Second Place

by Rachel Cusk

darkness. They throw out these white fleshy arms because they know it’s spring, and sometimes I’ll look at one and realise a potato knows more than most people do.

Good lord

this aura of male freedom belongs likewise to most representations of the world and of our human experience within it, and that as women we grow accustomed to translating it into something we ourselves can recognise.

The truth was I had always assumed that pleasure was being held in store for me, like something I was amassing in a bank account, but by the time I came to ask for it I discovered the store was empty. It appeared that it was a perishable entity, and that I should have taken it a little earlier.

Brett had seemed to me to have everything, and yet in that moment I saw in a flash that she had nothing at all, and that her intrusive and uninhibited manner was simply her means of survival. She was like one of those climbing plants that has to grow over things and be held up by them, rather than possessing an integral support of her own.

‘Huh,’ he said, with a grudging half-smile. ‘Wicked men don’t do that. Anyway, you’d probably like those men if you got to know them. Nothing evil ever dies. Especially not of remorse.’

Chud mentality