No One Is Talking About This

by Patricia Lockwood

A person might join a site to look at pictures of her nephew and five years later believe in a flat earth.

Winter still, and a once-in-a-lifetime moon, but she had to go outside to see it. Since that was out of the question, she watched the moon rise up slowly in the portal, shining down with its awful benevolence in the backyards of beloved strangers. Blood, and Super, and Blue, and always the first time in four hundred years, and looking, everyone rushed to say it, looking like a very thicc snack.

Modern womanhood was more about rubbing snail mucus on your face than she had thought it would be. But it had always been something, hadn’t it? Taking drops of arsenic. Winding bandages around the feet. Polishing your teeth with lead. It was so easy to believe you freely chose the paints, polishes, and waist-trainers of your own time, while looking back with tremendous pity to women of the past in their whalebones; that you took the longest strides your body was capable of, while women of the past limped forward on broken arches.

Frightening, too, was her suggestibility. Back in 1999, she had watched five episodes of The Sopranos and immediately wanted to be involved in organized crime. Not the shooting part, the part where they all sat around in restaurants.