Cursed Bread by Sophie Mackintosh

Author:Sophie Mackintosh [Mackintosh, Sophie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2023-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

It’s important to remember that, despite past catastrophes, our world was undeniably good. The fruit crops in the outlying farms mostly grew well, trees heavy with red cherries. Tourists came to look at the famous bridge, with their shining cars and their money to spend in the cafés and restaurants and bars, and sent postcards home. Deep blue of the sky against the long river, pale streets and alleys of stone, the heat perfect in the morning, burning all the badness away. I see it now like a photograph, or a painting, saccharine with its own mythology.

Violet was a painter herself, though as far as I know she never painted the town, or anything that happened in it, past or present. No dogs in nets, no fighter jets, no ancient bridge, no burning boy. When I told her about the terrible accident at the festival she barely seemed to register it, as if the outside world was irrelevant. I could never predict what would fascinate her and what would leave her bored, irritable. She painted flowers and still lifes, decorative and inanimate, like the ones she had to do in the art classes at her convent school, ten girls in white dresses studying pears on a sheet. Just once she showed me a sketchbook from before she got married, which was entirely different, full of women holding their heads serenely in their hands, strange rabbits with the faces of babies.

No more of that now, she told me.

Why not? I asked, and she just tilted her head and smiled at me.

Wouldn’t you like to know, she said.

The first time she drew my hands I did not notice, she did it so quickly, stealthily. We were sitting half-asleep in the thick heat, in the courtyard at the back of the shop, a stolen hour on one of the hottest days of the year. She had come to see me for once.

It stinks out here, Violet said. I don’t see how you could possibly doze off. Anyway, look.

She turned the sketchbook around to face me. My hands—burned against hot metal, weathered by water. They hid nothing. I was ashamed to see them and told her so.

No, they’re beautiful, she told me. Real hands, hands that have done real things.

I hated her for that, actually, and I silently begged her to say more things like that, to give me fewer reasons to love her, to stoke my scorn until it burned me out of helplessness, I already knew that nothing else would do it.

Was it truly beautiful to her, any of it? When she walked around our pretty town did she feel a kind of peace, or was it more a strangulation, that feeling of a hot thread around the throat, constricting the breath? Did she lean against doorways, catch glimpses of shadow in these places where she could breathe for a second, listening to the bells as they chimed on the quarter-hour, the matrons dressed in dark and light cottons, hair covered, the children racing along the pavement? The sun high in the air.

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