Florida

Florida by Lauren Groff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Beautifully written short stories about about feeling trapped one way or the other. Not all the stories are winners bit they are all so well observed and so well written you will remember them long afterwards.


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how dare he suggest risk like this to me, when I have proved myself vulnerable

Perhaps this is a projection: as they are both black swans and parents, they are already prefeathered in mourning.

her dog looks at me with a kind of human compassion,

these gorgeous changes that insist that not everything is decaying faster than we can love it.

It was the bread that made the pain return to his body, the deep warmth and good smell.

It was only then, when the night entered, that I understood the depth of time we had yet to face.

I felt, rather than saw, the power go out. Time erased itself from the appliances and the lights winked shut.

I hated that you opened your mouth and suddenly became another person.

things that once were alien life have become, simply, parts of her life.

She is frightened because maybe she has already become so cloudy to her husband that he has begun to look right through her; she’s frightened of what he sees on the other side.

The way he lets himself be full animal, a sensualist, the way he finds glory in the body’s hungers and delights.

how she was only one living lost thing among so many others, not special for being human.

Slowly, through reading, she became aware of the way the demands of a language can change you.

Keep me safe, she says to give him a job, pretending to be afraid. I don’t want to fall.

She would tether them here, to the earth, with her body.