Superior Interiority

I'll admit that reading online lit doesn't inspire patience. Much of it is written too quickly, and doesn't suffer from being read the same way. So it's a pleasant surprise indeed when one comes across a story with imagery as gorgeous as that of Christiana Langenberg's Tumble Dry Low Heat, another selection from Carve. As with Bruce Taylor's story from the same issue, profluence isn't the order of the day -- in this case, a divorced woman mentally relives her anxiety over her young son's recent heart surgery while sitting alone in her house during a snow storm. In this sense, it is, like Taylor's story, another think-piece, because we never really leave the woman's head; but the intensity of its imagery carries the story. A single example, when the heart surgeon speaks with the woman after the surgery is over:

Your son's blood, in red stars, constellates on his instep, an irregular galaxy wraps around his ankle.

The fraction of a light year it takes for this to happen. The arc of a droplet in flight. The angle of impact. The way it looks to the mother.