Sunday Short: “Ghosts and Empties” by Lauren Groff
“Ghosts and Empties” is the opening story of Lauren Groff’s Florida. Much of the collection pivots around Florida’s humidity and propensity for hurricanes, and the stories featuring a conflict are strongest. In the opening lines of “Ghosts and Empties,” there’s a small, individual conflict:
I have somehow become a woman who yells, and, because I do not want to be a woman who yells, whose little children walk around with frozen, watchful faces, I have taken to lacing on my running shoes after dinner and going out into the twilit streets for a walk, leaving the undressing and sluicing and reading and singing and tucking in of the boys to my husband, a man who does not yell.