The Wonder

by Emma Donoghue

Children lived to play. Of course they could be put to work, but in spare moments they took their games as seriously as lunatics did their delusions.

In childhood, Lib remembered, family seemed as necessary and inescapable as a ring of mountains. One never imagined that as the decades went by, one might drift into an unbounded country.

A fast didn’t go fast; it was the slowest thing there was. Fast meant a door shut fast, firmly. A fastness, a fortress. To fast was to hold fast to emptiness, to say no and no and no again.