drea

“Deliberately, she visualized the living room of their Flynders farmhouse, then, blurring that bright familiar place, another room began to form: the skimpy parlor of her childhood, her father and a friend speaking late into the evening while she lay drowsily on the Victorian sofa, listening to the drone of the men's low voices, feeling on her cheek the sting of a horsehair which had worked its way up through the black upholstery, safe and dreaming of the brilliance of her own true grown-up life to come.

She put her hand on her cheek and touched the place where the horsehair had pricked, and she gasped at the force of a memory that could, in the space of a breath taken and released, expunge the distance between sleepy child and exhausted adult, as though, she thought, it had taken all these years to climb the stairs to bed.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters