Elizabeth Smart

Elizabeth Smart’s passionate fictional account of her intense love-affair with the poet George Barker, described by Angela Carter as ‘Like MADAME BOVARY blasted by lightning ... A masterpiece’.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

Helen 

But he never passes anywhere near me without every drop of my blood springing to attention. My mind may reason that the tenseness only registers neutrality, but my heart knows no true neutrality was ever so full of passion. 

I am possessed by love and have no options. 

When the Ford rattles up to the door, five minutes (five years) late, and he walks across the lawn under the pepper-trees, I stand behind the gauze curtains, unable to move to meet him, or to speak, as I turn to liquid to invade his every orifice when he opens the door. More single-purposed than the new bird, all mouth with his one want, I close my eyes ana tremble, anticipating the heaven of actual touch.

Yes, you said, Take care of this girl for she is what makes my blood circulate and all the stars revolve and the seasons return. 

Perhaps I am his hope. But then she is his present. noticed I am dead and taken the trouble to bury And if then she is his present, I am not his present. Therefore, I am not, and I wonder why no one has me. For I am utterly collapsed. I lounge with glazed eyes, or weep tears of sheer weakness. 

ayoni

Parents’ imaginations build frameworks out of their own hopes and regrets into which children seldom grow, but instead, contrary as trees, lean sideways out of the architecture, blown by a fatal wind their parents never envisaged.

I never was in love with death before, nor felt grateful because the rocks below could promise certain death. But now the idea of dying violently becomes an act wrapped in attractive melancholy, and displayed with every blandishment. For there is no beauty in denying love, except perhaps by death, and towards love what way is there?

But if you do me the wrong of thinking I am beautiful, that I have a million rescuers from despair, and therefore I can take calamity better than anyone else, remember, truly, it is only you who bestow even these gifts upon me.

What I would give to be able to write like this.

Lily Cooper

‘Threateners of life are horrible enough, and she whom I have injured, and whose agony it is my penalty to watch, lies gasping, but still living, on the land. Shuddering like a coward, I dare not grasp either life or death from the ghoulish palm that offers them.’

Chloe

And, for a moment, at that gaze, I am happy to forego my future, and postpone indefinitely the miracle hanging fire.

When his soft shadow, which yet in the night comes barbed with all the weapons of guilt, is cast up hugely on the pane, I watch it as from a loge in the theatre, the continually vibrating I in the darkness. Swearing invulnerability, I measure mercilessly his shortcomings, and with luxurious scorn, ask who could be ensnared there.

But that huge shadow is more than my only moon, more even than my destruction: it has the innocent slipping advent of the next generation, which enters in one night of joy, and leaves a meadowful of lamenting milkmaids when its purpose is grown to fruit.  

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept quotes

Join the club