Whitney FI’s Reviews > Hamnet > Status Update

The grave is a shock. A deep, dark rip in the earth, as if made by the careless slash of a giant claw. It is over at the far side of the graveyard. Just beyond it, the river is taking a slow, wide bend, turning its waters in another direction. Its surface is opaque today, braided like a rope, rushing always onwards.

He can feel Death in the room, hovering in the shadows, over there beside the door, head averted, but watching all the same, always watching. It is waiting, biding its time. It will slide forward on skinless feet, with breath of damp ashes, to take her, to clasp her in its cold embrace, and he, Hamnet, will not be able to wrest her free. Should he insist it takes him too?

She had lain down, fitting herself into his form; he had nestled his face into her back. She had found a skein of his hair and smoothed it, twisting and twisting it between her fingers; she had pictured the thoughts in his head drawing upwards, along his hair, into her fingers, as a reed draws water up its hollow stem.

She grows up feeling wrong, too tall, too unruly, too opinionated, too strange. She grows up with the awareness that she is merely tolerated, an irritant, useless, that she does not deserve love, that she will need to change herself substantially, crush herself down if she is to be married. But she grows up, too, with the memory of what it meant to be properly loved for what you are, not what you ought to be.