Luckily I’ve gotten another Amazon package to tide me over, because I blasted through Atonement in two days and there’s really no stopping me when it comes to a good book. Now, I’m nearly done with the 2001 O Henry Prize Stories collection, and after that it’s on to Eudora Welty’s On Writing, and whatever else has piled up in the meantime. I recognized immediately the O Henry first-prizewinning story as something that Sheila Kohler had read aloud to us in class last fall in one of her examples of how to write. It was The Deep by Mary Swan, and it went places I couldn’t have imagined from the short paragraph Sheila had read us in class:

Here there are two tall windows, very tall, many-paned, and the gauzy white curtains swirl in the breeze, lift and fall like a breath, like a sigh. There is a faint, sweet smell, like blossoms; perhaps it is spring. The leaves on the trees also lift and sigh, all that can be seen through those windows. Sounds reach us from the street, wheels turning and hard shoes and sometimes a voice raised, calling out something, but they are muffled, all these sounds. Distant. Father told us once about the queen’s funeral, straw laid in the street to mute the sound. It is like that, and we wonder if someone has died.