Swimming Lessons

by Claire Fuller

She hated it when her parents became the thing men found most interesting about her.

“It’s women who underline and write words in the margins,” Gil continued. “Men doodle and scribble obscenities.”

Fiction is about readers. Without readers there is no point in books, and therefore they are as important as the author, perhaps more important. But often the only way to see what a reader thought, how they lived when they were reading, is to examine what they left behind.

But precise moments of grief, like the pangs of childbirth, are hard to recall after the most intense pain has passed: nature’s trick to ensure we survive and continue to reproduce.

“Mothers don’t leave their children.” “Who says so?” Flora dipped a finger into the sour cream. “Fathers leave their kids all the time and there’s barely a shrug—or maybe someone’s a bit disappointed. Why should it be so shocking when a mother does it?”