No One Is Talking About This

by Patricia Lockwood

Someone was dead, she had never met him, yet she had zoomed in on the texture of his injuries a dozen times, as she might squint at the pink of a sunset she was too lazy to meet outside. And that is what it was like.

“We’ll go up near the Great Lakes, where they’ll still have water, and you won’t have to work, you can just look for nice rocks and function in a sort of . . . shaman capacity,” he had told her. She felt ready. Had she not recently cleaned possum blood off a woman’s face, while only screaming very slightly? She picked up her knife and fork and took another wild bite of her destiny.