Sublime

Pehrzon,

I tell myself she was a luxury, like fruit out of season, lucky to have but temporary.

Being with Daniela isn’t like being home. It defines home.

All children want to be ordinary, and she never was, and that had been difficult – but all adults want to be extraordinary, and now she amplifies her strangeness, delighting in her ignorance of worldly matters and her tendency to speak sometimes in a biblical cadence, telling men she meets that she was born in 1887 (this being the year they dug Bet

Her calm acceptance of all these things made her seem to him something sacred. Whether human, animal or plant, she could not be called a “person,” but then she wasn’t exactly some feral creature either—more like a mysterious being with qualities of both.

She does not want to be one of those middle-aged women who thinks of nothing but her own painful history.