Status Updates From Our Hideous Progeny

Later, I would think about those words - I've got no use for it - over and over, letting them sink like needles into my skin. But in the moment, I was too distressed to notice, for all I could think of were the tears pricking at my eyes, the warmth of her hands around mine. She leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek, as friends do. As the French very often do. And then I ruined our friendship entirely.

"I ran my fingertips across it, and then my nails, as if it might be better if I had real bruises to match those he'd left on my pride. Would it have been different, I wondered, if I'd been able to explain to him what electricity was?"

The difference between a proper young lady and a beastly little thing was that ladies were never angry, they took their moods and wove them into lace, stuffed them into pillows. They learned to hold their tongue. But I have always been a beastly little thing at heart, it seems. "Finish your damned article on your own," I snapped.

It was a subject of constant debate between the two of us, whether the curtains ought to be left open or shut to prevent the books from fading. Evidently I won that day - for it was through a haze of that rare London sunshine that I watched through the doorway as an envelope slid from the letterbox and landed with a gentleness that did not match the gravity of its contents, on the chequered hallway floor.