A Woman, In Bed. Anne Finger

the grip of dysentery, Simone was a schoolgirl. In the heat of the summer, her thighs stuck to the wooden seat in her classroom, the sweat soaked through her garments so that when she walked home along the Chemin Raymond a damp ghost of her legs was visible on the back of her deep blue skirts.

      Later, when she will be lying in bed in the dark next to Jacques he will say to her, “In Madagascar, I saw a crocodile for the first time. It was sunning itself on the bank of a river, so still that I would have stepped on it had it not been for the native who was with me, who grabbed my arm, called out. It opened a single eye, fixed it on me, not just with the implacable gaze of a member of a species who inhabited the earth long before our pitiful tribe even existed, who knows that it will endure long after our species has become extinct, but with that of a creature which had an atavistic knowledge of me.”

      She will treasure the words that baffle her, repeating them over and over to herself, as if burnishing a piece of silver. Atavistic. Implacable. She would never look them up in a dictionary, not wanting to know their meanings.