How to Read a Book

by Monica Wood

I will think-whisper Night, Lorraine, at the end of every single one.

“Amazon is the devil,” Harriet informed not only Baker but whoever might be listening. She slid her credit card across the counter. “The Nazis worked with more subtlety.”

She was glad to have honored their request to revisit the past, for the future—theirs; hers—felt shadowy, and immense, and beyond discussion.

The line between this and that, you and her, us and them, the line is thin.

These words do not fly off my tongue. These words step out one by one, wearing shoes.

To me, Mrs. Rocha says, “See if you can convince the Great Oz to put the birds on YouTube.” “Mrs. Rocha,” Dr. Petrov mutters, returning to his papers, “you are the sound of one hand clapping.”

Do you hear that? That pause before my name? Everything I’m made of goes still—blood, water, skin, bone—perfectly still, and it takes one second, two seconds, three seconds for me to understand. You look like a Violet. He doesn’t mean capital-V Violet: a person. He means small-v violet: a flower.

And I “observe” that he doesn’t mention the other postgrads who left. I “conclude” that turnover here is epic, and that Dr. Petrov might be the reason.

Oh, Kristy. Not only had he already run into Violet Powell unexpectedly, he had fashioned an apology to her in three dimensions.

“Perhaps it’s an oddity of human nature to judge women more harshly. Or maybe we expect so little of men, their transgressions don’t register the same.”

We are a continuum of human experience, neither the worst nor the best thing we have ever done. Or, more exactly, we are both the best thing and the worst thing we’ve ever done. We are all of it, all at once, all the time.

make another nonsense bird noise, and Dr. Petrov scolds me again, turns his back. This part never goes the other way.

Dawna-Lynn told us once that it’s a thing now to ask permission, and nobody believed her. I swear to you bitches, she said, it’s the twenty-first century, and the guy’s supposed to ask.