“Every water has a right place to be, but that place is in motion. You have to keep finding it, keep having it find you. Your movement sinks into and out of it with each stroke. You can fail it with each stroke. What does that mean, fail it.”
The narrator muses on her relationship with water and swimming, and her relationship with a man who draws chalk foxes on the pavement. In this piece the foxes, unlike people, do not fail.
First published online in The New Yorker, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Wrong Norma, Jonathan Cape, 2024
A Personal Anthology 