Status Updates From Mödrarnas söndag

"Yes, it was tragic," she said, with a voice like flint. And didn't say, as she might have done-at eighty she could be oracular: We are all fuel. We are born, and we burn, some of us more quickly than others. There are different kinds of com-bustion. But not to burn, never to catch fire at all, that would be the sad life, wouldn't it?

A sudden unexpected freedom flooded her. Her life was beginning, it was not ending, it had not ended. She would never be able to explain (or be required to) this illogical, enveloping inversion.
As if the day had turned inside out, as if what she was leaving behind was not enclosed, lost, entombed in a house. It had merged somehow-pouring itself outwards—with the air she was breathing.