Sublime

Lucy wonders now if she’s spent her entire life distracting herself from the reality that there were too many gaps in the story of her family. A hollowness where the truth ought to be.

Lucy understands the mindset of small towns, the mythology that a community weaves like cloth. A story repeated so many times that every local knows where to draw breath in the telling.

Before what? Lucy wants to ask, but she can’t bring herself to intrude on the other woman’s memories, her grief.

A woman was leaving the asylum on midsummer morning. She went warily down steps leading to a gravel drive, observing her own feet with interest and care, as she might have watched children inclined to run into the road.