It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.

It was something every child knew how to do, maintain a direct and full connection with the world. Somehow you forgot about it as you grew up, and had to learn it again.

She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.

It was possible to feel superior to other people and feel like a misfit at the same time.

They were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived- bound, in other words, for life.

What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself.

In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.