Flashlight

by Susan Choi

“Someday, you’ll feel thankful to your mother. But I want you to act thankful now.”

Such naked wanting to be wanted made Louisa’s mother even more repellent.

They behaved toward her the way all adults did since her father had died, with a combination of hearty attention and squeamish discomfort.

“Normal life turning strange—did that feel really real? Are there things in your own life that feel that way?”

“She told me that when you were found on the beach in Japan, where your father had drowned, you told people your father was kidnapped.”

Sometimes, the unjustly downtrodden took up arms and fierce miens, but equally often they turned the other cheek, studied harder, camouflaged themselves ever more behind obedience and merit and bided their time, believing against all evidence that the future would bring something better, for them if for nobody else.

The world had not been fit for either of them; this suggested they were fit for each other.

Love is, perhaps, the sensation of expertise that erupts out of nowhere, and as time goes on accumulates enough soil at its feet to be standing on something.