"Natalie"

Winter Fiction Issue
"Beginners"
by Anne Enright

Rating: 7.5


Short story about a teen-age girl in Dublin. So Natalie put me straight. “Well,” I said, “I won’t be getting in your way again.”

I mean, I will still hang out with Natalie. And I know I’ll get to like her in some different way—probably her way, whatever that is. And I know the thing I have for my boyfriend isn’t love, it’s just a stupid kind of bliss. I know all these things—they’re not what woke me up. What woke me was a feeling like a horror film, except really boring.
It was the sheets. When I lay down, just for a second, on Mr. and Mrs. Casey’s moss-green sheets. Before the dance, when I was all dolled up in my silk skirt, and I pushed my hands along them and put my cheek against the dark cotton, just for a second. It was the smell of those sheets, cool, unwashed—like something I really wanted, going stale.
That is what woke me up.♦