The Widow Nash

by Jamie Harrison

He thought things to death, one reason why he hadn’t greeted her: she needed to crawl through all three acts of the revenge drama he’d been writing in his mind before he’d deign to see her as human again.

He’d opened the wide world for her but sluiced away her joy.

The world is filled with bad luck, surrounded by bad dreams, but if you see a woman three times, in three very different places, you have to be curious.

She had moved to a place where parasols came to die, were inverted into shuttlecocks and torn from hands, moving like squid.

The question is not how to be happy but how not to ruin it.