This chapter held me spellbound from the opening paragraph, so original is the voice, so precise the level of observation. What impressed me most was the emotional honesty of the writing, how deftly it moves between the minds of a father and daughter whose present-day estrangement kindles questions about the past. — Tania James, Guest Judge
ONE
2014
The night before departing, Lux Crawford dreams of stone colored light and falling bodies. On the early morning train, she drinks filter coffee and shuffles the importance of her dream with other things, like her mascara running dry and the fridge being empty and the new billboard on her street selling jeans by way of skin, or skin by way of jeans. She pockets observations; bargains for a sign. The window is damp and foggy, so she swipes an arc in the pane and scours the hedgerows for deer. A deer, she feels quite certain, would be a positive sign. She watches clouds of mist stretching over the open fields. No deer, just a trampled length of middle England, grayscale, punctuated only by satellite towns and austere steel cranes in the far distance. She stretches her neck, winces at the crackle of a bad night’s sleep.
As Lux approaches her destination, her father, Christopher Crawford, is arranging books on a table in an old bookshop on a street not far from London. With the help of his editor, he sets up a banner that reads DISTURBING AND VITAL followed by a subset of buzzwords: necessary—harrowing—unputdownable and so on. The night before the book launch, Christopher dreamt of seals abandoning their skins on the sand, of a woman’s voice turning through rain, and little else, clippings from the previous day; his bonsai tree, a pint of milk on the doorstep, all things lacking urgency and definition. In the morning, he does not consider the importance of any of this; he eats plain toast and reads the paper, making sure to avoid reviews of his book.
Lux changes trains in London. She buys another ticket and stands cold on the platform watching pigeons bicker in shallow pools of dirt. She smokes two cigarettes and tries to remember whether or not she turned the hob off. Her kettle is still broken so she boiled water in a pan for a cup of tea she didn’t drink. She is quite certain that she turned it off, but she sends a text to her neighbor all the same. Thanks Margaret. She keeps a spare key, just in case. Lux briefly indulges in the image of her bedroom thick with smoke, the walls turning black then caving in on themselves. Then the train pulls up. It’s mostly empty. Margaret texts Lux a thumbs up. Lux sinks into a window seat beside a table and watches London stagger into back gardens then open fields again.
When she arrives in the market town the platform barriers are open and Lux glides through unnoticed. She regrets paying for the second ticket which went unscanned. If she were to die in this little town she could be traced as far as London and no further. She imagines a ghostly version of herself straddling one of the lions in Trafalgar Square or buying ticket after ticket for the London Eye.
The bookshop is a significant walk or a quick bus ride from the station. Lux buys a second coffee from the platform kiosk, wraps her parka tight against her body and decides to walk. A mistake, she realizes, when she eventually arrives at the shopfront and her legs are sore and her hands bright red from cold. She stands at the window and watches for a while. The store is deep with high ceilings. She can see them setting up for the reading right at the back, behind several best-seller and special offer tables. It is a few minutes before Christopher drifts out from behind a row of shelves. He’s making himself useful, unpacking books, filling glasses of water. It has been nearly fifteen years since Lux last saw Christopher and even from a distance, she can see those years crowded around his features, shining silver in his tangled hair.
The shop’s size means that Lux can purchase a copy without Christopher noticing her presence. Patrons are already buzzing about, having arrived early to get a good seat for the reading. Copies are stacked by the till. Lux pays for a hardback without so much as glancing at it, then loiters in the history section, peering through the stacks, watching her father wrestle with his nerves. He is fidgeting at the front of the room and consciously avoiding having to observe the rows of chairs the booksellers have arranged before him in a gentle curve. He fiddles with a stack of his own books, the ones piled beside him on the table next to a jug of water. He makes the spines flush then messes them up over and over again until Lux has to look away. It is time for Lux to examine the book in her hands. The title is embossed in gold lettering over a turquoise background that looks vaguely oceanic. Shadows compete with one another in a kind of Rorschach test. The back cover shows a stamp size photograph of Christopher, looking a fair bit younger than he does today. Lux cannot open the book. She gathers spit in her mouth and swallows, the way she does when she wants to get rid of the hiccups or give a good blowjob. She is briefly accosted by the versions of herself she has discarded since seeing her father last. Blonde Lux, activist Lux, dancer Lux and so on. She swallows again, harder this time. She settled in marketing, comforted by the low stakes of her inbox. Christopher knows nothing of these women.
Eventually one of the booksellers gives Christopher a nod and he sits and looks out at the crowd, surprised by the number of people gathered. Lux realizes that she doesn’t really need to be hiding herself, that there are so many people here that some are crowded at the back of the room, behind the chairs, and so she could perfectly well stay hidden behind them if she wanted to. But she remains there in the alcove where it feels safe. Eventually, the room agrees to quieten down and Christopher begins to speak.
Hello. He falters, touching his book like someone encountering an infant abandoned on their doorstep, full of horror and surprise and the burden of being chosen. He takes a sip of water and clears his throat. Hello, he says again—he is brave, he holds the book and is brave. Thank you all so much for coming, really, thank you. Lux’s heart is fat like a rodent. It is scampering around the pipes of her body, searching for an exit. It is so agitated it might emerge, raw, from a tear in her throat. Christopher continues. This book has been years in the making. The audience is thinking, what a likeable man. What a shy and plaintive man. He holds it up awkwardly. As you can see, it’s called Simmer Dim. He pauses, considers making a joke, but decides against it. My fourth novel. You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s my first. The other three were pretty rubbish if you ask me. Or ask anyone for that matter. The crowd gives a little chuckle, what a likeable man, plaintive somehow, but likeable all the same. Stupid name, Christopher continues, opaque as anything. The publishers begged me to change it but I couldn’t. The name’s important. He scans the crowd then. Let me see, he says, and thrums his fingers against his trousers—moss-colored cords, second-hand—what a humble man, the audience is thinking. Is anyone here from the Northern Isles? he asks. Silence. Well, it would be a long journey if you were, he says. The Simmer Dim is an old Scots term for midsummer. It refers to the period between May and June when there’s only really a few hours of darkness each night. Sixty degrees north, you see, so the sun just dips beneath the horizon very briefly each night. I used to think that this light was a pleasure but in reality when the day lasts that long it gets under your skin. He pauses a little longer, then says, I’m going to start at the beginning, so there’s not too much more you need to know. Christopher opens the book. ONE, he says, his voice a little croaky. He deposits his listeners on an almost uninhabited island, closer to Bergen than Inverness. It goes something like this: the archipelago; a swash of muted greens and greys. Sea spray, rare algae, oystercatchers, curlews and redshank. The birds wrestle with their own beaks. As Christopher reads aloud the audience sees a gull clapping itself against the wind. Rain pummels the peatland. The gull is indifferent to the tired shoulders of a man who has spent much of his life exposed to the elements. This man, who is hiding so much, is trudging home. We see the cottage, the all-important cottage, with its dilapidated barn and shuttered windows. It is the only dwelling on the island. Inside, the man’s daughter is hiding too. No longer a girl, but not a woman either. She is turning on and off the noise of the ocean. She is matching her colors to her surroundings, the moss of her eyes, the sand of her hair, she is fading into the island, urging her pulse to align with the steady beat of waves against the stacks.
TWO
2000
Inside Lux (who at this very moment still goes by Alexandra, but only for a moment more, so let’s stick with Lux from here out) is the feeling of rejection. She is sitting on a narrow airplane seat preparing for descent. The feeling of rejection is a red hot violating one that hurts more with each passing moment. Her mother has sent her away. Her mother has sent her away from her friends and her school and her life and her bedroom, so all that Lux has now is a small bag, the things that have happened to her (good and bad), and a ticket. She isn’t thinking so much about her father, who is waiting for her at the airport. He exists in her mind the way a streetlamp does; pragmatic, invisible until needed. Beside Lux is a man asleep in his chair. This man is audibly chewing the inside of his cheek with his yellowing teeth, and below Lux is the carpeted floor of the airplane, beneath which is the ancient island which is home to a few species of endemic chickweed, though Lux cares nothing for this.
Lux is holding a gel pen and thinking about her boarding school with its yellow curtains and obscure uniform code. She is thinking about the time that the teachers made the girls kneel in a long row to check their skirts were long enough to graze the floor. What an image, Lux thinks, sixty girls in a snaking line, kneeling on the hardwood of the assembly hall before weedy men wielding lanyards. She tries not to think about Mr. R. in particular, his sweaty breath and his knuckles, always clasping at something, always a brilliant white. Now she’s wondering if the tongue is capable of producing sweat, if saliva is just the tongue sweating. She looks at her boarding pass, Alexandra Crawford, it reads. The sleeping man’s slobbering makes her skin crawl. She grips her gel pen, the black glitter one whose ink flows the surest, and crosses out that name over and over until it’s gone and dead and done. She’s recently watched a film called The Virgin Suicides, all about beautiful teenagers killing themselves, but kind of in a hot way, and the boys love them for it. She and all of her friends felt very seen by the film and have been wearing a fair amount of white since then and pulling tarot cards and sequestering catholic iconography for their lockers though their school is church of England, and she has a favorite character, the one with the long blonde hair whose name is Lux, and Alexandra’s hair is brown, but so what, she thinks, this is my summer of seclusion and atonement, apparently, and I shall be Lux if I want to be Lux. She writes the new name on her boarding pass in capital letters; LUX CRAWFORD, it reads now, and then she prods the sleeping man with her elbow and pretends its an accident when he startles and she swallows the sweat in her mouth and they descend, swooping over the ocean, and Lux keeps swallowing because her ears are popping and the thin slice of her ear drum is stinging, and she regrets being so womanish, being a body, being a membrane about to succumb to legions salt air. She speculates whether this summer she might erode entirely. She doesn’t have the word readily available for all of these feelings, but if she did, the word would probably be shame, or thereabouts.
* * *
Christopher and Raine are waiting in the airport lounge. Raine is sipping on a can of coke and Christopher has one hand resting on the back pocket of Raine’s jeans. Christopher is in his mid-forties, but doesn’t look so old, and Raine is nearing thirty, and she looks about that age. She is wearing a cowl neck shirt with a thick denim jacket over the top and Christopher is wearing a scarf, though it’s the end of May and really not so cold.
You look nervous, don’t be nervous, Raine says, rubbing Christopher’s arm through his jumper. It’s going to be great. She’s going to love it here. She’s going to be so happy to see you. As Raine speaks, she is willing the words to be true. If she sees how nervous you are, she’ll be nervous too, Raine continues.
I know, I know. I’m excited, really. I just—I don’t remember how to talk to her.
It’s not so hard, old man, Raine says, I’ll help you.
And her mother warned me that she’s having—well, she said she’s having a phase. Some kind of phase, apparently.
What kind of phase?
Some kind of phase.
Sexuality?
Christopher’s ears go red. No, not that, I don’t think. Well, maybe. I mean, it would be perfectly fine, you know, if she was—you know. But her mother didn’t mention anything about that. No. Some trouble at school.
Rebel-phase.
Christopher blushes some more, gives a half-smile. Oh you’d know about that wouldn’t you?
No, Sir, me? Raine says.
If Lux was here to see this scene unfolding she would be choking back the vomit, but she is still parked on the runway, waiting for the cabin doors to open. Then Raine shakes her head, says, boarding school is not an easy place to be a fifteen-year-old girl, believe me. And then they squeeze one another gently; they really are trying their best.
So her mum didn’t say anything else? Raine continues.
Maybe she did, the line wasn’t so great. Something about a boy’s room. It’s a strict school, they’re really not supposed to be in the boy’s rooms, apparently. But her mother wanted her somewhere quiet for the summer. She can’t take her. Because of the tour.
I feel bad for the poor lamb, honestly, Raine says.
She’s spiky, be warned.
And with that people begin spilling through the gate and Christopher and Raine hold up the little sign they made earlier that day with Raine’s daughter, who is only five, whose name is Laurie. The sign says ALEXANDRA in acrylic paint on the pack of a cereal box and Laurie has stuck tiny little stars all over. Now Lux is walking through the gate with a big rucksack on, and Raine thinks she looks a lot older than fifteen, carrying her body awkwardly, though she has a sweet, cherubic face with upturned lips and rusty freckles. Christopher remembers a special salute the two of them would do in the old days, when Lux was a little girl. When he dropped her back at her mother’s after a camping trip or a weekend away. She wouldn’t want to leave him. She’d cling to his leg like a vine. Her mother would have to peel her off him. And then Lux would lean off the balcony, standing on one of the large terracotta plant pots and Christopher, beside the car, would press two fingers against the opposite shoulder, then upwards, towards the sky. Christopher salutes now and Lux’s hand twitches, she considers returning the gesture but concludes that the salute must be earned. She settles on a shy wave instead, and then they are all standing together in a small knot and Lux looks at the sign and the knot pulls tight.
By the way, my name’s not Alexandra, it’s Lux. This is the first thing Lux says to her father, who she hasn’t seen for a long while, a whole year, and even then, last summer it was brief, just a weekend, and Christopher’s face falls only slightly. Lux shuffles awkwardly. But thanks for the sign, she says, that’s so cute, she says, trying to recover the moment, and she flicks her hair out of her face, and yes, they really are all trying their best.
It’s eight in the evening but the sun’s still high in the sky when they pull out of the airport in Christopher’s Volvo. Some of the islands have no people at all, Raine is saying, and she’s telling Lux that they’ve been so lucky with the weather these last few days, but it’s set to turn tomorrow, isn’t that unlucky, isn’t that always the way, she’s saying and now she’s saying that she grew up here and knows it well, and that they’re all staying in a rental on the edge of the biggest town, so it won’t all be sea and sky and birdwatching, there’s a cinema and a little skate park, if you’re into that kind of thing, and Lux is trying to ignore the needles accosting the back of her eyeballs, because it’s been a while since she felt so vividly the effort of someone trying to be nice to her. Sitting in the back, Lux examines Raine’s profile. She is very small, almost birdlike, certainly smaller than Lux, thinner and shorter, a barely there sort of woman, Lux thinks. She has some kind of tattoo on her wrist, poking out of the cuff of her jacket.
How come you don’t have a Scottish accent then? Lux asks.
I was sent to boarding school when I was wee, she says.
Which one?
In Newcastle.
Oh. I wouldn’t know it.
No, probably not.
Don’t you have a daughter? Lux says. I thought you had a little daughter.
Yes, Raine says, Laurie. It’s past her bedtime so someone’s watching her. I wanted to make sure we could both pick you up.
How old are you?
I’m twenty-nine. I’m thirty next month, actually, if you can believe it.
I can believe it. And how old’s Laurie?
She’s five.
Okay. So you were like, twenty-four when you had her?
Ale—I mean, Lux, her father corrects himself, keeping his eye on the road.
It’s fine. You can ask as many questions as you want, Raine says. Yes, I was twenty-four when I had her, which was hard, you know, not having anyone else to help me those first years. Christopher puts a hand on her knee which makes Lux squirm.
What happened to the dad?
It didn’t work out.
Right. And is your real name Raine?
Enough with the questions, Ally—Lux, sorry.
Yes, that’s my real name. Oh, Chrissy, Raine says suddenly, turning and gripping Christopher’s arm, let’s pull into the lay-by, it’s such a beautiful evening, she needs to see it properly, and so Christopher steers sharply to the right and pulls into a ditch beside the guard rail. Chrissy, Lux thinks to herself and raises her eyebrows as the three of them get out. Beyond the guard rail is a sheer drop and then open ocean. Lux has to admit, it’s pretty beautiful, it’s pretty different, it’s pretty something, and the sea is stirring all of its myths and stories.
Norway’s over there, Christopher says, pointing across the water.
Down the road a short way is the crumpled body of a sheep. It’s rotting at the edge of the tarmac and there are flies all over its face. Lux turns their attention from the sea to the carcass and it’s kind of macabre but in a way that makes all three of them feel special, like a family with edge, a family who can handle looking at bad things, and so they stare at it a while as though the deflated body is nothing more than a fire on Christmas morning, and Christopher and Raine are feeling pleased with themselves, for taking this on, for taking in Lux, who they didn’t really have to take, and then Raine says, Why Lux?
Lux smiles. Well, she says. First of all, it sounds like Luck and Sex stuck together.
Oh god, Christopher says. You’re fifteen! Please.
I’m joking, I’m joking. It’s because of a film.
I like Alexandra, Christopher says. That was my grandmother’s name.
Lux is nice too, Raine says. I always wanted to change my name to something normal, like Sarah or Beth.
You know, Christopher says, turning to the two women (and for a moment he is struck by the fact that when Alexandra was born, Raine was almost exactly the age of Lux now), you know, Lux means light in Latin.
Really? Lux says, engaged for the first time since arriving. She looks out at the water and the little pools of sunshine there. Light, Light, Light, she says under her breath, and they get back in the car and keep on driving to the cottage, and Lux is relieved to have a word to settle on, to take her away from the feeling she has, her sore ears and her mouth ulcer and cramps in her belly because she’s going to get her period soon, probably, and so she just sits in the back seat and thinks light light light over and over until her old name dies some more.
* * *
It’s not long before they pull up to an old cottage built very close to the road. There are a few other houses dotted around the hillside, but not many. It’s squat and white and old and rambling with a narrow strip of unruly grass separating the house from a stone wall. Nailed against the wall is a wooden board painted with the words The Chapters.
What does this mean? Lux asks as Christopher hauls her rucksack from the boot of the car. Raine pulls back a tangle of wildflowers obstructing the sign.
It’s the cottage’s name. The Chapters. Isn’t that gorgeous? she says. It used to be Sky Cottage but they wanted something sophisticated. The owners I mean. They wanted something literary.
It’s bloody naff, says Christopher. The Chapters, honestly. Pretentious as anything.
Is it helping with the book? Lux asks.
Oh, so your mother told you about the book did she?
She said that’s why you’re here. To write another book.
They are lingering at the gate. The house is panting like an old dog. Lux can hear it, the inside of the house’s mouth, moisture steaming up the windows, causing the wallpaper to peel. She does not want to enter.
Yes, Christopher says with a grimace. The book is, well I suppose it’s happening. He starts walking up the short path, only a few steps, shaking his head. Raine looks at Lux and raises her eyebrows. Lux shrugs back at her. She wonders why her father is acting like someone is holding a gun to his head. It must be a pretty nice life, she thinks, to spend day after day traipsing around his own made-up world. The front door is built into a sticking-out porch with big windows. Raine is standing by the door, waiting. If Lux had her own book she would hurriedly scrawl into existence a helicopter descending to scoop her off this island and away. Back. Backwards. Somewhere before. Instead she makes her way up the path to the cottage. Inside it is much warmer and drier than she expected.
Lux is sensitive to spaces. It’s a boarding school thing. The oldest school buildings (around half of which still remain) were built in the 1700s. The whole estate is grade II listed. Octagonal turrets, an old clocktower, a chapel adorned with old knobbly faces, their noses wiped off from wind. Once she saw a ghost in the chapel, sitting peacefully in the pews with its head bowed. She only knew it was a ghost because she was there after dark with two other girls sipping gin from a plastic bottle. Any not-ghost would have sent them straight to the headmistress but the figure stayed very still the whole time. A girl drowned in the pond, too. That was before Lux arrived. Everyone said that if you knelt by the water and looked at your reflection you might see a figure reflected right behind you, preparing to dunk you under. But by the time Lux started there was a fence around the pond and the reeds were too thick to see yourself clearly anyway.
But more than the pond or the clock tower or even the chapel, it’s the dorm rooms that are the most haunted. Sticky with a kind of residue, despite being the newest buildings on the grounds. They were constructed in the eighties, ugly concrete things with thick windowsills and nylon carpet tile and that squeaky smell of new raincoats all year round. Each floor had a sparse common room and kitchenette decked out with a cheap kettle and a microwave that always smelt of a supermarket salad bar. Leather sofas lined each wall but they were cracked and peeling and left little specks of black up your thighs if you sat on them without a blanket underneath. And you could almost taste the girls perspiring through their turbulent years. At night Lux would lie in bed and feel the warmth of all the other bodies pressing into the mattress. Sometimes it was comforting. Mostly not. There weren’t any voices exactly, but even an empty room was very crowded indeed.
Walking into The Chapters, Lux feels it too. That exact same crowdedness; a home designed to be temporary. On the surface it’s cozy as anything. Old stone tiles make up the floor and there’s a woodfire stove set into the exposed brick wall. A thick mantelpiece sprouts candelabras and garlands of dried flowers and bud vases and photographs in wooden frames. A long wooden dining table is similarly drowning in ephemera: binoculars and a topographic map and a guide to local birds and a plate covered in crusts and half-finished toast and mugs of tea. One wall is made up entirely of bookshelves. But these things can’t all belong to Raine and Christopher, Lux thinks. The trinkets are fake, made to make the house look like a home. She notices a thick leather bound visitors book on a bureau beside the back door.
She stands in the kitchen and looks out into the back garden, which isn’t really a back garden, more just a network of fields connecting this house with the others dotted in the distance. At the back of the first field is another small brick building, even smaller than this one. Its roof is a large sheet of metal, rusting in great patches, and there’s a little chimney at either end.
It’s an old croft house, Christopher says, suddenly at her side. He’s smiling a little, admiring it hunched on the hill. It would have housed a local farmer working at a big house up the hill. I’m using it as my writing shed, it’s now part of this property.
That’s cool, Lux says flatly.
I’d rather you didn’t go in there, if that’s okay. It’s pretty unstable. I had to ask the owners to open it up for me specifically. They don’t love people going in there but they’ve made a concession for the book.
A concession for the book. Lux turns the phrase over in her head. As though the book were a particularly petulant little baby that needed a special room of its own. Fine by me, Lux says. Her legs suddenly feel very weak, and the thought of walking the steady incline up the back field towards the croft house feels about as achievable as walking back to the south of England.
The rest of the house, Christopher gestures broadly at the open plan living room, is all yours. He is smiling now, thinking it won’t be long until his daughter warms up and things will be as they were when she was little. When she used to beg him, again and again, to pick her up and swing her around or read the same story three times in a row.
Lux barely notices Christopher’s smile. Neither does she notice the nice things, the flowers on the coffee table, picked specially for her, or the fridge filled with treats she’d loved as a little girl, but hates now, worrying about her skin and her tummy fat and all else. She sits on the sofa which is both too soft and too lumpy. She tries to adjust to the air, which is warm and dusty. She answers a few questions politely, declines a cup of tea. Then she asks to go to bed.
Christopher and Raine escort her up a narrow flight of carpeted stairs to a cramped room at the front of the building. It has a low ceiling that slopes towards a square window framing the open ocean. A single bed is pressed against one wall. Blue check curtains match the bedspread. Again, she is blind to the details: the brand new candle on the dresser (wood cabin scent), the books Christopher and Raine picked out just for her, and even a silk eye mask Raine found at a local maker’s fair, hand dyed with botanical inks. As soon as she hears Christopher’s large feet and Raine’s tiny feet going back downstairs Lux allows herself to break into pieces. Lux imagines that each of her limbs has been sawn off by some brutal and sadistic man unknown to her. She imagines that each of them has been squished into a metal safe, all in a strange order, her calf strapped between her breasts and her ankle pushing up against her wrist. You girls are so dark, she remembers her drama teacher, Miss E., saying that spring when they were required to devise short plays in groups of five or six. All the girls chose the most horrible things to portray; back street abortions and childhood cancer and sexual assault and unwanted pregnancies, and each year Miss E. dreaded this assignment, because she didn’t have an answer to the girls who said it’s acting through their grins as one got down on her knees to give a fake blow job to another who, though still in a skirt, now wore a trilby hat to “represent the male gaze.” When Miss E. asked them to please, please keep their clothes on in the drama studio, the girls would crow—don’t worry Miss, it’s all made up, you can enjoy it because it’s all made up —and in the staff room Miss E. would despair to the other teachers: We try to protect them from these things, she’d say, and yet, they flock to them. Now Lux is remembering the first thing Mr. R. ever said to her. She was in the canteen admiring a tower of oranges. There was a strip light over the food to keep it warm, but it meant the oranges were lit up like a painting. She took the plumpest orange and gave it a plate all of its own. Cue Mr. R.
He smiled at her and shook his head slightly. That was it, she had been noticed. You know, an orange isn’t a meal on its own, he’d said.
But it’s huge, Sir, she replied without thinking.
Did she imagine the blood rush up to his face? Was it possible that her tiny, insignificant comment had made him turn all pink? The moment passed. Mr. R. reached across her and plucked another orange from the basket. He held it up to the light. His grip turned his knuckles a painful white. Then, with some force, he placed it on her tray. No plate, it just sat there, raw. Go on, have two, he said. At the table she sat alone, skinned both oranges and combined their segments in an elaborate geometric pattern. The dining hall was famous because of a large Tudor painting depicting horses and riders and hounds all surging through a dense green forest. The painting was very dark, you could barely see the figures at the best of times. Mr. R. sat beneath the painting on his own, the dogs looming over him, their beady eyes peering out across the dining hall. Lux watched the back of his head for a while, then she swept all of her orange segments into the bin.
Now, as she falls asleep on the island she hopes to finally escape the dull wholeness of her body. Did she imagine it, all that heat stored up inside Mr. R’s neck?
