The Invisible Hour

by Alice Hoffman

In every fairy tale the girl who is saved is the one who rescues herself.

Reading is never wasted time, Ivy’s father had told her.

Ivy had begun to think that life was made up of a series of accidents and drastic errors. The unexpected became the expected, you made the right turn or the wrong turn, and all of it added up to the path you were on.

In a place where books were banned there could be no personal freedom, no hope, and no dreams for the future.

birthdays at the farm were thought to be a vanity and were never celebrated; children born into the Community were never told their birthday so that the day would be like any other and they wouldn’t fall victim to pride.

This was the hour that she decided she would never fall in love. Love tied you down, it made you pay, it demanded all you had to give and repaid you with despair. She would never get close to anyone and would remain invisible, a girl without a heart. She would be hidden even when she was in plain sight.

Memories rattle around late at night, they claw at the latch, escaping when you least expect them to do so.

Some people are who you think they are. Some people hide the wolf inside of them, but you can hear them howl.

The past was with her, tied to her feet with black thread.

SOON, THE DAYS HAD grown warm enough for them to sit out in the garden in the evenings, beneath the flowering wisteria vines, where they could watch the soft violet light fold itself over the river.

Lovely

he was a reader turned into a writer, as was often the case when people fell in love with stories and found themselves rescued by the pages of novels.

“There comes a time to give up dreams,” Robert had said. “I work because I must. We walk on earth, however we might stumble.”

“What do you have there?” he asked, always interested to discover what a person was reading, for he believed it was possible to see inside a person’s soul once you knew which books mattered to them.

A fish and a sparrow cannot live in the same world. One will gasp for air and the other will drown.”

Ebe wished she could dress as a boy, and sneak onto that ship, and live a life of freedom in the masquerade that a false identity would allow.

each day must be a garden in which she grew whatever was possible given the season.

It was possible to feel more alone in Manhattan than anywhere else no matter how many people surrounded you.

As so often happened, the children had become the caretakers of their fragile parent.

Women wrote under men’s names, or used only initials, hiding their gender, for all they did was considered less important.

To my mother. Now I know the love between us was never invisible, even when I didn’t see it. I see it now.

The Invisible Hour is a fictional story of how The Scarlet Letter came to be.