Liars

by Sarah Manguso

It was dark, and I was afraid of the dark—the real dark, the country dark. It isn’t dark in the city even though we refer to dark alleys and dark nightclubs. Those are only city dark. In the country, under the right circumstances of moon and weather, the dark can be depthless.

And yet no married woman I knew was any better off, so I determined to carry on.

To solve the problem, she said, I became a lot more patient.

It wasn’t that we’d been born angry; we’d become women and ended up angry.

John and I both caught the child’s cold. John stayed in bed for two days; I took the new kitten to the vet and bought groceries and did dishes and laundry and planned all the meals and took the child to school and so on. I took one nap but otherwise kept everything up. And that is a mother’s cold.