The Girl With Glass Feet

Have you ever hoped for something? And held out for it against all the odds? Until everything you did was ridiculous?

One day, I learned that a single look can change everything. And since then I have seen it countless times. I have grappled to understand it and failed. For instance, all it took was a look from another man for my wife to fall out of love with me. It baffles me that a simple alignment of eyes can cause so much devastation.

It didn’t take tragedy or war to derail a man. It took only a memory.

She had felt a collision with him and known that she had wanted this her whole life: to crash for just one moment into another person at such a velocity as to fuse with him.

Writing is like going underwater - thank you for being there when I come back up.

I should take a photo.' 'No. Just remember it, and us in it.

He imagined dying and being cut open and there were all his bones and muscles and his bared arteries and capillaries leading to a cavity in his chest where instead of a heart he had his camera.

Then there were the negatives. How he missed negatives. They were the actual rays of light, bounced straight off a landscape, an object, a person, and scarred on to the film. Photographic negatives were the hardest evidence you could get of your memories. They were the char left by the fire, the bruise left on your skin. The same light that carried to your eyes, on the day of your photograph, that image of your mother, or your father, or your close friend, had recorded itself on the film. And now, staring at the photo on the wall of Ida's transparent toes against the bed sheets, he thought how similar her feet were to negatives: both subjects of that half-world between memory and the present. These were not real, flexible, treading toes, but a play of light that showed where toes had been.

Carefully, he reached around her with both arms so his fingers locked across her back. 'You have to squeeze,' she whispered, 'or it's not a hug.

Sometimes I just can't stop thinking enough to turn off.

The sunset like a blacksmith, was beating the sky into glowing red blades.

After a long while he sat upright with great effort, exhaled a sigh and reached for a clean sheet of lined paper, smoothing it out on the desk. He unscrewed the lid of his fountain pen, laid it perpendicular to his paper, and began to write. Often he compared his writing to white water. He had only to leap in to be dragged away on its rapids, thrown this way and that with his own will rendered impotent. While writing he found the words came from the muscles in his hands, the feel of the shaft of his pen, the locked joint of his elbow. the scratching noise of the nib marking paper and, underneath all that, some coordinating impulse in his guts. Certainly not from his mind.

Sometimes Midas suspected that life was a film with subliminal messages. Things would move along with an acceptable degree of predictability, then be punctuated by some horrible childhood memory.

It was just her and Midas in here, tucked away from the world. Here she could turn quietly into glass, with only love to distract her.

His father looked wistful. 'And you don't feel anticlimatic?' What's that?' Somewhat the opposite of elated.' What's elated again?' Good feelings. That is to say, very good. You can feel, can't you? That's what I'm driving at. You don't ever wonder... where feeling went?

Dust particles panicked and swarmed in the light.

Perhaps you think too hard about what words you're going to use and how to make your mouth say them.

As if you could terminate love abruptly because the one you loved signed papers with someone else in a church.

He’d been an odd one, that boy with the camera. Such a distinctive physique: pale skin so taut on his skeleton, holding himself with a shy hunch, not ugly as such but certainly not handsome, with a demeanor eager to cause no trouble, to attract no attention.

Her toes were pure glass. Smooth, clear, shining glass. Glinting crescents of light edged each toenail and each crease between the joints of each digit. Seen through her toes, the silver spots on the bed sheet diffused into metallic vapours.

She sometimes wished she possessed the flawed kind of taste that drew girls to arseholes who wanted that one thing alone.

The woods felt like a sleeping monster worth tiptoeing past.

Besides, he didn't have enough intact heartstrings to hand them to people to pull.

Beeches stood aghast in pools of shed leaves. Silver poplars looked like moonbeams.

Was she horrid to you? I hate her if she was horrid.

It was the touch that made him realize he loved her. Warmth from her scalp. Grease from her locks. He entwined his hand in her hair. It shrank through his moving fingers like sand. They lay together for a long time. Somewhere outside, a dog barked. He could barely believe he had lived so long without wanting to touch. Photography had made him forget the necessity of this feeling.

Her toes were pure glass. Smooth, clear, shining glass. Glinting crescents of light edged each toenail and each crease between the joints of each digit. Seen through her toes, the silver spots on the bed sheet diffused into metallic vapors. The ball of her foot was glass too, but murkier, losing its transparency in a gradient until, near her ankle, it reached skin: matte and flesh toned like any other.

I should take a photo.” “No. Just remember it, and us in it.” He swallowed. She smiled. Here was rightness of place and time.