No One Is Talking About This

by Patricia Lockwood

the world pressing closer and closer, the spiderweb of human connection grown so thick it was almost a shimmering and solid silk, and the day still not opening to her. What did it mean that she was allowed to see this?

When folk music became popular again, it reminded people that they had ancestors, and then, after a considerable delay, that their ancestors had done bad things.

English, that language of conquerors that broke rock and built with it, had never been capable of sounding that way, as if it were in the process of tumbling into its own long open-legged ruin.

“Don’t normalize it!!!!!” we shouted at each other. But all we were normalizing was the use of the word normalize, which sounded like the action of a ray gun wielded by a guy named Norm to make everyone around him Norm as well.

“The massacre,” a Norwegian journalist had repeated over and over at the dinner table, “you remember, the massacre.” “What massacre,” she had wondered hazily, and it wasn’t till she heard the killer’s name that it came back: the island, and the man with the manifesto, complaining of cold coffee in prison, and the number 77. But how strange, she had thought, biting into a slice of bread-and-butter that tasted like sunshine in green fields, to live in a country where someone can say “the massacre” and you don’t have to ask which one.

Despite everything, the world had not ended yet. What was the reflex that made it catch itself? What was the balance it regained? You’ll be nostalgic for this too, if you make it.

The law itself was only a month old: fresh as a newborn, and no one knew whose it was, and naked fear on the doctors’ faces.

In the portal, a picture of Joseph Merrick’s skull, where on the right side the bone grew fractally, like cave or crystal or ivy, hand over hand and almost flowing. It did not look strange. It looked, when all was said and done, like what a skull wanted to do.