an excerpt from _Hush_

Forword:

I've decided to share this passage with you, with Anne's permission, because I find this passage in her book breathtakingly beautiful. I hope you enjoy it as well.


Excerpt:

Roses pictured Loralie lying on the bed, wrapping herself in rope-white sheets when sleep came on her, seeping into the skin like warm water. Her lips full, swollen. August, dowsing her with his tongue, the lapsing shape of her hips, until he positions them, just so. And the words, suddenly Roses knows the words, as she pictures Loralie.

Loralie, legs parted in a V, eyes slit open, whispers softly, pulling at one, two, of August's fingers, sliding them inside of her and softly, so softly: "How am I shaped here?" But it was impossible to measure this pleating swell, so what could he say? That her sex was incomprehensible. That it wasn’t square or round or oblong. That the passage passed nowhere and everywhere at once, depending on how you looked at it. That to tell her the shape of her sex would be telling her the shape his mind took when he passed into her, and how choke-cherries were tart, and how a cut was when you drew off the blood. It'd be telling her about every other place he'd ever been but that one. What could he tell her but, “Loralie, darling, you can’t think like that, you can’t spend your time thinking like that.”

Spent time. No, that’s the way she can’t think. She can’t think about spent time at all. Not that way. And she’d turned to him, picturing this bed and the next, picturing how men got themselves spent and how it ruined the sheets or them or both, or so they said, and about how money got spent, but not so much on her, and about all the beds she’d already laid in and all the beds she would be laid in and all that time, and Loralie said, shaking her head against it, “Let's just say time spends me that way.”

from _Hush_ by Anne Stone (47-48)