Fates and Furies

by Lauren Groff

Extravagance, under the circumstances, could be forgiven.

You will be a world-eater or a mother of eight.” “I won’t be a mother of eight,” she said.

But her love for him was new, and her love for herself was old, and she was all she’d had for so very, very long. She was weary of facing the world alone. He had presented himself at the exact right time, her lifeline, although it would be better for him if he had married the kind of soft, godly woman she’d know soon enough his own mother wanted for him.

[Odd, how easy it all is to summon. Like a pain from a dream. A life you’d imagined so long that it had almost become a memory; this middle-class American childhood of the eighties that you’d never had.]