Sublime

Edwidge Danticat story: “Shame is heavier than a hundred bags of salt.”

Her mother, too, had possessed this dangerous faculty of tears; and it was not wonderful if the sober-minded Doctor, roused for the first time to consider his little girl as a creature possessed of individual character, should recognise, with a thrill of dismay, the appearance of the same qualities which had wearied his life out, and brought his yo

piquant:

She had spent her poetry and romance on their short courting: the function was exhausted because the need was past. Now she was simply ripening into a copy of her mother, and mysteriously, by the very process, trying to turn him into a Mr. Welland. He laid down his book and stood up impatiently; and at once she raised her head.

And there, as years passed, this wonder-woman bore child after child, five of them—all girls.

She came up here for college, but her daddy got cancer, and the farm got sold, and ends stopped meeting, and she had to drop out.

Estelle told her the story of how she’d waited until Antony had gone away with his family to Palermo for a fortnight then took a jar of emergency cash she had literally buried in their back garden, went to a woman in Koreatown and had her tubes tied in secret.