Fates and Furies

by Lauren Groff

In a vision, he saw the sea rising up to suck them in, tonguing off their flesh and rolling their bones over its coral molars in the deep. If she was beside him, he thought, he would float out singing.

[This day would bend back and shine itself into everything.]

The world was precarious, Lotto had learned. People could be subtracted from it with swift bad math.

Hurricanes of entitlement, all swirl and noise and destruction, nothing at their centers.

The others took a step in, bowed their heads to listen. Holy Communion of scuttlebutt.

He didn’t deserve these women who surrounded him, who made things right. [Perhaps not.]

Chollie blinked, bulged. “You’re assuming that I’ll be able to pay.” “Of course you will. You’re the kind of slimy little man who makes a hundred million dollars by your thirties,” Danica said. Chollie said, “That’s the nicest thing anyone ever said about me.”

It unnerved her, the gap between who he appeared to be and the person he held inside him.

Their marriage picked itself up off the ground, stretched, looked at them with its hands on its hips.

The friends had been whittled down. The ones who remained were heartwood, marrow.

They had been married for seventeen years; she lived in the deepest room in his heart.

His happiness stretched out its wings and gave a few flaps.

There was nothing that miracle woman couldn’t do, he thought, then thought about how this fresh-cut-grass smell was the olfactory scream of the plants.

The revelations falling off in layers, like the separate skins of an onion. He would find a true friend all the way on the inside.

On his internal dock, a great ship that he had wanted to climb and sail away on gave a low blast. The ropes were tossed. It moved silently out into the bay, and Lancelot was left alone onshore, watching it dip low over the horizon, watching it vanish.

I think we can all agree that women are just as good as men—better, in many ways—but the reason for the disparity in creation is because women have turned their creative energies inward, not outward.”

Boys belong to their mothers. Cord cut decades ago, but they’ll always share the warm, dark swim.

In her absence, the sheets had been changed. When she climbed in again, they were cool and smelled like lavender and brushed her skin like accusations.

Conquers all! All you need is! Is a many-splendored thing! Surrender to! Like corn rammed down goose necks, this shit they’d swallowed since they were barely old enough to dress themselves in tulle.

Like most deadly attractive people, he had a hollow at the center of him. What people loved most about her husband was how mellifluous their own voices sounded when they echoed back.

They could have lived on happiness alone, in their glamorous poverty, in their apartment. They were as slender as fauns with lack; their apartment was spacious with it.

“We have all had stupid youths,” said Mathilde. “I find them delicious.”

“I AM NOTHING,” Alice said, after Gertrude died, “but a memory of her.”

She could not believe and yet something in her did believe, and this contradiction that she held within her became the source of everything.