Sublime

One evening, as a special treat, she and her brothers were allowed to read to each other from Lermontov’s fairy tale “Démon,” the story of an immortal fiend condemned to wander the earth in infinite isolation until he meets and falls in love with Tamara, a beautiful princess whom he ruthlessly pursues. Pitying the demon’s troubled soul, Tamara

Grace, feeling at that moment she’d exchange an eternity of rest for a tube of lipstick, bit her lips to bring up the blood, and fell into desolation. It was her eighteenth birthday, and all she had at hand was a walk down by the Blackwater with her only two friends, and tea with her peculiar family. Other girls on days like these held parties to

She would like to believe there will be a place, again, where the streetlights end and wilderness begins. The wolf border. And if this is where it has to begin in England, she thinks, this rich, disqualifying plot, with its private sponsorship and antiquated hierarchy, so be it. The ends justify the means.

She could plant a forest inside herself.

She could crouch on the wind-whipped grass and dig the stones from the ground and fling them down at the suspicious cottiers and their fear of any woman who was not tethered to man or hearth. There, upon the mountain, her difference – no matter its great weight, its sharp and restless ache upon her heart – was, in the face of such unyielding

It’s as if each

The letters were so precious to her, and what were they? They were bland and prosaic, three readings out of four. But when they touched her, she was suffused with joy. There was no other word for it. She knew that if she had kept them, she would still look at them to see if there was anything in them to account for the sweet power they had had for

behind you.” I take the two-track away from the orchard and towards the woods until I find the smallest break in the trees, a path I know to look for only because I’ve come this way a thousand times. It’s like stepping into a book, one turn and everything changes: cool instead of hot, dark instead of light. Instead of cherry trees, eighty-foot