I would work my way through the alphabet, and by the time I had reached the end it would have changed, shifted even a little. Often I would find myself sliding them into sentences where they did not belong. They were the same as an earworm, a song that became stuck in your head. The word was tricky and defied simple definition. There were index cards spread across the table and some on the floor.
I gave it space the way others gave space to their religion or politics I owed nothing to either of those.įor a living I updated dictionary entries.
I was an hour and a half from Oxford, where I worked, on the bus. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. I understood that you were always trying to bury yourself so deep even I wouldn’t unearth you. I understood that this was a trait I had got from you. These were words which meant: I do not want anyone to find me. In America they called it in the backwoods or past the jerkwater. In Australia they spoke about being beyond the black stump. None of the doors quite fitted. I was thirty-two years old and had been there for seven years. The floor in the tiny kitchen had a slant that rolled a ball from one end to the other. This place was a boat in another life. That month there were seams of damp around all the walls in the sudden hill-winds the chimney coughed down bird’s nests, shards of eggshell, balls of owl pellet.
At the start of the summer the potholes in the track up to the cottage filled with frogspawn but it was nearly halfway through August and nothing much grew there any more. It had been sixteen years since I last saw you, as I was getting on that bus. Daisy Johnson's writing has appeared in Boston Review and The Warwick Review, and her novel Everything Under was shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. A reinterpretation of the myth of Oedipus, the novel follows a lexicographer as she retraces her past, searching for her missing mother and uncovering memories of the final winter they spent living in a houseboat on the canals. The following is from Daisy Johnson's novel, Everything Under.
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