9781250816214

But Sophia didn’t. She still doesn’t. Surrounded by the secrets her house
has kept from her, she tries and tries to see the shape of the thing happening
to her. But all she has are pieces, these pieces, an incomplete body with too
much hair and jewels and teeth but no face to see and understand.
Sophia gets unsteadily to her feet. She reaches up for the lip of the
counter to hold on to. And she does understand something then, one thing,
one little bone in the hundreds that make up a self.
The table so high she swings her legs in the air.
The bed she needs a staircase to dismount.
The staircase she needs a half hour to descend.
The chairs she drowns in. The kitchen counter she has to reach up to
grab hold of. Oh, she thinks. How silly of me not to see. Not to know from
the first day.
This house was never built for her.
Someone fashioned it lovingly, brick by beam, for the daily use of a
woman much bigger and taller and stronger than Sophia. A giantess.
Someone the size of her husband. Perhaps even greater than him. Someone
with long, coarse black hair like the wig Mrs. Palfrey wore in the
amphitheater.
It had never been her house at all.
Something breaks in Sophia. Or perhaps that little organ of
dissatisfaction she had always lacked germinates and begins to send out
sprouts at last.
Either way, she runs from it.
Out.
Into the night and the street, past curfew and into the reaching, grasping
shadows that have waited for her for so long.