Carrington’s narrator has had enough of attending “cocktail-drinking, prize-giving-and-taking, artistic demonstrations and other casually hazardous gatherings organized for the purpose of people wasting other people’s time”. After various misadventures with cosmic wool, and her retirement from social face-eating competition, she ends up a saint, living on a traffic island. This story is darkly comic and completely bonkers in ways that mean it somehow ends up making sense.
First published – in French – as Une Chemise de nuit de flanelle, Parisot, 1951, translated by Ives Bonnefoy, then in The Seventh Horse and Other Tales, Dutton, 1988 and The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington, Dorothy Project, 2017
