These days she couldn’t quite tell if she was just giving in to a catastrophic imagination or if the catastrophe was entirely real and so urgent now that she had no choice but to face it.

But this time she sat on the living room floor, eating shortbread, feeling slightly insane as she tried to make an imagined thing turn real.

It seemed to her that the world that woman existed in was in fact different than the world she felt herself to be in now—as though that woman had actually found a different world, one she had moved through quietly and easily, one much different than this one, with its terrible histories and foreboding futures, this world of rising tides and

Many mothers leaving children. In a movement, she called it. But not political. More like a migration, away from a role.

What if they have some practical advice that could save your life? There’s no science behind live shooter training. Just liability. Just lawsuit culture.

some basic approaches, he said. I already know my escape routes. You do? Don’t you? she said.

Does it feel like you caught something? I supposed I could’ve been affected by someone else. Infected, in some way. But I don’t know.

A young man was raped by a group of women in the arboretum. Or this was what he claimed. Sexually assaulted was the language they used in the news.

In tonight’s case, she knew that the thing he’d say would have to do with her never wanting to be in the place they lived. This was obvious. He’d say that it was really hard for him to feel good about what he was doing in life—working all the time for some security for their family, trying to get tenure—when she didn’t even want to live here.