Hamnet

by Maggie O'Farrell

Susanna’s? She will be making a spectacle of herself, as ever, stopping to gaze up into the clouds, to whisper something in the ear of a mule, to gather dandelions in her skirts.

“The problem is,” her brother says, striding through the attic, through the words scattered on the floor, making the curls of paper skitter and swirl around his boots, “that I have no talent for it. I cannot abide waiting.”

A sense, too, that something was tethering him, holding him back; there was a tie somewhere, a bond, that needed to be loosened or broken, before he could fully inhabit this landscape, before he could take command.