The Cliffs

by J. Courtney Sullivan

She had never had a knack for women. The way they told secrets, their own and other people’s, as a form of currency.

It must be lovely to be a psychic; people just expected you to be strange.

When they lived in a cramped Manhattan walk-up, she sometimes dreamed that she had discovered a door in the apartment that led to more and more rooms they never knew were there.

One morning, she popped in and found a glass milk bottle full to the top with marbles in shades of green, red, and blue.

But why buy a historic home and take the history out?

I never had an image in mind for how life ought to look. I believe that to be the most freeing fact of my existence.

She was like some boozed-up version of that book about a very hungry caterpillar Jason loved when he was a toddler. On Tuesday, she drank half a bottle of tequila, but she was STILL thirsty.

Human beings did so much damage to one another just by being alive. To the people they loved most, and to the ones they knew so little about that they could convince themselves they weren’t even people.