Lucile Desmoulins is twenty-two years old, wife, mother, mistress of her house. In the August heat—a fly buzzing against glass, a man whistling in the street, a baby crying on another floor—she feels her soul set into its shape, small and stained and mortal. Once she might have said the prayers for the dead. Now she thought, what the fuck’s the use, it’s the living I have to worry about.
