All That Life Can Afford

by Emily Everett

Because this one essential thing that other bodies made for free, her body had to pay dearly for.

Even in their palatial houses, my students had never enjoyed even a fraction of something so invaluable.

I would arrive, blank like a sheet of notebook paper, and write myself new.

All of the city sprawled below us; I devoured it, like always. Like I could tell Mom about it later, on the phone.

I tried to keep every moment there—like a receipt, like I might at some point be made to account for each moment. The simple and the grand: cold abbeys and sun-warmed baklava. As if these beautiful things would one day be measured against something I’d left behind, something lost and unrecoverable, and I needed to tip the balance.

“A lot of American writing can be very bootstrappy, you know? That focus on individual choice and fate and forging your destiny. British writers do write about those things, too, but I think they do it more honestly. They tell the truth.” “What truth?” “That where you come from matters, that money and class are real. Those things eliminate and elevate people. They have power.”

And really, why poke holes in it? What a simple, miraculous thing: to be remembered.

Mourning is pretty much a universal thing, right? We all have to do it, at some point. Everyone on the planet is doing it, will do it, but when you’re going through it, it’s only yours.”

I had grifted, but it wasn’t for money. It was simpler, the thing I’d needed since the day my mother died. A place to be loved.