Hex

by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight

This seemed more or less earnest, if simultaneously devastating. “Betty would love Bermuda, but . . . she understands.” And I watched Mishti internalize this understanding, catch the punt, and take a knee, knowing it was now her turn to understand, to permit, to forfeit, to encourage Carlo to go ahead and have a single-track mind, darling.

Not to impress, not to receive your approval your interest or your disdain, total blankness, which is not to say that we are strangers, it is to say that we have fallen from each other’s grace. Some things are just very large parts of your life, and not your life.

I wish for him that he might someday come to want another thing. That’s the real hazard with people who only wish for one thing in the world: the brutal singularity of the wish doesn’t make them any more likely to get it. And when they don’t get it, they are no longer people.