The silence growing vertiginous, my body’s surface like a black cloth absorbs his angry baffled look.
I nodded, feeling unexpectedly protective of Baby, this silly girl I’d created, so earnest and fey. OK …
the sweet, woody smell of it mingled with that of his drugstore-brand dandruff shampoo and the Italian soap he used to hand-wash his lingerie, plus an underlying scrim of a thirty-seven-year-old dude—chopped garlic and decay
It wasn’t his wife I envied most, sleepy in slacks, but his taciturn daughter. She was bored, taut, and concupiscent.
But the situation does not wear well. It feels dated and neurasthenic
