Status Updates From Sunstroke and Other Stories

She fell asleep and the voices became a kind of loose safety net into which she fell, drooping and stretching under her, bearing her up, letting her go.

Sometimes Louie grumbles about Duncan, her husband, but the fervour's gone out of it. Once you've been together with someone for twenty years there's no excuse for hanging on with them if you think they're so awful: and of course she doesn't really think Duncan's awful, she supposes that she even loves him dearly, these days, underneath it all.

Neither is exactly unhappy, but what has built up in them instead is a sense of surplus, of life unlived. Somewhere else, while they are absorbed in pushchairs and fish fingers and wiping bottoms, there must be another world of intense experiences for grown-ups.

They are both in their early thirties, at that piquant moment of change when the outward accidents of flesh are beginning to be sharpened from inside by character and experience.

“Which just goes to show how you mustn’t trust a scrupulous realism, that sometimes sloppy fantasy comes nearer the true state of things.” this just made me so sick