Fates and Furies

by Lauren Groff

[True. It was not his time.]

Love the way this is written

He knew only one thing that could shut off this flow of tears, and in a panic, he pushed the child upright and scrabbled in his lap and took the surprised pale worm out of his jeans, and it grew impressively in his mouth, thank god, and this alone was enough to stop the sobs.

Oh my god!

The world was precarious, Lotto had learned. People could be subtracted from it with swift bad math. If one might die at any moment, one must live!

Celebration with Samuel’s fifteen-year-old sister up for the weekend, in a handicapped bathroom. Never, never tell Samuel. Searing glare. What

It’s not true that he had no standards, it’s simply that he saw the stun in every woman.

Women who screwed deserved the scorn they got. Lotto was doing what men do. They didn’t make up the rules.

Lotto never brought home the men. They didn’t get put in any book. They remained unseen, these ghosts of hungers in his bed, out of it.

Husk of Lotto watched in the wings as he, Hamlet, sauntered on.

All those years, the singers in the soft light in the basement apartment crystallized in his mind, became the very idea of what happiness should look like.

“Fine,” she said. “If you come to bed now, I’ll let you do me. But don’t be mad if I fall asleep.” “Glory. How tempting,” Lotto said, and sat back down with his bottle in the dark.

Aneurysms ran in the family. His father’s had been so sudden, forty-six, too young;

“Don’t leave me,” he said. “I’ll be better.”

“Your genius. Your new life,” she said. “You were meant to be a playwright,

If it meant his wife smiling through her blond lashes at him again, his wife posting atop him like a prize equestrienne, he could change. He could become what she wanted. No longer failed actor. Potential playwright.

He wished he could have known her old. He thought of how magnificent she would be then.

Later, she would think of this gift, so impulsive, the ten-thousand-dollar necklace to a little girl, and feel warmed by it, even during their decade in the underground apartment in Greenwich Village, even when Mathilde didn’t eat lunch so they could pay for phone service. It was cheap to buy a lifetime of friendship.

In October, they had thirty-four cents in their checking account and Mathilde walked into Ariel’s gallery.

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

Anger’s my meat; I sup upon myself, And so shall starve with feeding. Volumnia says this in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. She—steely, controlling—is far more interesting than Coriolanus. Alas, nobody would go to see a play called Volumnia.

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