un-makeup

          Adai’n had tripped and dropped his bundle for the fifth time before he finally sat down to catch his breath. He had run all the way from the chandler’s cottage at the far end of the village, and his legs and back ached fiercely. It seemed like ages since he visited Eloi’n and her attendant wolf, Luca; work was eating up the majority of his days, and his mother had recently renewed her efforts to find him a nice docile wife. A wife he didn’t want if she was any of the girls he had grown up with, ruddy faces and ruddy hands and twittering, gossip-filled mouths. He recoiled at the thought. Let him live his life a ba

Call me Anna, she says, hoping they'll get the vague reference, but they never do, mainly because it's too obtuse, and partly because nobody really reads Moby Dick these days. But it matters not, nothing ever does. She wears her hair swept up and her mind swept away. There are the remains of a meal speckled upon her collar and down the front of her top, but people make sure not to comment. It wouldn't be right, but that's for later. First, call her Anna. Heroines always had such exciting names, she mourned, drowning in jealousy that she instantly hated them all. She embraced the plain out of spite, and insisted that people called her by her