winter

Author's Name: To Smith

“It strikes me that this room at this moment reminds me a little of a Shakespearean play, where throughout the whole story someone comes forward and says something which the person reading the text, or let’s say the audience, is supposed to hear and know, but the other people on the stage don’t hear it for some reason, or are supposed to act as if they can’t, even though the person speaking says it clearly and everyone in the theater hears it. I think you mean a panto, not Shakespeare,” says Art, “where the audience boos the villain when he appears on the stage.” * Sophia Cleves, the meanest woman of our time, a retired tradeswoman who has always put work before family duties, now lives, on Christmas Eve, in a house with fifteen empty rooms. But she is not alone. A green child’s head floats around her like a hot air balloon, keeping her company. As the night drags on, the narrative cuts between past and present like a dream vision before the reader. Her sister arrives Iris, with whom she has an ambiguous relationship, is a human rights activist who none of the dangers she has spent the past fifty years fighting to eradicate have disappeared; and her son, Art, a nature enthusiast who surfs the internet to report artists who violate intellectual property rights. And into this conflicting family arrives a stranger who assumes she has a license to tell the truth, a truth that sheds light on the family's fissures and secrets.