The God of the Woods

by Liz Moore

She had wanted to lower the blinds halfway and open the windows halfway and point all the fans in the house in her direction and lie on the sofa, only rising to prepare herself elaborate snacks. And she wanted to read: reading was the main thing.

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It let her return, in fact, to her preferred state of being: dreamy unavailability, a cultivated air of mystery that she hoped might mask the lack of intellect that she accepted as a fact about herself.

But the quickest way to make an attractive man ugly was to give him too much to drink. Drunk men frightened her. She had learned young how to coddle them, how to laugh just enough at their bad jokes to prevent them from feeling insulted, but not so much that her laughter egged them on.