Sublime

She has what writers like to describe as a hint of sadness around her mouth and is the sort of woman whose family, centuries past, would find after her death a journal of poems that no one knew she’d been writing her whole life, or a perfumed packet of fading letters from an ill-fated love who’d been dead for decades.

space of places.”

Easily, he slept; and as he slept, the woman in the photograph took her arm from the pastor’s waist, and crossed the parched lawn towards the camera. Her black skirts, thickly beaded at the hem, obscured the view of Bethesda; then her fine and muddied boots came over the frame, and were first set squarely on the table, then one by one on the floor:

I am superterrestrial, he thought, and passed untouched through crowds on Aldleigh High Street with the waters of his body drawn up by the moon with the tides.

Clemetine Wembley, Certified Medium and Psychic.

She existed. She had not existed, and then she had, summoned out of whatever matter her consciousness had been made, and had stuck her small bare foot in his door. It was disastrous. There was a pain in his heart, as if it had acquired a new chamber to contain her, and so all his life he’d be carting her about.

(Mona was my best friend—until one day she left the country without saying a word. I only found out she was gone later, once she settled into her new life in LA, as if we had been no more than two acquaintances, friends of friends.) (I guess that’s exactly what we were. I was a friend of one of Mona’s many invented selves, as she was mine.)

‘This is Thomas,’ said Grace, without explanation. She stood close by the boy with the ease of long acquaintance, and seemed to Thomas they were in some way ranged against him – that it was possible to make out some connective tissue dissolving between himself and Grace, and re-forming between the other two.