We Do What We Do in the Dark

by Michelle Hart

A teacher in grade school had told her that if she went looking for trouble, trouble would find her, and Mallory wondered now whether this was the point at which she and trouble met in the middle.

She asked Mallory if she’d like to see. Mallory wanted to see anything the woman wanted to show her. She wanted to see the whole world the way the woman did.

She believed she had to be alone, since solitude was what made her available to the woman in the first place.

Looking at it now, she felt as though she was knocking on a locked door with no one on the other side.

Her disconnection from the world seemed designed to protect herself from further loss.

As they kissed, the woman cupped her hands around Mallory’s face. Mallory felt as though her insides were liquid in a bowl from which the woman was taking a drink.

“We do not change that much from who we are as children. Who you are now is who you always have been.”

There is something pleasing about misery that makes it seem as though time has stopped.”

She was a sad girl, a lonely girl, and, after a lifetime of practice, she had become so good at this that it had become the most appealing thing about her. This should depress her, she thought, but instead it brought her comfort; at least she was good at something.

“The perfect woman indulges in literature just as she indulges in a small sin; as an experiment, in passing, looking around to see if anybody notices it—and to make sure that someone does.”

Everything the woman said seemed worth writing down to remember. Every story the woman told and gesture she made felt to Mallory as if it was unlocking another latch to the door to her own life.

Then he said marriage was like the card game War: the pain and pleasure of it came from how long it lasted.

If the two of them were halves, then together they could make a whole.

If she couldn’t be pretty, then at least she could be funny.

Also, she found surprising delight in the fact that a middle-aged woman could be as secretive and petty as a teenage girl.

There was a forced solitude to her heartache that felt surprising and cruel.

What did it matter, Mallory wondered now, whether a woman was pretty or funny? She was fucked either way.

There is no better sex than the kind no one knows you’re having.”

Love, thought Mallory, was a lot like getting lost alongside someone else.