Hop hop hop. In another moment down went the curly-haired girl after it, never once considering how in the world she was going to get back again.
The houses on the street were all the same, it was just the people living in them who were different. The people who lived in the house where the girl had grown up had terrible taste in curtains. The brick of Janice’s house had been painted pale blue. A little dog barked behind the door of a house where no dog had lived before and instead of the ivy plant in its bow window there was a gold lamp shaped like a naked woman. The large holly bush at the corner was gone.
The vacant lot, though — the vacant lot was still exactly the way it had been when the girl was a girl. She threw herself down on the short green grass, heedless of getting grass stains on her good silk skirt, and somehow tearing a hole in its hem with the heel of her shoe in the process.
The lot was a place you weren’t supposed to linger in; in that way, also, nothing had changed. She tried to remember how long ago it had been that she’d felt the fluttering in her pocket that she’d thought was a common garden fairy but that turned out to be nothing more than her heart. It was so easy to get the two of them mixed up.
The sun began to get low and all the west was dyed red.
Uh oh, said her friend the lustrous black ant.
When the Space Drift finally took place it was like everything — everything that is and has been and always will be — became for a moment like a huge thick velvet curtain, and everything that ever considered itself to be separate from anything else no longer was but only just for that moment, the moment of the Drift, while space was carrying away time in its soft dark folds like a lover.
Suddenly the curly-haired girl perceived that the grass was growing up between her and where she’d been. It had long spearlike leaves, it pushed up long pipes of green stem, and they whistled. She began to have a curious feeling as if all of this had already happened, and then half her sorrow faded into wonder, and the feeling grew upon her that these things had happened a long time ago. She drew a little nearer. It was a long time ago, she repeated.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to the Bogliasco Foundation and the Lannan Foundation for their support.
“Descent of the Aquanauts” appeared in Conjunctions.
“The Four Horsewomen” appeared in Mischief and Mayhem.
“The Rain of Beads” appeared in Little Star.
“Through the Wormhole” appeared in New England Review.
A very different version of “Body-without-Soul” appeared in My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, edited by Kate Bernheimer (Penguin, 2010).
A part of “Yellow Bear” appeared in Significant Objects, edited by Joshua Glenn (Fantagraphics, 2012).
I also want to thank Louise Glück for her help with the manuscript.
The novel is haunted by the ghosts of Sappho, Mopsa the Fairy, and “The New Mother.”
About the Author
KATHRYN DAVIS is the author of six previous novels, the most recent of which is The Thin Place. Her other books are Labrador, The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, Hell, The Walking Tour, and Versailles. She has received a Kafka Prize for fiction by an American woman, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2006 she won the Lannan Foundation Literary Award. She is the senior fiction writer on the faculty of the writing program at Washington University.