I’m not the first to pick this story, nor will I be the last. It’s earthy and visceral, sometimes sweet, sometimes horrific, written in an incantatory first-person voice that pauses every now and then to instruct the reader on how to achieve the right sound effects or what pitch of voice to use when reading aloud. The narrator tells us that as a little girl she was sure she saw bloody toes for sale in the supermarket: “As a grown woman, I would have said to my father that there are true things in this world only observed by a single set of eyes. As a girl, I consented to his account of the story.”
First published online in Granta in 2014 and available to read here. Collected in Her Body And Other Parties, Graywolf/Serpent’s Tail, 2019
A Personal Anthology 