Sublime

“style transfer.”

She was Melissa’s oldest, boldest friend. They had gone to the same primary school. Hazel worked in advertising. She had a wide and glamorous smile behind which was an oft-foul tongue, and long, bouncing, half-French, half-Ghanaian curls falling down her back, the most beautiful, the most envied of their schoolgirl pack, the one the boys always wen

We’ll go back to work just after Miss Catharine puts the cornflowers in her hair. This is one of our favorite moments in the movie, when the octogenarian gentlewoman Miss C is given piles of cornflowers by George and his kind-eyed father, who says, “There are no jewels more becoming a lady. I like to see them in your hair.” And so father and son de

Aoife and I watch her shrink as she moves further away. My daughter asks, “Who was that lady, Daddy?” SO I ASK my daughter, “Who was what lady, darling?” Aoife blinks up at me. “What lady, Daddy?” We look at each other, and I’ve forgotten something. Wallet, phone; Aoife; Sharon’s wedding; Brighton Pier.

One or two fingers of cirrus were now in the sky overhead.

I SAT ON the train clutching the folder with the speech inside, ankles burning from the heater on the floor. Outside, winter breathed in. Papery skies. Glittering trees. A wash of backlit fields that folded and shrank as the city grew.

That Thomas had worked for the Chronicle since 1976 was easily established, as was the fact that he’d published three brief novels since that date. Out of a sense of delicacy Carleton never mentioned that he owned all three of these, and found them elegant and elliptical, couched in prose that had the cadence of the King James Bible, and concerned

her hair a dark, drifting halo.

human tastemakers,