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After work, if Antoinette came too, we would find ourselves walking next to the cold black river, following it to the black lake, sometimes stopping to throw crumbs for the birds. Two figures on a canvas. I saw us in that way.

"I want a bathing suit," she said one evening. I don't like to hear a person's voice during this kind of moment.

It's strange being alone again. In the afternoons there's a spaciousness larger than I've ever wanted. I had a husband and I left him; I wonder how he is. Now I have writing, but I also have too much of my own self. I am stalking my own soul.

Before this was done, people like him would kill people like me by the thousands. And people like me would cleave through his kind, wreaking even more damage. All while the real culprits sat back and watched and laughed.

The forest and lakes and small towns subside into planes. The prairies are initially interesting, then tedious, then unsettling. There's too much of them, that's the problem. The scale is wrong. The train crawls like a millipede through endless grass. He can see from horizon to horizon. He feels terribly overexposed.

Peter stepped forward. "Did you find your accommodations comfortable?" he said.

Alice was struck, suddenly, by the stiff way he spoke, as if he were from another time. Their friends in the city were loose-lipped, irreverent, delighted by scandal. Politeness, they believed, was only to be directed at those who ranked lower than you, who served you in some way.

"Very comfortable," said Alice. "Thank you."

Her father once told her casually that she was built like a plum on toothpicks, and the phrase was at once so cruel and so poetic that it clicked into place around her like a harness.

"Well," Mia said, settling back on her elbows. "What do we think of the boys?"

"I think Tom's kind of sexy," Susie said.

"He nearly drowned Becca," I said.

"Did he? I still want to get to know him, though."

"What do you think of Ryan?" Candice asked me.

"I think I like him," I said.

"He's gorgeous," Candice said, but there was something about the way she said it, like she was comforting me.

She didn't like that even in lug-sole boots she only came up to his chin, that the height of him cast a shadow on her when they walked. It struck her as -- gendered, in a way that felt politically irritating.

"Loving our children does not mean keeping them happy all the time and avoiding power struggles. Often it is doing what feels hardest for us to do: saying 'no' and meaning it.

"When boundaries work, children don't need to test them as often. They trust their parents and caregivers, therefore their world. They feel freer and calmer and can focus on the important things: play, learning, socializing, and being happy-go-lucky kids" (viii).

I fall asleep and dream of Daisy knocking a plant off a windowsill with her hips. "Oops." She giggles. "Don't tell Mom." The plant doesn't make a sound when it lands in the grass.I look out the window and my body is spilled out on the lawn, arms and legs twisted in improbable directions. Out of my cracked skull sprouts a thickened root, a bursting spiral of leaves.

Plus, we were on the same antidepressants in high school so I know our brain chemistry is somewhat compatible.

"This was the strangeness of becoming famous online. I had a million followers, I could access more people in a single moment than any European king of the last thousand years, and then someone could effortlessly wipe my entire kingdom away with a single sentence: I don't have Instagram.

I'm aware this isn't the kind of thing you're meant to feel about your own daughter. But motherhood is its own kind of curation. Which is to say: every woman I know lied to me about what it would be like, before I became one myself.

Weeks pass of empty scalp, but in my dreams the lice squirm in an infinity loop, a disorganized school of fish, multiplying exponentially, becoming more and more covered until they are a solid block of pulsing black which follows me wherever I go because it all come down to blood: being made from it, being thirsty for it.

I asked Dr. Hasadsri, a clinical molecular geneticist at Mayo Clinic, whether it would someday be possible to develop a NIPT-style blood test that screened for BWS and related conditions early in pregnancy... I thought about the expectant parents who might jump, scared, at an early chance to prevent kids like my son. All their private, data-informed decisions, adding up to the total elimination of his genetic code.

It was, I agreed, insane. I had been so excited for [my baby] to be discharged from the NICU, then released from his infernal oxygen tank. Now the baby-monitor industry was recruiting peppy moms to sell a vision of the perma-hospital, restyled as comfy and chic.

"It is quite true that I might be a wiser person, Celia, and that I might have done something better, if I had been better. But this is what I am going to do. I have promised to marry Mr. Ladislaw; and I am going to marry him."

But still -- it could not be fairly called wooing a woman to tell her that he would never woo her. It must be admitted to be a ghostly kind of wooing.

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

More than food they are tribute, piled up outside your altar, a compost pile of what good mothers do. An incantation, a prayer, a pleading: "Look what I made you." Sitting there like a dummy, all mother-shaped and rotting.

"We should not grieve, should we, baby?" said Celia confidentially to that unconscious centre and poise of the world, who had the most remarkable fists all complete even to the nails, and hair enough, really, when you took his cap off, to make -- you didn't know what: -- in short, he was Bouddha in a Western form.

It is undeniable that but for the desire to be where Dorothea was, and perhaps the want of knowing what else to do, Will would not at this time have been meditating on the needs of the English people or criticizing English statesmanship... Our sense of duty must often wait for some work which shall take the place of dilettantism and make us feel that the quality of our action is not a matter of indifference.

Every time I remember that my son is saddled elsewhere in someone else's arms, not mine, milk seeps from my bbreath, an ancient ache, a second set is tear ducts. By midday, all my shirts have hardened circles, stiff ghost areolas, despite the absorbent pads, my body manages to scrawl a message: please, it begs, please, just let me hold him.

And in small ways we do eat our young, feed off their stores, metabolize their still dewy flesh, swallow little rations of hope by watching them filter sand through their fingers for the first time, be first touched by a wave, feast on their look of conquest when they scale the wall of their crib... and you have already blown into a child's sweaty hair as they slept on your chest, how dare you ask for more?

The copy in this case bore more of outside resemblance to the mother, in whose sex frog-features, accompanied with fresh-coloured cheeks and a well-rounded figure, are compatible with much charm for a certain order of admirers. The result is sometimes a frog-faced male, desirable, surely, to no order of intelligent beings.

There is the simple cost benefit analysis, daycare and diapers, yes, but it doesn't consider the intangibles, the dearest currency of all: the cheek brushed against yours, the soft body wanting to be in your orbit and you wanting so badly to be in theirs, and how the gravity between those celestial bodies is what keeps us all from spinning out of control.

Rosamond, examining some muslin-work, listened in silence, and at the end gave a certain turn of her graceful neck, of which only long experience could teach you that it meant perfect obstinancy.

People were so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their fools' caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else's were transparent, making themselves exceptions to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow under a lamp they alone were rosy.