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Ever since she’d been old enough to pick out her own library books, Hen had always had a morbid streak, a preoccupation with death.
It was a habit of Hen’s, and not one she was proud of, that she was often interested only in people who’d suffered in some way.
tranquil. A line went through his head, something he’d learned in college when he’d taken an elective in the Romantic poets: poetry was “emotion recollected in tranquility.”
An image came to her—a potential piece of artwork—of a human-sized cat tucked into a bed and a small, naked girl asleep on a windowsill. She imagined that outside the window, crouched on the bare branch of a tree, was a small, naked boy with large catlike eyes. As always happened when Hen imagined an etching, the entire image was instantly in her mind, exactly as it would look and exactly as it should feel.
true. As was always the case, he looked forward to Mira’s leaving, and he looked forward to her returning.
His favorite was an etching of a family eating dinner—mom and dad and three pretty girls. There was a large roast on the table, and all the family members were eating pieces of it greedily, some with juice dripping down their chins. Underneath the table, although it wasn’t obvious at first look, one of the girls was missing a leg, severed just under the knee. It looked freshly bandaged. The title of the etching was “Christmas that year came and went most pleasantly.”
A wave of almost suffocating rage surged through Matthew. If you gave a man just the smallest amount of power—a handsome face, the ability to sing, a little money—the first thing he’d do is destroy a woman, or two if he could.
Hen loved weather in all its forms, but something about the big months of change—October and April—made her ache with a sadness that she couldn’t quite articulate.
They had a secret, the two of them, and there was no better way to start a friendship than with a secret.
like that picture you drew of the teenage girl looking in the mirror and seeing herself with the . . . with the . . .” “With the deer horns.”
Her phone buzzed. It was John McAleer,
The print that Matthew looked at the longest was of a fox caught in one of those leg traps. The fox, grimacing in pain, wore a shabby suit, his tie askew. Around him, in a circle, stood more anthropomorphized foxes wearing a variety of clothes—dresses, suits, children’s outfits, a butcher’s smock. They were just observing, eyes wide and scared. The caption read: “The other foxes of the village watched, as it had been decreed.”
