Glass Hours

Glass Hours – Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE

Evelyn pressed the moth to her tongue, its wings dissolving into the bitter geometry of memory and heat. The taste was impossible to name: dust and shadow, the brittle residue of afternoons gone sepia. Around her, conversation hiccupped and stalled. Candlelight turned the wine glasses into minor planets, orbiting the hollow ache between strangers. She almost closed her mouth, holding silence as softly as she held the insect, daring someone to speak first.

Not dead; sleeping, she told herself, lying with the devotion of a mother who refuses to call the ICU. The moth tasted of attic rafters, sun-warmed air heavy with old wool and lost letters. She felt the fragile pressure of its body, no heavier than a sigh. Something about the dry, papery wings triggered an ancient, shuddering recoil in her: childhood horror at the blacked-out bulbs, the scatter of dust on windowsills, the comfort of small deaths curated by absence. She pictured the thing curled soft as lint against her palate, tender and inconsolable.

The guests froze mid-orbit. Mrs. Harrington’s wine glass hung at her mouth, the liquid pooling, captive, blood-dark. The pearls looped around her neck thrummed, obedient to some secret rhythm of fear. Her hand moved up, two fingers pressing at the hollow just above her clavicle as if to dam some rising, fizzing dread. Her throat jumped, pale and animal. Mr. Peterson, paunch bulging above his belt, suspended his fork as though threatening some microcosmic insurrection. The silver tines, exquisitely cruel, absurdly dainty, shivered above the flesh-pink wedge of salmon. Across from him, his wife’s mouth buckled, lips stiffening in a mask: teeth, white, relentless, as she tried to smile away the rising dark.

Evelyn’s wife, Charlene, orchestrator and conductor of this autumnal feast, fluted a laugh. It cracked in the air, a sound too large, too brittle, like a tumbler striking tile and splintering into unswept shards. “She’s joking, of course,” Charlene said, her voice all sharp edges smoothed thin, and her eyes flicked to Evelyn with a silent plea: undo it, be manageable. “Evelyn has such an unusual sense of humour.” Evelyn wondered which of them she was trying hardest to convince.

Evelyn closed her mouth, pressed the moth flat between tongue and palate. The taste deepened, an eruption of bitter mineral and dried grass: August air trapped in wing-dust. She felt the ghosts of the moth’s powder on her lips as she unfolded her napkin, palming the linen like a magician preparing for disappearance. With theatrical delicacy she spat the moth into the snowy shroud, leaving a faint white imprint, a chalk outline, forensic and implicating. What shape, she wondered, would her own outline take in the end? Surely nothing symmetrical, nothing safe. A body bent on escape, even in effigy.

“Protein,” she announced. Her voice rang clear and cold, a bell made of broken silver. The napkin trembled between her fingers, its creases soft as old bone. “Doctor’s orders.”

A hush pinched the table. Mrs. Harrington’s fingers contracted, stroking the pearls as if checking the links for cracks. Each orb glowed against her throat, moons leashed by a tide she could not name. Charlene’s gaze was razor-bright: both accusation and question. Somewhere in the muted background, a moth died behind glass.

Mr. Peterson set his fork down with careful gravity. It landed softly, a punctuation mark no one dared to read. His wife’s eyes kept snagging on the napkin, white as new snow, white as the underbelly of trust. Evelyn, refusing to look at Charlene, let the wine on her lips burn away the memory of dust.

Mrs. Harrington reanimated, breath ticking like a second hand. “Well. I suppose we must all mind our health these days,” she said, but her pearls beat a frantic rhythm, small hearts strung for display.

Charlene leant forward, laughter now wholly counterfeit, too polished. “Really, Evelyn, you mustn’t take these wellness fads to heart.” She performed concern, but her smile was a fracture line. Her hands clenched the edge of the tablecloth, fingers bone-white. “Dr. Levinson’s daughter became a vegan this year,” she added, desperate for levity, for the comforting ballast of other people’s strangeness.

Evelyn folded the napkin once, twice, a final seal, and entombed the moth in its linen sarcophagus. The residue left on her lips was cold and granular, unyielding: a reminder that some boundaries cannot be erased, only overpainted with new discomfort. She caught her own reflection in the blade of a knife: mouth ringed white as a ghost’s kiss.

“Actually,” she offered, her tone light as spores drifting, “I’ve been collecting them from the windowsills. They die so beautifully, don’t they? Wings spread as if they’re still in flight.”

The table jumped, all at once, into nervous movement: conversational mouth-to-mouth, a desperate resuscitation. Mrs. Peterson exhaled. “Gardens are therapy, don’t you think, Mrs. Harrington?” as if confiding a secret remedy for dread. Mr. Peterson launched a discourse on bird feeders. Charlene laughed too high, knuckles tight on her glass. The performance resumed, with a palpable urgency, each guest claiming a mask from the heap.

Charlene stood, carefully lifting her chair. “Dessert,” she announced, her voice brittle, face controlled. “I’ll just bring out the torte.” She glided from the table, body marshalled by years of boarding school discipline, but Evelyn saw the stiff set of her shoulders, the quickening flick of her hair. As Charlene crossed the threshold, Evelyn counted her steps: one, two, three, four. The same number of times Charlene had called her “unstable” this week. Evelyn pressed thumb and forefinger together, feeling the memory of the moth’s dry body, the small thud of something unmanageable refusing to die.

She lifted her wine glass, swirling the liquid, watching herself dissolve and refract in the deep garnet surface. The woman looking back was unfamiliar: blurry, moth-shadowed, half-formed, a face water-logged with loss. She wondered what shape she’d leave, pressed between memory and linen: something twisted, disobedient. Something not easily contained.

Dr. Levinson, sensing the vacuum, cleared his throat. It was the practised cough of a man accustomed to resetting awkward conversations. “I understand you grew up in this house, Evelyn?”

She nodded, index finger circling the rim of her glass. The friction was a small, private comfort. “Yes. My mother’s garden is still out back. The roses are eating the fence.”

“How lovely,” Mrs. Peterson interrupted, voice landing too brightly. “Gardens are such therapy.” The word soured as it passed Evelyn’s ear.

She smiled, a small wound in her face. “They’re full of dead things, actually. Decomposing matter. That’s what makes things grow.”

Charlene re-entered, the torte a holy relic in her hands. The dessert plate trembled, shadow bisecting the cocoa-glossed dome. Her watch caught the candlelight, the gold band shining with the finality of a trap. She lowered the plate as if appeasing something ancient and volatile. For a moment, silence reigned: sugar and char, perfume and rot, everything teetering on the uncertain rim of the evening.

* * *

The study smelt of dust and abandoned ink, an airless reliquary, dense with silence that crackled as Evelyn crossed the threshold. Afternoon sunlight slanted through old glass, fingering the books and blotting the familiar shape of her mother’s empty chair. She moved with careful intent, each step a trespass into memory, until she halted before the windowsill and saw the moth: a pale scrap, pressed flat, wings spread in resignation.

She knelt. The rough nap of the carpet rasped her knees through threadbare denim. Up close, the moth’s wings were finer than old paper; milk-white streaked with silt and grief. The body was impossibly slight, a dry hinge between two veined cathedrals, already caving to the invisible tide of decomposition. Sunlight exposed the delicacy of death, painting the insect’s architecture in shadow and gold. Evelyn exhaled, afraid her breath would shatter the fragile symmetry. It was perfect, she thought, in the way only a ruin could be perfect: beauty exposed only in the moment before collapse.

She didn’t want to touch it. She could not not touch it. The impulse was old, automatic; a need to confirm that what she mourned was real. She extended one finger, the pad trembling slightly, and grazed the edge of a wing. The powder clung to her skin, lighter than flour, refusing any weight or permanence. This moth, this brittle offering, seemed to ask nothing from her except recognition. She lifted it gently, feeling the life it no longer held. How astonishing, that something so minute could stop so cleanly, an entire order of being reduced to an etching on air.

She thought of her mother’s notebooks: more than a dozen, stacked like unearthed bones in the bottom drawers of the desk. Leather and paper swollen with humidity and unspent dreams, filled with lines that never reached another pair of eyes. Each page was a confession that stalled at the boundary of self. Her mother, too, had faded out quietly, intellect eaten from the inside by a silence nobody else seemed to notice. There were nights Evelyn dreamt of those journals erupting, their long-hidden words swarming the house, hungry as moths for light.

She knelt back on her heels. The ghost-weight of the chair pressed in from behind, still holding the sag and heat of her mother’s body, a negative imprint impossible to erase. For a moment, Evelyn wanted to sit, to run her thumb along the battered leather, let herself believe that creation was still possible, could rise, Lazarus-like, from this furniture and dust. But the thought hurt. She stayed on the floor, cradling the moth as though it could teach her anything about how to stay soft and alive inside a skin that expected to be broken.

The house pulled at her then, rooms calling to rooms, and she found herself climbing the stairs with careful steps, the moth cupped in her palms like a prayer she didn’t know how to finish.

In the bedroom, she crossed to the wardrobe, opened the top drawer. Nestled within velvet, her mother’s lacquered jewellery box winked. She undid the clasp, breathing in the faint ghost of talc and perfume. Inside, a grid of small compartments: two earrings missing their mates, the dull gold curve of a forgotten pin, an elastic thread, a lone hematite bead. She laid the moth in the central space, arranging the wings with forensic care, as if the gesture itself was a spell to call something lost back into shape.

Downstairs, a rattle of cutlery; a life proceeding along rational lines, unmoved by elegy or dust. Evelyn listened. Charlene was arranging the flowers again. Each snap of a stem was sharp, cruelly definitive. Lilies trimmed an inch from the base, roses twirled into compliance. Three inches between every flower, Charlene’s voice rang out, brittle with precision: “The Harringtons will be here at seven. Dr. Levinson is bringing that wine you pretend to like.” Her tone was crisp enough to peel paint.

Evelyn moved to the kitchen door, moth box in hand, watching her wife’s head bent over the arrangement, mouth pursed in judgement. The flowers stood at attention, pink and gold and blood red, coordinated to match Charlene’s script of what the evening should be.

Evelyn tucked the lacquered box into her palm, absorbing its residual warmth. “Fine,” she said, voice flat as glass. She ran her thumb along the hinge, craving friction, surprise, anything alive beneath her skin. For a moment, she hovered at the border of action; neither in nor out of the moment, not yet ready to explode its decorum. But something in her was stirring. There was an electricity under her flesh, bright and indignant. The dinner party, she realised, was Charlene’s altar: clean lines and coordinated cloth, a testament to stability Evelyn could no longer muster. Suddenly, she wanted nothing more than to invite in the uninvited; the silent, restless dead; the moths that threw themselves at every barrier, every bulb.

Upstairs, the clock ticked onward: a silent countdown to rupture, to dusted wings and the sound of something crumbling that nobody could name until it was already past.

* * *

After the guests evaporated, leaving perfume and platitudes caught in the thickening air, Evelyn found Charlene hunched over the sink. The kitchen was half-lit, blue shadows crawling up the tile, and the last wine glass turned in Charlene’s hands, catching the gleam of spent light. Each motion (scrub, rinse, stack) was a silent denunciation, and Evelyn stood in the doorway, collecting their ghosts.

The party’s leavings drifted on the air: the sting of wine and burnt sugar, the sweetish wilt of peonies bowing in their vase. Unfinished conversations hung, thick as drapery. Evelyn listened to the ring of glass on porcelain, the hush of water, the pause before a sigh. Charlene had rolled her sleeves to the elbow, her forearms corded and decisive as she scoured the crystal. For a moment Evelyn thought she might scrub all the way through, grind away every fingerprint until the glass gave way beneath the pressure.

She leant, hip against the doorframe, arms crossed; defensive or casual, even she couldn’t tell. In the dark reflection of the window, there were two Charlenes: one sharp and tangible, cropped hair glinting silver, back straight as a snapped ruler; the other dissolved and doubled, a shifting figure stitched in shadow, mouth half-open in argument or ache. Evelyn wondered which version her wife would offer her tonight.

Charlene did not turn. “What was that?” she said, low and measured.

Evelyn let the question linger, swirled it around her tongue like cheap liqueur. “What was what?” she said finally, voice light, deflecting. She stared not at Charlene, but at the blackness beyond the window; her own face ghosted over the streetlamps, the old ash tree quivering in the wind.

“You know exactly what,” Charlene said. The glass slipped in her grip, rang against porcelain, unbroken. Just loud enough to register as a warning.

Evelyn traced her own fingers along the seam of her jeans. A thin seam of pleasure curled up from her rebellion, gilded with shame. “The moth?” she said, arching a brow. “Or the ‘comments about dead things’?” The phrase echoed the cadence of one of Charlene’s legal briefs. Evelyn imagined the summary: MOTH, DEATH, AND SOCIAL SABOTAGE; see Exhibit A.

Charlene whirled, eyes snared by tired fire. “Dr. Levinson’s wife is on the hospital board, Evelyn. Did you know that?”

“I am well aware of Mrs. Levinson’s many virtues,” Evelyn murmured, picking up a dish towel. “She mentioned them herself at least three times tonight.”

Water dripped from Charlene’s hands (plip, plip), patterned and relentless, ticking away the beats between them. It was a sound of accusation and absolution in equal measure.

“This isn’t about her.” Charlene wiped her hands, slowly and surgically, into a towel folded four times. “It’s about us. About how you seem determined to sabotage everything I try to build for us.” The “build” landed heavily, as if she’d bricked them up together inside the house and left the world outside.

Evelyn folded the dish towel, knuckles straining. “Perhaps I’m not interested in your construction project.”

Charlene’s face fractured. Just a flicker. Mask slipped. Her hand darted to the streak of silver in her hair. She touched it, unconscious habit, thumb skating over the strand.

“Your mother’s been at the home for months.” The words flattened out between them. “I’ve been patient. I’ve given you space. But this behaviour, it has to stop.”

“My behaviour.” Evelyn tasted the phrase: bitter, overripe, spoiled. “Like I’m a child who’s misbehaved at Sunday school.”

Charlene’s jaw set. “That’s not what I meant.”

Evelyn folded the dish towel into a perfect square, setting it on the counter with the finality of a verdict. “Isn’t it?” She heard the echo of old reprimands in Charlene’s voice, the summoning of every broken teacup and unswept corner, every inconvenient grief she’d failed to arrange. “You want me contained. Predictable. Like one of your legal briefs.” She almost laughed, but the sound failed on her lips.

Charlene’s watch ticked, gold and implacable. Time marched on her behalf, measuring out the distance: step, second, sigh. Her thumb circled her temple. “I want you well,” she said, softly.

Evelyn met her gaze, surprise blooming with clarity. “No,” she said, truth crisp as September air. “You want me convenient.” For a second, neither moved, the charge between them humming at a subsonic pitch.

Charlene swallowed, eyes full of weather she would not name. “I loved your wildness, once,” she said, almost too low to be heard. “I thought it would set us free.”

Evelyn closed her eyes, mourning not the words, but their aftermath.

She turned and walked upstairs, the boards aching underfoot. She didn’t look back at the kitchen; at Charlene standing amid her stemware and order, her gleaming, emptied room.

Upstairs, in the bedroom shadowed by lamplight and indecision, Evelyn sat on the edge of the bed, unclasping the lacquered box. She opened it like a door, expecting to find an absence but confronted with the fragile weight of the moth. Its wings were splayed in silent petition, half luminous, half erased. She stroked the tip of one wing with her finger; the powder came off in a soft, milky film. Her skin tingled where it contacted the dust, as if she’d absorbed some of the moth’s dying: its delicate insistence, the way it marked the glass with failed longing.

She leant close, breath frosting the air just above the fragile body. “We’re the same,” she whispered, mouth so near she tasted the mineral of her own need. “Trapped behind glass, beating ourselves to death for someone else’s view.”

For a moment, she saw herself, the her that wrote, that loved, that still hungered, reflected in the wing’s pale shimmer. Not yet gone, not yet folded to dust. Just sleeping, she thought. Waiting for the right tremor to rise, for the first draught of dawn to call her out from under the white shroud.

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