Fates and Furies

by Lauren Groff

“Firstly,” he said, “tell me the difference between tragedy and comedy.” Francisco Rodríguez said, “Solemnity versus humor. Gravity versus lightness.” “False,” Denton Thrasher said. “A trick. There’s no difference. It’s a question of perspective. Storytelling is a landscape, and tragedy is comedy is drama. It simply depends on how you frame what you’re seeing.

The fireworks blister-popping in the sky, the party sounds. [Doomed people celebrate peace with sky bombs.]

[The noble feel the same strong feelings as the rest of us; the difference is in how they choose to act.]

“Please. Marriage is made of lies. Kind ones, mostly. Omissions. If you give voice to the things you think every day about your spouse, you’d crush them to paste. She never lied. Just never said.”

Paradox of marriage: you can never know someone entirely; you do know someone entirely.

And the great Now What stretching without end.

Somehow, despite her politics and smarts, she had become a wife, and wives, as we all know, are invisible. The midnight elves of marriage.

We are in an immensely slow tango with the Andromeda galaxy, both galaxies shaped as spirals with outstretched arms, and we are moving toward each other like spinning bodies. The galaxies will gain speed as they near, casting off blue sparks, new stars, until they spin past each other. And then the long arms of both galaxies will reach longingly out and grasp hands at the last moment, and they will come spinning back in the opposite direction, their legs entwined but never hitting, until the second swirl becomes a clutch, a dip, a kiss. And then, at the very center of things, when they are at their closest, there will open a supermassive black hole.

His eagerness, his deep kindness, these were the benefits of his privilege. This peaceful sleep of being born male and rich and white and American and at this prosperous time, when the wars that were happening were far from home. This boy, told from the first moment he was born that he could do what he wanted. All he needed was to try. Mess up over and over, and everyone would wait until he got it right.

occurred to her then that life was conical in shape, the past broadening beyond the sharp point of the lived moment. The more life you had, the more the base expanded, so that the wounds and treasons that were nearly imperceptible when they happened stretched like tiny dots on a balloon slowly blown up. A speck on the slender child grows into a gross deformity in the adult, inescapable, ragged at the edges.

THE WORD wife comes from the Proto-Indo-European weip. Weip means to turn, twist, or wrap. In an alternative etymology, the word wife comes from Proto-etc., ghwibh. Ghwibh means pudenda. Or shame.

IT WAS MATHEMATICAL, marriage. Not, as one might expect, additional. It was exponential.