A woman contends with her rage and anxiety by going on walks around her Florida neighborhood. Though the story opens with the narrator proclaiming “I have somehow become a woman who yells,” we never actually see her do so. Instead, we see the neighborhood: a place where there are controlled burns in parks where unhoused people shelter, where cygnets are gobbled up by otters. Under Groff’s keen eye, these descriptions of walks around the neighborhood become a treatise on the transitory, cyclical, and sometimes violent nature of all things, the melancholy that comes with watching change happen before our very eyes.
First published in The New Yorker, July 2015, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Florida, Riverhead, 2018
A Personal Anthology 