Sublime

Like many girls her age, Maggie is laid out before the world, unafraid, unpopulated. Men come to insert themselves, they turn a girl into a city.

Maggie’s destiny arrives one afternoon without a clarion call. It comes on cat feet, like everything else in the world that has the power to destroy you. She had

Protective colouration, she called her outfits. She looked like a dependable mother from a respectable neighbourhood such as ours. As she worked at the kitchen counter, she might have been demonstrating a jiffy recipe in Good Housekeeping magazine—something with tomato aspic, this being the mid-1950s, when tomato aspic was a food group.

Maggie had always taught her to stay away until she was summoned.

Maggie began to show her the way in which the world was webbed; how nothing lived in isolation.