Sublime

She’s a heavy woman, like an octopus—

gyre

cloying,

On the night Sam went missing, it occurred to Sadie that nothing in life was as solid-state as it appeared. A childish game might be deadly. A friend might disappear. And as much as a person might try to shield herself from it, the possibility for the other outcome was always there. We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was

In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado explores the relationship between the thin self and the fat self as a form of inner doppelganger. In the story “Eight Bites,” Machado’s narrator despises her body as it is—its heaviness, softness, and sagginess: “I was tired of flat, unforgiving dressing room lights; I was tired of looking into th

I could feel it, deep in the soft, chewy caramel center of my being.

scrim

The first way Maya approaches a book is to smell it.

But despite knowing it, Jacaranda invented an artificial bouquet of excuses, which, if gazed upon from across the room, looked as though they’d smell like real flowers—like roses and lilacs and sweet peas—if one got closer.