Monday Morning Required Reading. I've shared a story by Josephine Rowe on the blog before (her story "Hotels"), and my enjoyment of her work has not diminished since then. Sometimes authors, particularly short story authors, are one-off loves for me; I read something by them that I adore and then never really read anything else by them, or never enjoy anything else by them as much. Kind of the literary equivalent of one-hit wonders. Rowe is not that for me. I've been waiting for the right time to share this story with you all, and I think today is it. I've been thinking a lot about love lately, and this story captures some particular aspect of love that I've been struggling to capture and explain. So, here's Josephine Rowe's "Love":

He is teaching her how to break bottles against the side of the house. A whiskey bottle works best, he tells her. She thinks this is very lucky, because that is what they have the most of - he has spent the last few weeks emptying them. So whiskey bottles are what they are using. Now, he says. Like this. Crack. So that you get something like a shiv, not just a fistful of glass and stitches. Like this, he says. Crack. And she feels a great swell of pride in her sparrowy chest - he gets it perfect, every time. Now you, he says, and he hands her the next bottle. Because a father can't always be there, he says, and she nods and tries to look solemn, to make him believe she understands. The bottle does not break on the first try. She swings harder on the second try and gets it, but it is a bad break. Her father does not say this, but she knows. Too close to the neck. Shards of glass from other afternoons shine dully in the dry earth at their feet. He hands her another bottle and the second break is better, the glass jutting out like the snaggled teeth of some prehistoric fish. 

She tries to imagine when she will need this - how things will ever get so bad. Her idea of evil is a slinking, unknowable thing, formless and weightless and impossible to hurt. She takes another bottle and tries to give the evil a shape, eyes and lips and things, all squinty and sneering - a composite of all the villains and monsters she has seen in films and picture books. And although she finds the result is less terrifying than something incorporeal, she does not know how she will ever be brave enough - will she ever be able to do that to somebody, evil or otherwise? 

[KEEP READING]