She Turned On the Lights

It was the reflex of someone who had learned that her own injuries were dangerous to display.

And in the half-second it took her to yank those sleeves down, I understood that everything in that beautiful house was a lie — the diet, the clumsiness, the gastritis, the cultured united family — and that the one true thing was this woman on a plastic stool in the dark, hiding her arms out of an instinct she should never have had to learn.

“Yvaine.

What is going on here?”

Her eyes filled.

“Nothing.