Jenny

“To say I'm lucky in the people I'm surrounded by is like saying I'm lucky to have possession of both my hands -- it would be impossible to do most of the things I take for granted without them, but specifically impossible to type or pick up a pen.”
― Julia Armfield, Salt Slow

“Pale man in her meat-colored bedroom, long blue eyes and his smell like grass and eiderdown and something stranger; damp down a wall.”
― Julia Armfield, Salt Slow

“Looking at him then, she had thought about all the men who might have preceded him, the men she had allowed to take her out to movies and sit-down dinners but forestalled before letting them into her flat. Always a reason, of course; a stupid comment or a quick flash of violence, a seam of cruelty in some region of their bodies (a grabbing hand, a dark and fleshy underside). Enough, whatever the reason, to make her wish to bar their way any further, to invent excuses and take the train back home alone.”
― Julia Armfield, Salt Slow

“Coming home sticky-lipped from the wine and the argument, she will grumble and thrash her way through a solitary evening, watching television alone and ignoring her friends' messages, reheating dinner in the microwave. She will canonize her former loneliness with a tang of self-pity, pretend to revel in the reestablished silence, the remote control and sofa to herself.”
― Julia Armfield, Salt Slow