Salt Slow

by Julia Armfield

it’s hard to remember your ribs connect to your backbone until the chill in your chest reaches around for your spine —KAVEH AKBAR

In the spaces between mass and classes, we talk long, indulgent circles of self-hatred. It is Girl Language—a cozy bonding rite. We are all convinced we are too fat, too short, too ugly; competing for each title with Olympic fervor, every grievance made to top what came before.

cities could not be lived in but only haunted, that we would simply become two more ghosts in a place where ghosts already abound.

I had found that people seemed to speak more freely in the nighttime—a strange release of inhibitions that came with talking in the dark.

Sleeping gave me time off from myself—a delicious sort of respite. Without it I grow overfamiliar, sticky with self-contempt.

the gentle clatter of her in the other room a pleasant presence,

“THERE IS A level of insult I cannot overlook,” Miriam announced, “in the way that men behave toward women.”

She has always considered herself the kind of person seen to best effect at 4 p.m., once the day has burnt away and softened up her difficulties. Having someone with her from the outset gives her no rehearsal space, no time to sink down into some more pliable version of the creature she is to begin with.

His voice is bad today, graveled with cold, and as she clambers in beside him he turns away from her to sneeze. She has a funny impulse to kiss him then, to take his germs or whatever is wrong with him into herself on a long inhalation. A disgusting sort of perversion, love.

Occasionally, I convinced myself I had made it all up—love, attraction, all of it—that I had made it up with everyone I’d ever met.