500 words response of a short story "Hairball" by Margaret Atwood

Kat
Margaret Atwood, 1990

ON THE THIRTEENTH OF NOVEMBER, DAY OF UNLUCK, month of the dead, Kat went into the Toronto General Hospital for an operation. It was for an ovarian cyst, a large one.

Many women had them, the doctor told Kat. Nobody knew why. There wasn’t any way of finding out whether the thing was malignant, whether it contained, already, the spores of her death. Not before they went in. He spoke of “going in” the way she’d heard old veterans in TV documentaries speak of assaults on enemy territory. There was the same tensing of the jaw, the same fierce gritting of the teeth, the same grim enjoyment. Except that what he would be going into was her body. Counting down, waiting for the anesthetic, Kat, too, gritted her teeth fiercely. She was terrified, but she was also curious. Curiosity has got her through a lot.

She’d made the doctor promise to save the thing for her, whatever it was, so she could have a look. She was intensely interested in her own body, in anything it might choose to do or produce; although when flaky Dania, who did layout at the magazine, told her this growth was a message to her from her body, and she ought to sleep with an amethyst under the pillow to calm her vibrations, Kat told her to stuff it.

The cyst turned out to be a benign tumor. Kat liked that use of “benign,” as if the thing had a soul and wished her well. It was big as a grapefruit, the doctor said. “Big as a coconut,” said Kat. Other people had grapefruits. “Coconut” was better. It conveyed the hardness of it, and the hairiness, too.

The hair in it was red-long strands of it wound round and round inside, like a ball of wet wool gone berserk or like the guck you pull out of a clogged bathroom-sink drain. There were little bones in it, too, or fragments of bone-bird bones, the bones of a sparrow crushed by a car. There was a scattering of nails, toe or finger. There were five perfectly formed teeth.

“Is this abnormal?” Kat asked the doctor, who smiled. Now that he had gone in and come out again, unscathed, he was less clenched.

“Abnormal? No,” he said carefully, as if breaking the news to a mother about a freakish accident to her newborn. “Let’s just say it’s fairly common.” Kat was a little disappointed. She would have preferred uniqueness.

She asked for a bottle of formaldehyde, and put the cut open tumor into it. It was hers, it was benign, it did not deserve to be thrown away. She took it back to her apartment and stuck it on the mantelpiece. She named it Hairball. It isn’t that different from having a stuffed bear’s head or a preserved ex-pet or anything else with fur and teeth looming over your fireplace; or she pretends it isn’t. Anyway, it certainly makes an impression.

Ger doesn’t like it. Despite his supposed yen for the new and outré, he is a squeamish man. The first time he comes around (sneaks around, creeps around) after the operation, he tells Kat to throw Hairball out. He calls it “disgusting.” Kat refuses point-blank, and says she’d rather have Hairball in a bottle on her mantelpiece than the soppy dead flowers he’s brought her, which will anyway rot a lot sooner than Hairball will. As a mantelpiece ornament, Hairball is far superior. Ger says Kat has a tendency to push things to extremes, to go over the edge, merely from a juvenile desire to shock, which is hardly a substitute for wit. One of these days, he says, she will go way too far. Too far for him is what he means.

“That’s why you hired me, isn’t it?” she says. “Because I go way too far.” But he’s in one of his analyzing moods. He can see these tendencies of hers reflected in her work on the magazine, he says. All that leather and those grotesque and tortured looking poses are heading down a track he and others are not at all sure they should continue to follow. Does she see what he means, does she take his point? It’s a point that’s been made before. She shakes her head slightly, says nothing. She knows how that translates: there have been complaints from the advertisers. Too bizarre, too kinky. Tough.

“Want to see my scar?” she says. “Don’t make me laugh, though. You’ll crack it open.” Stuff like that makes him dizzy: anything with a hint of blood, anything gynecological. He almost threw up in the delivery room, when his wife had a baby two years ago. He’d told her that with pride. Kat thinks about sticking a cigarette into the side of her mouth, as in a black-and-white movie of the forties. She thinks about blowing the smoke into his face.

Her insolence used to excite him during their arguments.

Then there would be a grab of her upper arms, a smoldering, violent kiss. He kisses her as if he thinks someone else is watching him and judging the image they make together. Kissing the latest thing, hard and shiny, purple-mouthed, crop-headed; kissing a girl, a woman, a girl in a little crotch-hugger skirt and skintight leggings. He likes mirrors.

But he isn’t excited now. And she can’t decoy him into bed; she isn’t ready for that yet, she isn’t healed. He has a drink, which he doesn’t finish, holds her hand as an afterthought, gives her a couple of avuncular pats on the off-white out sized alpaca shoulder, leaves too quickly.

“Goodbye, Gerald,” she says. She pronounces the name with mockery. It’s a negation of him, an abolishment of him, like ripping a medal off his chest. It’s a warning.

He’d been Gerald when they first met. It was she who transformed him, first to Gerry, then to Ger. (Rhymed with “flair,” rhymed with “dare.”) She made him get rid of those sucky pursed-mouth ties, told him what shoes to wear, got him to buy a loose-cut Italian suit, redid his hair. A lot of his current tastes-in food, in drink, in recreational drugs, in women’s entertainment underwear-were once hers. In his new phase, with his new, hard, stripped-down name ending on the sharpened note of “r,” he is her creation.

As she is her own. During her childhood, she was a romanticized Katherine, dressed by her misty-eyed, fussy mother in dresses that looked like ruffled pillowcases. By high school, she’d shed the frills and emerged as a bouncy, round-faced Kathy, with gleaming freshly washed hair and enviable teeth, eager to please and no more interesting than a health-food ad. At university she was Kath, blunt and no-bullshit in her Take-Back-the-Night jeans and checked shirt and her bricklayer-style striped denim peaked hat. When she ran away to England, she sliced herself down to Kat. It was economical, street-feline, and pointed as a nail. It was also unusual. In England you had to do something to get their attention, especially if you weren’t English. Safe in this incarnation, she Ramboed through the eighties.

It was the name, she still thinks, that got her the interview, and then the job. The job was with an avant-garde magazine, the kind that was printed on matte stock in black and white, with overexposed closeups of women with hair blowing over their eyes, one nostril prominent: The Razor’s Edge, it was called. Haircuts as art, some real art, film reviews, a little stardust, wardrobes of ideas that were clothes and of clothes that were ideas—the metaaphysical shoulder pad. She learned her trade well, hands-on. She learned what worked.

She made her way up the ladder, from layout to design, then to the supervision of whole spreads, and then whole issues. It wasn’t easy, but it was worth it. She had become a creator; she created total looks. After a while, she could walk down the street in Soho or stand in the lobby at openings and witness her handiwork incarnate, strolling around in outfits she’d put together, spouting her warmed-over pronouncements. It was like being God, only God had never got around to off-the-rack lines.

By that time her face had lost its roundness, though the teeth, of course, remained: there was something to be said for North American dentistry. She’d shaved off most of the hair, worked on the drop-dead stare, perfected a certain turn of the neck that conveyed an aloof inner authority. What you had to make them believe was that you knew something they didn’t know yet. What you also had to make them believe was that they, too, could know this thing, this thing that would give them eminence and power and sexual allure, would attract envy to them-but for a price. The price of the magazine. What they could never get through their heads was that it was done entirely with cameras. Frozen light, frozen time. Given the angle, she could make any woman look ugly. Any man, as well. She could make anyone look beautiful, or at least interesting. It was all photography, it was all iconography. It was all in the choosing eye. This was the thing that could never be bought, no matter how much of your pitiful monthly wage you blew on snakeskin.

Despite the status, The Razor’s Edge was fairly low-paying. Kat herself could not afford many of the things she contextualized so well. The grittiness and expense of London began to get to her; she got tired of gorging on the canapés at literary launches in order to scrimp on groceries, tired of the fuggy smell of cigarettes ground into the red-and-maroon carpeting of pubs, tired of the pipes bursting every time it froze in winter, and of the Clarissas and Melissas and Penelopes at the magazine rabbiting on about how they had been literally, absolutely, totally freezing all night, and how it literally, absolutely, totally, usually never got that cold. It always got that cold. The pipes always burst. Nobody thought of putting in real pipes, ones that would not burst next time. Burst pipes were an English tradition, like so many others.

Like, for instance, English men. Charm the knickers off you with their mellow vowels and frivolous verbiage, and then, once they’d got them off, panic and run. Or else stay and whinge. The English called it “whinging” instead of whining. It was better, really. Like a creaking hinge. It was a traditional compliment to be whinged at by an Englishman. It was his way of saying he trusted you, he was conferring upon you the privilege of getting to know the real him. The inner, whinging him. That was how they thought of women, really: whinge receptacles. Kat could play it, but that didn’t mean she liked it.

She had an advantage over the English women, though: she was of no class. She had no class. She was in a class of her own. She could roll around among the English men, all different kinds of them, secure in the knowledge that she was not being measured against the class yardsticks and accent detectors they carried around in their back pockets, was not subject to the petty snobberies and resentments which lent such richness to their inner lives. The flip side of this freedom was that she was beyond the pale. She was a colonial—how fresh, how vital, how anonymous, how finally of no consequence. Like a hole in the wall, she could be told all secrets and then abandoned with no guilt.

She was too smart, of course. The English men were very competitive; they liked to win. Several times it hurt. Twice she had abortions, because the men in question were not up for the alternative. She learned to say that she didn’t want children anyway, that if she longed for a rug rat she would buy a gerbil. Her life began to seem long. Her adrenaline was running out. Soon she would be thirty, and all she could see ahead was more of the same.

THIS WAS HOW THINGS WERE WHEN GERALD TURNED UP. “You’re terrific,” he said, and she was ready to hear it, even from him, even though “terrific” was a word that had probably gone out with fifties crewcuts. She was ready for his voice by that time, too: the flat, metallic, nasal tone of the Great Lakes, with its clear hard “r”s and its absence of theatricality. Dull normal. The speech of her people. It came to her suddenly that she was an exile.

Gerald was scouting, Gerald was recruiting. He’d heard about her, looked at her work, sought her out. One of the big companies back in Toronto was launching a new fashion-oriented magazine, he said: up-market, international in its coverage, of course, but with some Canadian fashion in it, too, and with lists of stores where the items portrayed could actually be bought. In that respect, they felt they’d have it all over the competition, those American magazines that assumed you could only get Gucci in New York or Los Angeles. Heck, times had changed, you could get it in Edmonton! You could get it in Winnipeg!

Kat had been away too long. There was Canadian fashion now? The English quip would be to say that “Canadian fashion” was an oxymoron. She refrained from making it, lit a cigarette with her cyanide-green Covent Garden-boutique leather-covered lighter (as featured in the May issue of The Razor’s Edge), looked Gerald in the eye. “London is a lot to give up,” she said levelly. She glanced around the see-me-here Mayfair restaurant where they were finishing lunch, a restaurant she’d chosen because she’d known he was paying. She’d never spend that kind of money on food otherwise. “Where would I eat?”

Gerald assured her that Toronto was now the restaurant capital of Canada. He himself would be happy to be her guide. There was a great Chinatown, there was world-class Italian. Then he paused, took a breath. “I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he said. “About the name. Is that Kat as in Krazy?” He thought this was suggestive. She’d heard it before.

“No,” she said. “It’s Kat as in KitKat. That’s a chocolate bar. Melts in your mouth.” She gave him her stare, quirked her mouth, just a twitch.

Gerald became flustered, but he pushed on. They wanted her, they needed her, they loved her, he said in essence. Someone with her fresh, innovative approach and her experience would be worth a lot of money to them, relatively speaking. But there were rewards other than the money. She would be in on the initial concept, she would have a formative influence, she would have a free hand. He named a sum that made her gasp, inaudibly of course. By now she knew better than to betray desire.

SO SHE MADE THE JOURNEY BACK, did her three months of culture shock, tried the world-class Italian and the great Chinese, and seduced Gerald at the first opportunity, right in his junior vice-presidential office. It was the first time Gerald had been seduced in such a location, or perhaps ever. Even though it was after hours, the danger frenzied him. It was the idea of it. The daring. The image of Kat kneeling on the broadloom in a legendary bra that until now he’d seen only in the lingerie ads of the Sunday New York Times, unzipping him in full view of the silver-framed engagement portrait of his wife that complemented the impossible ballpoint-pen set on his desk. At that time he was so straight he felt compelled to take off his wedding ring and place it carefully in the ashtray first. The next day he brought her a box of David Wood Food Shop chocolate truffles. They were the best, he told her, anxious that she should recognize their quality. She found the gesture banal, but also sweet. The banality, the sweetness, the hunger to impress: that was Gerald.

Gerald was the kind of man she wouldn’t have bothered with in London. He was not funny, he was not knowledgeable, he had little verbal charm. But he was eager, he was tractable, he was blank paper. Although he was eight years older than she was, he seemed much younger. She took pleasure in his furtive, boyish delight in his own wickedness. And he was so grateful. “I can hardly believe this is happening,” he said, more frequently than was necessary and usually in bed.

His wife, whom Kat encountered (and still encounters) at many tedious company events, helped to explain his gratitude. The wife was a priss. Her name was Cheryl. Her hair looked as if she still used big rollers and embalm-your-hairdo spray. Her mind was room-by-room Laura Ashley wallpaper: tiny, unopened pastel buds arranged in straight rows. She probably put on rubber gloves to make love, and checked it off on a list afterwards. One more messy household chore. She looked at Kat as if she’d like to spritz her with air deodorizer. Kat revenged herself by picturing Cheryl’s bathrooms; hand towels embroidered with lilies, fuzzy covers on the toilet seats.

The magazine itself got off to a rocky start. Although Kat had lots of lovely money to play with, and although it was a challenge to be working in color, she did not have the free hand Gerald had promised her. She had to contend with the company board of directors, who were all men, who were all accountants or indistinguishable from them, who were cautious and slow as moles.

“It’s simple,” Kat told them. “You bombard them with images of what they ought to be, and you make them feel shitty for being the way they are. You’re working with the gap between reality and perception. That’s why you have to hit them with something new, something they’ve never seen before, something they aren’t. Nothing sells like anxiety.”

The board, on the other hand, felt that their readership should simply be offered more of what they already had. More fur, more sumptuous leather, more cashmere. More established names. The board had no sense of improvisation, no wish to take risks, no sporting instincts, no desire to put one over on the readers just for the hell of it. “Fashion is like hunting,” Kat told them, hoping to appeal to their male hormones, if any. “It’s playful, it’s intense, it’s predatory. It’s blood and guts. It’s erotic.” But to them it was about good taste. They wanted Dress-for-Success. Kat wanted scattergun ambush.

Everything became a compromise. Kat had wanted to call the magazine All the Rage, but the board was put off by the vibrations of anger in the word “rage.” They thought it was too feminist, of all things. “It’s a forties sound,” Kat said. “Forties is back. Don’t you get it?” But they didn’t. They wanted to call it Or. French for “gold” and blatant enough in its values, but without any base note, as Kat told them. They sawed off at Felice, which had qualities each side wanted. It was vaguely French-sounding, it meant “happy” (so much less threatening than “rage”), and, although you couldn’t expect the others to notice, for Kat it had a feline bouquet that counteracted the laciness. She had it done in hot pink lipstick-scrawl, which helped some. She could live with it, but it had not been her first love.

This battle has been fought and refought over every innovation in design, every new angle Kat’s tried to bring in, every innocuous bit of semi-kink. There was a big row over a spread that did lingerie, half pulled off and with broken glass perfume bottles strewn on the floor. There was an uproar over the two nouveau-stockinged legs, one tied to the leg of a chair with a third, different-colored stocking. They had not understood the man’s three-hundred -dollar leather gloves positioned ambiguously around a neck.

And so it had gone on, for five years.

AFTER GERALD HAS LEFT, Kat paces her living room. Pace, pace. Her stitches pull. She’s not looking forward to her solitary dinner of microwaved leftovers. She’s not sure now why she came back here, to this flat burg beside the polluted inland sea. Was it Ger? Ludicrous thought, but no longer out of the question. Is he the reason she stays, despite her growing impatience with him?

He’s no longer fully rewarding. They’ve learned each other too well, they take shortcuts now; their time together has shrunk from whole stolen, rolling, and sensuous afternoons to a few hours snatched between work and dinnertime. She no longer knows what she wants from him. She tells herself she’s worth more, she should branch out; but she doesn’t see other men, she can’t, somehow. She’s tried once or twice, but it didn’t work. Sometimes she goes out to dinner or a flick with one of the gay designers. She likes the gossip.

Maybe she misses London. She feels caged, in this country, in this city, in this room. She could start with the room, she could open a window. It’s too stuffy in here. There’s an undertone of formaldehyde, from Hairball’s bottle. The flowers she got for the operation are mostly wilted, all except Gerald’s from today. Come to think of it, why didn’t he send her any at the hospital? Did he forget, or was it a message?

“Hairball,” she says, “I wish you could talk. I could have a more intelligent conversation with you than with most of the losers in this turkey farm.” Hairball’s baby teeth glint in the light; it looks as if it’s about to speak.

Kat feels her own forehead. She wonders if she’s running a temperature. Something ominous is going on behind her back. There haven’t been enough phone calls from the magazine; they’ve been able to muddle on without her, which is bad news.

Reigning queens should never go on vacation, or have operations’ either. Uneasy lies the head. She has a sixth sense about these things, she’s been involved in enough palace coups to know the signs, she has sensitive antennae for the footfalls of impending treachery.

The next morning she pulls herself together, downs an espresso from her mini-machine, picks out an aggressive touch-me-if-you-dare suede outfit in armor gray, and drags herself to the office, although she isn’t due in till next week. Surprise, surprise. Whispering knots break up in the corridors, greet her with false welcome as she limps past. She settles herself at her minimalist desk, checks her mail. Her head is pounding, her stitches hurt. Ger gets wind of her arrival; he wants to see her A.S.A.P., and not for lunch.

He awaits her in his newly done wheat-on-white office, with the eighteenth-century desk they chose together, the Victorian inkstand, the framed blowups from the magazine, the hands gloved in maroon leather, wrists manacled with pearls, the Hermes scarf twisted into a blindfold, the model’s mouth blossoming lusciously beneath it. Some of her best stuff. He’s beautifully done up, in a lick-my-neck silk shirt open at the throat, an eat-your-heart-out Italian silk-and-wool loose knit sweater. Oh, cool insouciance. Oh, eyebrow language. He’s a money man who lusted after art, and now he’s got some, now he is some. Body art. Her art. She’s done her job well; he’s finally sexy.

He’s smooth as lacquer. “I didn’t want to break this to you until next week,” he says. He breaks it to her. It’s the board of directors. They think she’s too bizarre, they think she goes way too far. Nothing he could do about it, although naturally he tried.

Naturally. Betrayal. The monster has turned on its own mad scientist. “I gave you life,” she wants to scream at him.

She isn’t in good shape. She can hardly stand. She stands, despite his offer of a chair. She sees now what she’s wanted, what she’s been missing. Gerald IS what she’s been missing: the stable, unfashionable, previous, tight-assed Gerald. Not Ger, not the one she’s made in her own image. The other one, before he got ruined. The Gerald with a house and a small child and a picture of his wife in a silver frame on his desk. She wants to be in that silver frame. She wants the child. She’s been robbed.

“And who is my lucky replacement?” she says. She needs a cigarette, but does not want to reveal her shaking hands.

“Actually, it’s me,” he says, trying for modesty.

This is too absurd. Gerald couldn’t edit a phone book.

“You?” she says faintly. She has the good sense not to laugh.

“I’ve always wanted to get out of the money end of things here,” he says, “into the creative area. I knew you’d understand, since it can’t be you at any rate. I knew you’d prefer someone who could, well, sort of build on your foundations.” Pompous asshole. She looks at his neck. She longs for him, hates herself for it, and is powerless.

The room wavers. He slides toward her across the wheat-colored broadloom, takes her by the gray suede upper arms. “I’ll write you a good reference,” he says. “Don’t worry about that. Of course, we can still see one another. I’d miss our afternoons.”

“Of course,” she says. He kisses her, a voluptuous kiss, or it would look like one to a third party, and she lets him. In a pig’s ear.

She makes it home in a taxi. The driver is rude to her and gets away with it; she doesn’t have the energy. In her mailbox is an engraved invitation: Ger and Cheryl are having a drinks party, tomorrow evening. Postmarked five days ago. Cheryl is behind the times.

Kat undresses, runs a shallow bath. There’s not much to drink around here, there’s nothing to sniff or smoke. What an oversight; she’s stuck with herself. There are other jobs. There are other men, or that’s the theory. Still, something’s been ripped out of her. How could this have happened—to her? When knives have been slated for backs, she’s always done the stabbing. Any headed her way she’s seen coming in time, and thwarted. Maybe she’s losing her edge.

She stares into the bathroom mirror, assesses her face in the misted glass. A face of the eighties, a mask face, a bottom-line face; push the weak to the wall and grab what you can. But now it’s the nineties. Is she out of style, so soon? She’s only thirty-five, and she’s already losing track of what people ten years younger are thinking. That could be fatal. As times goes by, she’ll have to race faster and faster to keep up, and for what? Part of the life she should have had is just a gap, it isn’t there, it’s nothing. What can be salvaged from it, what can be redone, what can be done at all?

When she climbs out of the tub after her sponge bath, she almost falls. She has a fever, no doubt about it. Inside her something is leaking, or else festering; she can hear it, like a dripping tap. A running sore, a sore from running so hard. She should go to the emergency ward at some hospital, get herself shot up with antibiotics. Instead, she lurches into the living room, takes Hairball down from the mantelpiece in its bottle, places it on the coffee table. She sits cross-legged, listens. Filaments wave. She can hear a kind of buzz, like bees at work.

She’d asked the doctor if it could have started as a child, a fertilized egg that escaped somehow and got into the wrong place. No, said the doctor. Some people thought this kind of tumor was present in seedling form from birth, or before it. It might be the woman’s undeveloped twin. What they really were was unknown. They had many kinds of tissue, though. Even brain tissue. Though of course all of these tissues lack structure.

Still, sitting here on the rug looking in at it, she pictures it as a child. It has come out of her, after all. It is flesh of her flesh. Her child with Gerald, her thwarted child, not allowed to grow normally. Her warped child, taking its revenge.

“Hairball,” she says. “You’re so ugly. Only a mother could love you.” She feels sorry for it. She feels loss. Tears run down her face. Crying is not something she does, not normally, not lately.

Hairball speaks to her, without words. It is irreducible—it has the texture of reality, it is not an image. What it tells her is everything she’s never wanted to hear about herself. This is new knowledge, dark and precious and necessary. It cuts.

She shakes her head. What are you doing, sitting on the floor and talking to a hairball? You are sick, she tells herself. Take a Tylenol and go to bed.

THE NEXT DAY SHE FEELS A LITTLE BETTER. Dania from layout calls her and makes dove like, sympathetic coos at her, and wants to drop by during lunch hour to take a look at her aura. Kat tells her to come off it. Dania gets huffy, and says that Kat’s losing her job is a price for immoral behavior in a previous life. Kat tells her to stuff it; anyway, she’d done enough immoral behavior in this life to account for the whole thing. ‘‘Why are you so full of hate?” asks Dania. She doesn’t say it like a point she’s making, she sounds truly baffled.

“I don’t know,” says Kat. It’s a straight answer.

After she hangs up she paces the floor. She’s crackling inside, like hot fat under the broiler. What she’s thinking about is Cheryl, bustling about her cozy house, preparing for the party. Cheryl fiddles with her freeze-framed hair, positions an overloaded vase of flowers, fusses about the caterers. Gerald comes in, kisses her lightly on the cheek. A connubial scene. His conscience is nicely washed. The witch is dead, his foot is on the body, the trophy; he’s had his dirty fling, he’s ready now for the rest of his life.

Kat takes a taxi to the David Wood Food Shop and buys two dozen chocolate truffles. She has them put into an oversized box, then into an oversized bag with the store logo on it. Then she goes home and takes Hairball out of its bottle. She drains it in the kitchen strainer and pats it damp-dry, tenderly, with paper towels. She sprinkles it with powdered cocoa, which forms a brown pasty crust. It still smells like formaldehyde, so she wraps it in Saran Wrap and then in tinfoil, and then in pink tissue paper, which she ties with a mauve bow. She places it in the David Wood Box in a bed of shredded tissue, with the truffles nestled around. She closes the box, tapes it, puts it into the bag, stuffs several sheets of pink paper on top. It’s her gift, valuable and dangerous. It’s her messenger, but the message it will deliver is its own. It will tell the truth to whoever asks. It’s right that Gerald should have it; after all, it’s his child, too.

She prints on the card, “Gerald, Sorry I couldn’t be with you. This is all the rage. Love, K.”

When evening has fallen and the party must be in full swing, she calls a delivery taxi. Cheryl will not distrust anything that arrives in such an expensive bag. She will open it in public, in front of everyone. There will be distress, there will be questions. Secrets will be unearthed. There will be pain. After that, everything will go way too far.

She is not well; her heart is pounding, space is wavering once more. But outside the window it’s snowing—the soft, damp, windless flakes of her childhood. She puts on her coat and goes out, foolishly. She intends to walk just to the corner, but when she reaches the corner she goes on. The snow melts against her face like small fingers touching. She has done an outrageous thing, but she doesn’t feel guilty. She feels light and peaceful and filled with charity, and temporarily without a name.