This story is exquisitely constructed, with an exciting and totally convincing fight scene, preceded and followed by two long plaques of silence. By enumerating the few exceptions to the near total stillness inside the house before the fight, and the extraneous sounds – the Amazon delivery, the message left by her mother, the friends ringing the doorbell then going away … – that at the end of the fight impinge upon, without ever bursting, the bubble within which the drama is gestating, as Kiva (poor sweet Kiva!) is lying fully conscious but unable to move (like someone suffering from locked-in syndrome), the writer artfully makes the sense of unreal closeness to, yet isolation from, the outside world even more vivid.
Then we see her trying to keep her morale up and fuel her patience by thinking positive thoughts – only for one nightmarish vision after another to rise up from the depths of her subconscious, until eventually they combine in a kind of maelstrom of delirium to drag her under.
Next come the scenes of intimacy, which were described tastefully and imaginatively, followed by her sudden but totally understandable empathy for the cockroach trapped on its back in the glue waving its legs and antennae.
All of which reminded me that in Ancient Greece, the performance of a tragedy was often followed, after the interval, by a comedy that in effect parodied and made light of what had gone before. This is the origin of the saw that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
In short, brilliant!
(You write a lot better than you fight
)
