Sublime

‘Christabel LaMotte. Daughter of Isidore, the mythographer. Last Things. Tales Told in November. An epic called The Fairy Melusina. Very bizarre. Do you know about Melusina? She was a fairy who married a mortal to

The sun begins to sink. It is time for the cats to come. He knows that he is irretrievably lost. This is no town of cats, he finally realizes. It is the place

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.

“Mary,” Jane said. “My grandmother.”

I found out early that you can throw yourself away, missing what you’ve lost.

Peggotty knowing nothing about her, and my mother saying nothing about her, she was quite a mystery in the parlour; and the fact of her having a magazine of jewellers’ cotton in her pocket, and sticking the article in her ears in that way, did not detract from the solemnity of her presence.

“You’re her,” she said, looking up, meeting his pale eyes. Not that crazy cartoon blue. Not blue at all, but widening now. A woman laughed, tables away. His hand lowered the tablet, came to rest on the table, and for the first time since the end of the ride back from Pickett’s, she thought she might be about to cry. He swallowed. Blinked. “Really,