusto replied that he knew a lot of English, and out gushed his story: gardener, widower. He would abandon Catholicism if the doctor saved Maria.

“I require no conversion from a faith in which you are comfortable,” Kalley said. When Maria Catarina shrieked, he added, “Your daughter agrees. We come to Jesus as we are, equal.” He winked at Augusto. “Even girls. I suspect the root of my troubles is my refusal to hold Eve responsible for men’s folly. Let me acquaint you with the properties of quinine, from cinchona trees. My Margaret has had cause to praise our Lord for its curative power.”

He administered a tincture to Maria Catarina from a vial, adding, “You’re looking less than hale, too, Senhor. Tobacco? A glass of port? I do not indulge, but I keep some for visitors.”

“I partake of neither.” No point in Augusto admitting how separate he was from most society. He lived with plants, and a foundling he had failed to keep well.

“A lemon drink? I flavor it with papaya, as sugar’s history with slavery gives it a taste of blood. No? All right.” He set a benedictive hand on Maria’s forehead. “She is cooler already. Let us pray, Senhor Freitas, you to your God, I to mine, an easy convergence.” Kalley closed his eyes and achieved that muscling into communion with the ether that people of faith found innate but that Augusto thought puzzling, almost embarrassing. Prayer seemed at root a pleading for God to change His decree that everyone must die. Kalley intoned, “Lord, in Your infinite wisdom, allow Maria Freitas the great destiny I am sure awaits, as she is clearly loved, and such things are sadly rare upon the earth You entrusted to us.”

*

Maria Catarina Pereira Vaz Gato de Freitas stands with Papa and many strangers on a hill. Behind them the tides ripple in the manner her skin does when she hears music, when Papa sings as he is doing now, ribbons of notes unspooling, and she joins in while a soprano chants like a sorceress, the whole day is a song! Papa shows her the hymnal with its tunes shaped like black wires and hooks. A little boy is locked in that building past a salt-dashed field. He is a caged sparrow. This is called a “vigil.” With tunes they are demanding his freedom. She hits a note high enough to get through the window to greet him. A taste of pineapple pours down her throat, since a protester wields a machete to open fruit so the juice will travel like edible yellow birds into the jail.

Papa says her wishes are forged of iron; she is made of iron.

Why, then, does she often feel so frightened? He vows to protect her, and as she drowses with him in the rocking chair, he recites the Portuguese Night Blessing that counsels a child to dread nothing, neither sleep, darkness, age, nor illness—Deus a abençoe, e a faça uma santa muiiiiito grande, boa noite, durma bem—God bless you, and make you a biiiiig saint, good night, sleep well—and he tucks her into her feather bed while wishing her sonhos cor-de-rosa, pink dreams, the Lusitanian way of granting sweet dreams, night-rest in the shade of peonies, the raptures of sunrise, and the tint of the camellias that got the best of God’s paintbrush . . . sail into pink and seize it as yours, my living angel, my own dream incarnate.

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From Above the Salt by Katherine Vaz. Used with permission of the publisher, Flatiron Books. Copyright © 2023 by Katherine Vaz.

Still holding her cocktail, Judith rambled through the castle garden. She passed a crumbling bailey wall covered with moss, large oaks flanked by woodlands and orchards, and bold borders of roses, delphiniums, lavender, peonies, and herbaceous plants. Here and there she came across a nude sculpture of a goddess or a nymph carved from stone, rising from a fountain or languishing under an arbor bursting with wisteria. Her spirits lifted as she absorbed the tranquility of the setting, plucking a rose and inhaling its fragrance, or listening to the sweet calls of the birds.

She reached the end of the garden and came to the top of a cliff, stopping to survey the beauty of the landscape. The turquoise water frothed against the shore, beating against a foot of black rock, and the white sand shimmered before a backdrop of mossy green hills. Seagulls wheeled and cawed. Cornwall was a place of savage beauty, holy and enchanted. It was where Daphne du Maurier had spent most of her life, and where her sublime Gothic novel Rebecca was set. To Judith, this gave it an especially enchanted air.

She descended the hill and followed the rough-hewn stone steps to the sand. The beach was empty save for a couple seated on folding chairs, several women making their way back to the castle, and a man walking his dog along the shore. The wind whipped the tall tufts of marram grass and tousled Judith’s fine brown hair.

She sat down on her beach towel and gazed at the shimmering water, the glare hurting her eyes.

Suddenly a shadow came over her. She started, and glanced up to see a man standing over her. He was silhouetted against the sky, a masculine cutout with broad shoulders and a narrow waist, his shirtless outline chiseled and well defined.

Judith froze in fear. She had only felt this kind of terror once before: in the woods when she was a child, and a man had flashed at her and chased her all the way home. Then as now, a feeling of dread chilled her bones. For a moment, she thought she was going to be sick.

He circled her until he was lit by the sun, and she saw that it was the handsome man from the chapel. She breathed a sigh of relief. He was wearing only a small pair of briefs despite the freezing wind, and she couldn’t help but ogle his beautiful physique.

“Oh! It’s you!”

The man smiled charmingly, putting her instantly at ease. “I’m sorry if I frightened you,” he said in an upper-class accent, his voice so deep and sexy that it made her blush.

“You just startled me, that’s all.”

The drinks had given her courage, and she was surprised at her own forwardness as she made eyes at him. “Won’t you sit down? I’m Judith.”

The man parked himself at the edge of her towel. “Glad to meet you. I’m Gavin Garnet.”

“That’s an unusual name.”

“Yes, it is. Gavin is after Gawain of the Arthurian legends, and Garnet is after the gemstone. I changed it from my family name, Longueville, because . . . well, it’s a long story.”

He held out his hand and flashed a large garnet ring, which sparkled spectacularly in the sun.

Her eyes widened. “What a lovely ring! I love garnets. Garnet is my birthstone.” It was true that she loved garnets. She loved all gemstones, having been enchanted by her mother’s fantastic jewelry, but garnets were her favorite because of their blood-red color, and because they were a symbol of Christ’s blood sacrifice.

He moved his hand to make the ring sparkle. “My mother loved garnets too. She married my father because he gave her a spectacular garnet ring that had been passed down for generations in his family, along with diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and sapphires as big as the crown jewels. He’s loaded with cash. Oh, and because of his lineage. He’s Baron Hastings. Someday it will be my title.”

Judith had known there was something special about this man. That was it . . . he was from the peerage! Now, it all made sense. His obvious breeding reminded her of some of the titled young men she’d met at her parents’ parties. But she was amused to think that, because of his stunning good looks, he also reminded her of some of the male models and gigolos there.

“Baron Hastings,” she drawled playfully. “That sounds familiar. Weren’t you at St. Moritz last season?”

“Yes. I saw you there.”

“I’ve never been to St. Moritz.”

“Neither have I.”

They both burst out laughing.

“How do you know Victoria?” she said.

“Victoria?” His smile became tight.

“The girl whose birthday party we’re here for.”

“Oh, Victoria! Of course. Stupid of me. I’ve always called her Vicky.”

“No one calls her Vicky.”

“Well, I do. We’ve known each other since we were children, and I’ve always called her Vicky. It irritates her like mad, but I love to tease her. Anyway, Victoria sounds too stuffy . . . reminds me of the Queen.”

They both stared at the water for a moment. Then he turned to her enthusiastically. “I’ve been watching you for two days. I wanted so much to meet you, but I was too intimidated to approach you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re Judith Moore, the mystery writer. It’s not every day one meets a famous author. I’m a big fan.”

Judith was startled. It was true that she had written seven books, five of them bestsellers, under the pen name Judith Moore (her family name was de Courtenay), but her readership skewed heavily female, and she had never had a man approach her about her writing, let alone recognize her from her book jacket.

She smiled modestly. “Thanks very much. I’m surprised you know about my books; most of my readership is female.” “Gothic fiction is my favorite. You’re very young to be such a prolific writer. When did you start writing?”

“When I went to boarding school, at age fourteen.”

“You did start young! What school did you go to?”

“Malvern St. James, in Worcestershire.”

“Isn’t that where Barbara Cartland went?”

“Yes. How did you know that?”

“My mother went there. Cartland is their most famous alumna, I believe. And the world’s most prolific author. Did you know that she published seven hundred books in her lifetime?”

“Well, I’m not that prolific,” she said, and they laughed.

“Your novels are wonderful. They’re romantic, but they’re also chilling . . . they have a dark side.”

She basked in the compliment. “I suppose they do. I like to write about my experiences, but also about things that frighten me—like murder. To me, being murdered is the most frightening thing that can happen to anyone.”

“I’m interested in murder too.” Somehow, it was creepy when he said it—as if he was interested in actually murdering someone, rather than just reading about it.

There was a silence, and then she looked at him and she saw that he was brooding.

“Is that why you came down to the beach to see me? Because you’re a fan?”

“No.” He turned and fixed his gaze on her.

His expression had changed. It was now reminding her of the way he had looked at her at the chapel. She had liked it then, because she had needed the ego boost after her deflating encounter with Tony, but now she had to face the consequences of her silly flirtation. She had led this man on. And no doubt about it—he was a man. Not a boy, not a harmless pussycat like Tony, but a grown man. And she was afraid of what might happen.

The couple on the folding chairs had left, and they were all alone. Judith suddenly felt nervous, wondering what she would do if he made a pass at her.

Now he was speaking again. “I didn’t come down to the beach because I’m a fan. I came because I wanted to look at you again.”

“Why?”

His eyes ran up and down her body. “I’m a man,” he said, in the manliest tone she had ever heard. “Do I have to explain it to you?”

Now things had definitely gone too far, and once again fear crept up and down her spine. She rose and picked up her bag. “No thanks, I’m good.” She turned and walked away in the direction of the castle.

“Hey!” he called out, standing and moving towards her. “You’re quite the narcissist, aren’t you?”

She stopped and turned, genuinely surprised.

“Me?”

“Yes. What girl would ask a man why he wants to look at her . . . unless she wants to be told she’s pretty?”

Now she was furious. How dare he mock her looks, by suggesting she was so desperate for a compliment? She hadn’t asked for his opinion. Being pretty was not her forte, nor did she want it to be. Where she shone was in her mind, and she was disgusted at the way everyone made such a fuss about how women looked.

“I’m not a narcissist,” she blurted out. “Anyway, my sister Anne is the pretty one. I’m the clever one.”

She couldn’t believe she’d said this. She might have blamed it on the three drinks, or on the fact that she’d had nothing to eat all day, or on the way the wind was whipping her hair, and the sea was shimmering like diamonds, and the sand was blinding her eyes. But the real reason she’d said it was that when she was excited, she always said whatever she was thinking. Anne and mother had called it “being dramatic.” Fine, she thought. So I said something stupid; now he’ll go away and leave me alone.

But her outburst appeared to have the opposite effect. He moved close to her, fixing her with his gaze. “Anne is attractive in an obvious sort of way, but you’re the real beauty in the family.”

He was standing so close that she could hardly breathe, and she felt overpowered by the scent of his pheromones. “You’re crazy,” she said. “No one thinks that. Anne is the beauty in the family. Everyone says so.”

He smiled, impaling her with his gaze like a lepidopterist pinning a butterfly to a board. “Well, they’re wrong. I think you’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. And I love you.” At these words she became overwhelmed with emotion.

All her life, she had lived in the shadow of her beautiful sister. Everyone had always hinted that she was plain, and even after she had blossomed at the age of fourteen, no one had ever told her she was beautiful; but she believed him. For although his confession was implausible, the eyes don’t lie, and his longing for her was radiating straight from his eyes to her soul.

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From Bluebeard’s Castle by Anna Biller. Used with permission of the publisher, Verso Books. Copyright © 2023 by Anna Biller.