At dawn on the street of princely foxes and senile cats, a pigeon cooed and the first traffic purred by. A woman in a fluffy green bathrobe sat at the bus stop. Minutes earlier, she had emerged from a nearby gate with the recycling box, but it was the wrong day, or the wrong box, and it had all seemed too complicated.

Now she watched the sky catch fire in a sublime, unholy dawn. Pink mist crept along the asphalt, and clouds clustered the horizon like heavy fruit. Across the street, her own flat on the second floor of a seventies low-rise building was still in shadow. And what shadow. The blank façade, the vacant windows, the malevolent black wink of the one she left open. Out here was all the world, with its promise of fulfilment and demise. In there, one great unknown.

People in daytime clothes arrived at the bus stop and shot her wary glances. The light grew feverish bright, enough to reveal a purple smear on the road: the remains of a squirrel with its skull crushed and its body mangled. One little paw remained whole, angled back towards her house.



PART IThe Lady of Shalott



One’s sympathies, of course, were all on the side of life.

—“The Death of the Moth,” VIRGINIA WOOLF

The first flicker of life was a moth. It was dusty, threadlike legs and Rorschach wings. It was what I had wanted, but immediately I no longer wanted it. I was only twenty-three. What had I been thinking?

Flicker.

I was on the way to see my tutor, a woman of massive intellect who was a cult figure in my discipline. I was on the verge of being late, but at the first flicker I stopped. I went and leaned against one of the pillars and saw the sunlight on the Victorian towers, and watched the whole shape of my life change.

Flicker, again. The word “moth” came to me, and an image of a moth crouched in darkness.

It rustled its wings, almost like it was saying ahem.

Ahem, said the moth. Here I am.

I leaned against the pillar, counted the days backwards, and felt: comprehension, inner rebellion, tug of responsibility, panic.

“No,” I said. “No. This is a mistake.” I remembered the circumstances that had led me here. “It was the night after the funeral, a night with a full moon. I wasn’t thinking clearly that night. There was this sense of lingering magic, a belief in the transmigration of souls. I don’t believe in all that in the daytime, moth.”

Even so, the moth said. I’m here.

I was teaching An Introduction to Nineteenth Century Literature that term. A parade of fallen women, ruined women, clustered around me.

“They will make me wear a scarlet A,” I said. “For accident.”

Tom would say it didn’t matter what people thought, but I cringed to think of telling anyone, because I liked to project an aura of control, and in the second year of my PhD this could only indicate the opposite, total lack of control and lack of foresight. I could hardly even bear to tell Tom.

Don’t worry about Tom, said the moth. He likes the idea of me. Even you like the idea of me. A blood relative for you.

“But not now,” I said. I fretted, I rocked back on my heels, I felt sick. I rummaged in my mind through all the books I had ever read, which was always my first response in a crisis. But what help were books now? “Perhaps like that short story Marie told me of,” I said. “A woman goes for an abortion but it goes a bit science fiction. The doctor gives her something to make the baby fold back into her body, an embryo postponed. When she does have a baby, years later, it’s that same baby.” The grooves of the pillar cut into my back.

You can’t fold me back into your body, said the moth, tiny and trying to contort away from me. But it was an honest moth. You could do away with me, of course.

No, I couldn’t do that. I had a bad history. It didn’t take much to see that snuffing out the moth would be a betrayal, bad karma.

I’m raw potential, said the moth.

I was used to thinking of myself as raw potential. The sun had moved on from the tower. I was late. I could not go and see my tutor now.

Tom will make a wonderful daddy, the moth said anxiously, still worried I might actually snuff it out to protect everything: my twenties, stretching ahead full of reading, travel, dancing, impromptu feasts with Tom at two in the morning. And my strong, empty, young body.

It will make your mother happy, said the moth.

But by then I was feeling something divorced from reason. I was feeling the delicate tickle of silken legs, the vibration of the dry, quavery voice. I was feeling the thump of new blood. It was a lure. It was a mystery. I was imagining Tom as a wonderful daddy. The baby would be Tom’s and it would be mine. It would be something different; it would be complex and disruptive.

Tom would say we could make it work.

“Tom,” I practiced saying, for later. Or maybe I was talking to the moth. “It seems that life is stronger than I am.”

Afternoon falls fast in September. The air was as sharp as the vertical thrust of the tower, but I was warm with a new desire.



But for him it was his last afternoon as himself

—“In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” W. H. AUDEN

“Tomorrow is my birthday,” Marie said. “I’ve always hated being born in November. There’s no excuse for it. Based on totally anecdotal evidence I think it must be tied with February as everyone’s most despised month. When is your birthday?”

“June twenty-third.” We faced each other across a lacquered wooden table, in a froufrou bar in an upscale neighbourhood, waiting. It was the kind of place where the ceiling was tiled pastel pink, the walls painted mint green, and there was a hodgepodge of framed aspirational pop-art prints, polished wood, mood lighting. I was here for a meeting. Marie was not supposed to be here at all as far as I knew, and I hadn’t been pleased to see her.

“Summer child. Not to be mystical about things, but I feel that says everything. Why you’re all sorted and loved up with the perfect man and already underway on your PhD, while I’m such a princess of darkness. I just flounder about.”

I hadn’t been paying much attention to what she was saying. For weeks, being in public had been a test of my attention span. I seemed to have two frequencies running at once, constantly. Finding Marie here ruptured my inner monologue, but it was still there, under the surface. Tonight was both a meeting to plan a trailblazing project between the university and the wider community, and also the night I must tell Angela. I had said to Tom, yes, I would, yes, why not, yes. But I dreaded it. It was one thing to be excited with Tom, at home, discussing names and debating first board books, speculating whose eyes, whose chin. Another to reveal my private life in public, invite everyone to observe my body and question my choices. But the time had come. We’d had the ultrasound this morning, paisley squiggle, moth portraits in black and white that made the whole thing real, and it was doubly real because we’d called my parents in Ontario when the time difference allowed and—well, I was still digesting that conversation. They had been polite rather than thrilled.

Marie had her lips pursed, was staring out into the early gloom, tapping her fingers lightly on the table. Next to her on the mini red leather chesterfield was all her usual chaos, a cracked phone, free newspapers, a collapsing tote bag, a stack of library books that wouldn’t fit inside it. I pulled back to the conversation.

“Flounder about. I don’t think anyone else would describe you that way,” I said.

We looked like mirror images, two women drawn by a child who only knows one type, and so makes one fair and one dark. We were both tall and leggy with long and permanently tangled hair; Marie’s was light brown, mine very dark. Her face was wide and mobile, mine was narrow like a bird of prey. But our faces lied: Marie was the bird of prey, and I was the ingenue. She had transferred into the department last year, fleeing her previous university after a sexual assault (“I can’t even look at that place again,” she’d said). She was a year younger, but my only real competition. I had been accepted to study under Angela, and that meant something, but my inner critic whispered that I wasn’t brilliant. I just had an excellent memory. I remembered things I had read years ago, almost verbatim. But Marie might actually be brilliant. She read close to two hundred books a year. She had taught herself to read Spanish. Her research was feminist and unapologetically personal, grounded in her lived experiences. She wasn’t intimidated by the lauded old professors, and didn’t hesitate to attack a friend on intellectual grounds either, which is how we’d come to public argument about “The Lady of Shalott” in my nineteenth-century seminar.

The interpretation I taught was unassailable. The Lady Elaine abandons her tower, mirror, and loom to go after Lancelot in search of love and colour; and yes, she dies, but she has still chosen life over shadow half-life. Marie had demanded to know how choosing Lancelot could possibly be choosing life, and why, if Lancelot was so wonderful, did he have that awful final line about the Lady having a lovely face, as if that were all that mattered? The other twelve young women in the class nodded along with Marie. The Lady had it wrong, my students said. The loom was life, creative energy, manifestation of self through work. And she abandoned it for a man. The room was quiet then. “Fine,” I said, aiming for Angela’s crystalline diction but coming across distant, possibly snooty. “Support it in your essays.” It wasn’t so serious. It was just that I loathed standing in front of people and being appraised, loathed being the focal point of the room. In that moment I loathed Marie too. I wanted to be left alone with my Victorians.

So her “perfect man” comment rang false. Tom was indeed the perfect man. But was she mocking me, and fishing for compliments at the same time?

There was a vibration from my phone inside my bag. I dug it out, and Marie went up to the bar.

After four hours of silence, I could tell my mother wanted to please me because she was texting select feelings in quotation marks.

Mum: I’m sorry if I was maybe a little “dry” earlier.

Mum: Delighted for your news, thrilled.

Mum: I only wish you had told me before the ultrasound. Just my little “hangup.” You know I always miss the parentheses of life. First days and last days. You know. After Nan and Grandy, I would have loved to have known about this from the start.

After five minutes had passed:

Mum: I just mean I would have liked to share the “early days of excitement” with you.

My mother had once said “tick, tock” to me about having babies. I was a teenager at the time. But she had not been able to have any herself, so she was sensitive about this.

The earliest of her messages had come through half an hour before, when I was walking up from the bus stop through a drab no-man’s-land of laundrettes and betting shops. The city spread before me, its bright ribbon of river, ruddy brick, patches of ugly towers, tufts of tree-filled parks. I turned away from it and cut in among leafy streets and Georgian terraces. Angela had called this meeting not far from her own terraced house.

My mother was still online. She was at work at the licensing office of the municipality where I grew up. It was five hours earlier there; she was in her afternoon slump and distracting herself by looking up prenatal yoga classes in my new English city.

Mum: I know you’re “not into yoga” but building core strength is important when expecting! I’ve been looking it up … it reduces stress and strengthens muscles and endurance needed for childbirth!!

Me: Ok we’ll see

Mum: Oh, Maddie. “Humour me.”

Me: Can you find a class for cynical graduate students without $200 leggings?

I deleted those words carefully, letter by letter, before I could send them. My mother with her minimalist spirituality, her forced cheeriness. I had run away from her. The least I could do was let her be involved.

Tom messaged that he was leaving work and would meet me soon.

Marie was back with a packet of crisps. “The prices in this place,” she said. “I wanted the cheese plate but then I wouldn’t make my rent. Now, important! Do you have room in your bag? I’d rather Angela’s novelist doesn’t know I’ve been reading his books. I’ll be forced to find something nice to say about them.”

“Did you read them all?” I asked, astonished. “I only read the newest one.” Angela’s novelist was another person she had roped in for the scheme we were here to discuss. Angela and I and a social worker and the novelist were to run a program that would create links between the university and the local community, bringing at-risk youth together to read literary texts and learn how to express themselves in writing. It would culminate in a publication and a series of performances that would prove the relevance of literature and the untapped potential of the youth. Angela strongly believed it was our role to engage with the world, but I was quite nervous; I liked the distancing effect of university, and even my seminars meant being a little too close to other people sometimes.

“There are only three. But I’ve no intention,” she said, lowering her voice conspiratorially, jabbing out words in her flat Midlands diction, “of talking about them with him. Or talking with him much at all. I think he’s basically a vampire. As you go through them, you see a man ever more in desperate need of a subject that isn’t himself. I bet he takes notes on everyone he meets.”

At moments like this I could lower my hackles and remember how much I’d wanted Marie as a friend when she’d first appeared on the scene—before I suspected her of sniffing around me for what she might get out of it. I had been as glamoured by her as everyone else. I’d started angling my chin just like her, and tossing my hair around. She’d come around mine for dinner; we’d gone together to protest the planned Tesco that threatened to undermine local commerce in my neighbourhood. We still went for coffee every week with other graduate students. I smiled and opened my bag for the novelist’s books.

Then my attention drifted. There was no point trying to get closer. Our life paths were about to diverge. She had somehow invited herself along to what was meant to be my project; and I knew she would worm her way into it. Actually … and here my attention drifted again, counting weeks and days forwards. There was a strong possibility it would just be handed over to her. It was meant for March, and the moth was expected in April, but Angela never stayed on schedule.

And there was Angela, coming through the door, her waxlike face framed by platinum hair. Dressed as always in voluminous black clothing of many textures, and exclamatory jewellery, she filled the space, reducing the floor-to-ceiling windows to background, towering above the little lacquered tables. The clientele, mostly slim, groomed women also dressed in black, were wraiths next to her. She held the door open for someone she had glimpsed approaching, and the November wind rattled in.

Angela was the kind of serious, frightening older woman I worshipped, women who were effortlessly themselves and spoke their minds without needing to be constantly speaking. There had been a collection of women like her in my life: a drama teacher, a neighbour back home, the boss at my first summer camp job. Women like suns: I moved in orbit. Since I had come to study with her a year and a half ago, life was tremblings and epiphanies. Crushing insecurity, shyness, transcendence. I was terrified of slipping up and having her despise me. I had no idea how I should tell her my news. I desperately did not want to. Angela shared another trait with the other fearsome but inspiring women in my collection: she had no children.

In came the social worker, so similar to Angela in type and passion, so different in background and field. Angela was a renowned scholar of medieval poetry and literary Modernism; Dorrie a longtime activist and advocate for young people who had aged out of the care system. Angela was widely considered a genius. I often worried I didn’t need a genius supervisor; I needed a musty one, one who would let me read and write but not insist on our galumphing back out into the world. I hardly knew how to speak to Dorrie; she seemed to represent a hard reality, which might easily have been mine, because I had been adopted out of the care system as a baby in Canada. I had not mentioned this to either of them.

Angela was still holding the door open. Throughout the warm bar people were raising their heads in protest, tsking and fretting, but Angela ignored them all and waited until a slight man of about forty with a goatee hurried in.

“Thank you for coming all the way out here to meet me practically on my own doorstep,” Angela called as they advanced to meet us. “Oh, you two have been catching up. Maddie, Marie told me yesterday she was hoping to take on more responsibilities, so I invited her along tonight. Now, you’ve met Dorrie, I think. And this is the Lord of Misrule, who needs no introduction, Marie and Madeleine.” (How naturally our names went together.) The novelist was recognizable from his book jacket photo. Flustered, I forgot that I had not liked the one book I had read.

“So, you’re the writer,” said Marie.

“I am. And one of you is Angela’s French graduate student, who sends the emails?”

“Only I’m not French,” I said.

“No you’re not, are you? How so, with a name so Gallic as Madeleine Brodeur?”

“I have one French-Canadian grandparent,” I said, which was a half-truth. A brief silence followed.

“What do you study?” A question he was obliged to ask and we to answer, with words we’d repeated so often that they had lost most of their meaning. Marie’s topic was the monstrous feminine, literary body horror, but she was bad at explaining it, throwing in names like everyone knew them, lobbing in theory, tossing her hair around.

It was nice to be undeniably better than her, at this one thing. “The non-human in Modernism.”

“Non-human as in machines?” asked the novelist. “Cyborgs and whatnot?”

“There is that,” I said. “It includes machines and streets and the alienating features of the modern landscape. And also animals—quite a few of those—and a few fairies courtesy of Yeats.” It was Tom who’d gotten me into bed with the Modernists, or rather I’d fallen into Tom’s bed when we were both undergraduates, and the Modernists just happened to be there. I’d been a pure Victorian maiden before he got his hands on me. I was still a bit pastoral, for a Modernist.

“Oh, fairies,” said the novelist with a comedy grimace that banished me to an intellectual corner. I smiled. My mother had been delighted with this angle of my thesis topic, picturing me studious among flowers and acorns. I’d heard every possible reaction. Fantasy fairies, not real, all made up. Sometimes I heard this from people who had no problem with zombies or ghosts. Other people I suspected of harbouring secret passions for fairies, asking had I read such-and-such, did I know about Arthur Conan Doyle and the photos at the bottom of the garden? Did I know about brownies, pinkies, pixies? Lots of people liked dallying in the aesthetics and magic.

Of course, I could explain my topic without going into all of that. Most of what I studied had nothing to do with fairies: I could frame it around Marianne Moore’s animals or Hope Mirrlees’s urban soundscapes or Delmore Schwartz’s movie theatre. I loved them all equally. I had come to posthumanism via the animals; my master’s thesis used horses to reframe wildness and labour in Victorian texts. I had been animal-mad as a child, but also allergic to all of them. My studies became one more way to extend childhood into maturity. I rather liked getting raised eyebrows about the fairies. Just my mother and I against the world, for once, a high-five across the distance.

“Not real,” I could hear the novelist saying confidentially to Marie. She laughed and twirled a piece of hair.

“I’ve got an icebreaker in mind.” Angela glided forwards, cleaving them cleanly apart. She pushed him over by Dorrie. “Let’s all have wine, maybe some cheese. My treat.”

“How is your wife?” Dorrie asked the novelist pointedly.

“We’re separated.” He smiled at Marie and me once more.

“That’s a shame,” Dorrie said. “I liked her so much.”

Wine gurgled forth like blood. I was handed a glass, and should have spoken up then, but didn’t. I was unable to say anything at all. There were too many personalities in the room. Conversation was a football match; the novelist and Marie were vying for possession of the ball with Angela and the outreach worker, conversing about art and text and sex and society and money, everything except babies. I hadn’t a hope of keeping up, with my own thoughts running on another track entirely. I wanted it to be over, but I didn’t want to do it. I would be cast out of this magic circle.

Angela finally called us to order. She spoke in the clipped tones that were her trademark in lecture halls, in office hours, on the phone. “Our job throughout this project is to help people who aren’t used to expressing themselves.” She gave me little shivers of excitement; she seemed to confirm that it all mattered, what we were doing, even if all we were doing was reading. “We have to remember that many of these young people are wearing masks, of one kind or another.”

“Often several,” added Dorrie.

Across from me, Marie smiled and nodded.

My phone vibrated and I excused myself. Tom was almost here, and I would go meet him at the bus stop. Outside in the cold, I read a message from my father, my old conspirator and best friend, my recent enemy. He wanted to get down to the nuts and bolts of things, the who-did-what-in-the-night-with-whom, the from-where, the why-didn’t-we-know-about, the narrowing of horizons into a manageable line of descendancy, genealogy.

Papa: I’ll be happy to sponsor the baby’s first DNA test, and we’ll see how stern a stuff he or she is made of.;-) Once arrived, of course.

I hissed like a kettle letting off steam.

But Tom was coming, so I forced all that down and put the phone away for good. There was a tranquillity that spread through me at the sight of him, at the delight of him. You could see everything about Tom at a glance. He was flushed and freckled, sandy-haired and grey-eyed, often laughing, and you knew immediately that he was warm-hearted and approachable, and funny and incisive.

“Hello, baby,” he said, all good cheer and double entendre, laying a sly hand on my stomach. We giggled like teenage lovers. “How is your work meeting or drinks night or whatever this is?”

“Marie is plotting a coup. There’s a vampire. Angela’s got all her biggest jewellery on.”

“Excellent.” Tom rearranged a crimson scarf. He was always more dressed up than I was, and more effortlessly at home in the stylish corners of cities. This came at the cost, as he often told me, of being horribly, irrevocably out of place in the rough coastal town he’d left at eighteen, and with the family that never expected our marriage, any marriage, to work out. We had married young, but it was part romance, part pragmatism, at least 50 percent the fault of the passport office who considered me un-British despite my mother, who had been born and grown up in the north of England. A story I had told too many times. I’m adopted. Yes, later they changed the law to include people like me, but it doesn’t apply to the year I was born.

“Have you told her yet?” he asked.

“No.”

“Why not?” Tom would not have hesitated. He would have swept in, pink-cheeked, announcing the news in the first minute.

“It feels complicated. And I’ve realized I’ll be rather unprofessionally having the baby right in the middle of this project.”

“They can’t blame you for that. Life is complicated. Embrace complexity.”

Always Tom’s attitude. If something was difficult, he was the first in line for it. Manual film photography. The Modernists at university. The Postmodernists. None of my Victorians and their moral certainties. He enjoyed complexity because he didn’t, despite his disadvantageous background, actually find life all that complex. He enjoyed alienation, from his peers, from his place of origin, because he never in fact felt alienated. Everything was a new adventure. Even getting an adult job, which he’d accomplished last year by lobbing off almost a hundred CVs. His enthusiasm for doing new things was catching. He made me see the pleasure in being clever enough. But I did not like things to be complicated; I thought they were complicated enough. Angela and her expectations, Marie and her aspirations. My father and his dead relatives.

“How was work?” I managed, stealing more time alone, even though it depressed me to talk about Tom’s work. I had managed to avoid grown-up life so far.

“Oh, fine. The usual. I can never decide if I’m selling my soul or just paying my dues, and this job is a stop on the way to one that does some good in the world. What though?” A question complex enough even for Tom. He worked in communications for a brand agency, where he wrote copy, took photographs, and was learning to shoot promotional videos. He often moaned that in one fell swoop they had reduced most of his hobbies to filthy lucre. The company was lucky to get someone with all Tom’s skills on an intern’s contract. When they couldn’t string him along further, they’d promoted him to the minimum entry wage. Youth unemployment was high, so he stayed. And I was lucky too; I could study for years on a barely sufficient stipend and introduce the moth into the equation because his salary might—would—go up. And yet.

“I wouldn’t mind one of these houses,” Tom was saying, looking around.

“These are just the little ones,” I said. “I told you we should explore the city more. The houses get bigger further in.”

“These would be perfect for a growing family.”

“The neighbourhood is boring and the shops cost a fortune. Anyway we’ll be able to afford one when we’re dead.” Angela came from the generation when becoming an academic allowed a person this minor luxury, a house, three little bedrooms, a small garden. Everything finished properly. An electricity plan that didn’t involve running to the corner shop to top up.

“Angela has no heirs, does she, Queen Mab? Perhaps she’ll let us live in her garden shed in exchange for caring for her when she’s ancient. They look worth a gander anyway,” he said, angling his head to peer through a kitchen window. I was taller and could easily see the bespoke-looking cabinets in robin’s-egg blue, the expensive taps.

“And ‘love likes a gander,’” I said. Tentative.

I thought he wouldn’t reply but he murmured, almost absently, “‘And … and adores a goose.’”

I smiled like an idiot. A few days ago he had failed to notice one of my quotes. We had always gone around dropping quotes for each other into conversation; all our shared loves, Eliot, Lawrence, Woolf. He had not recognized an obvious one the other day, and when I had jokingly pointed it out, he’d said, “God, I never thought that would happen. It’s amazing how it all starts to seem unreal—uni, I mean, talking about books all day.” It was a small thing. But I had taken such joy in finding Tom, in finding Lancelot, when we were barely twenty, and in being freed by it, not entrapped or cursed. My world was still a patchwork of other people’s words. It had shape as long as I could find a quote for all the pivotal moments. But I didn’t want to be alone in the narrative.

“Come on,” Tom said as another gust of November wind barrelled through. “It’s Baltic out here.”

When we reentered the café, I saw that the mask metaphor had been brought to life. Angela had actually brought masks with her, old-fashioned painted cardboard half-faces with ribbons to tie behind the head. Dorrie was a vintage nurse, the novelist a mid-century housewife with a curly blond updo, Marie a little girl. Angela was, so far as I could tell, Mother Goose. If we weren’t the oddest group in the bar before, we certainly were now.

“Hullo Angela,” said Tom, sitting across from her. “I like your area. I’d not been out this end of town since we moved in. I bet you get lots of birds, with all the greenery. I love to take pictures of birds, but our neighbourhood is so full of borderline evil cats and foxes that we don’t see so many.”

Tom and I lived nearly forty minutes away by bus, in a rundown but vibrant district officially called Saint Peter’s Wood, though the wood, if there had ever been one, was long gone. Around town it was universally known as Splinters Wood, or just Splinters.

“I like to take pictures of them myself,” said Angela. “But I’ve heard you’re a proper photographer. I’m very much the armchair kind. I use my phone with the zoom, which a photographer friend has told me is a cardinal sin, pardon my pun. But I quite like the sound of evil neighbourhood cats.”

“Ah, well mine is just a hobby too, really. But I like doing birds in particular. Everyone wants to see them as delicate and poetic, but when you get down to it and home in on their bright little eyes, you see something that’s just bent on, you know, brute survival. Long-winded way to say, something wild. The same with squirrels, of course, but people don’t tend to get so romantic about squirrels. Are these going free?” Tom was going through the masks, slipping on one of a bearded old codger. “One for you, Maddie?” The masks of faces were gone now but there were a few that looked like animals at the bottom of the box.

“Wolf?”

“Erm.”

“The badger looks more like a cow. Evil Splinters fox or cat, then. Which do you prefer?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, and he tied one over my face while introducing himself to the others. I turned a vixen or feline gaze on the novelist, and wondered why I couldn’t make such easy conversation as Tom.

“So I hear you’re gestating a new project,” Tom said slyly to Angela. Here was my cue; all I needed to do was jump in with our news. I said nothing. Angela and Dorrie described the history of the project and this year’s iteration while I sat frozen.


Copyright © 2026 by Emily McBride

Copyright © 2000 by Seamus Heaney. Used by permission of W. W. Norton and Company, Inc.