The Hunting Party

by Lucy Foley

It is a dark place from which you can never quite return. It does something to you, the first time. An essential change somewhere deep in the soul, the amputation of something important.

But he remembers the anger, the punch of it in his chest, and then the brief release. That stupid, grinning face. Then the sound of something shattering. Inside his own mind? The sense of feeling himself unshackled from the codes of normal behaviour and loosed into some animal space.

At least, that is what they will have seen if I have pulled it off, this clever disguise I have built for myself, like a tough outer shell. Inside this shell, the reality is very different.

It is always a shock – a profound, existential shock – to be confronted with the inanimate object that was once a person.

I could swear it happened at least a decade ago. But if Emma remembers it, it must have been much more recently. ‘When was that?’ ‘Hmm,’ Emma says, ‘it must have been in London at some point. The days when everyone actually had house parties – when we were fun, you remember? So recent, and yet it feels like centuries ago.’