She carries the trash can into the living room and sweeps the beer cans into it. Empties the ashtrays from the coffee table and side table and the one she found on top of the TV. It’s there that she catches her reflection in the tube and sees a creature she can’t reconcile with the image she’s clung to in her mind, an image that bears little resemblance to the sweaty lump of matted hair and droopy chin dressed in a tank top and shorts. Even in the flat grey of the picture tube, she can make out the blue veins in her outer thighs, which somehow don’t seem possible, not yet. She’s only forty-two, which, okay, when she was twelve seemed like one foot into the threshold into God’s waiting room, but now, living it, in an age that makes her feel no different than she always has. She’s twelve she’s twenty-one, she’s thirty-three, she’s all the ages at the same time. But she isn’t ageing. Not in her heart. Not in her mind’s eye.
Dennis Lehane, “Small Mercies”, 2023
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