Hello to new subscribers :)

WHERE TO REVIEW A UNIVERSE AKILTER: 𝚊𝚖𝚊𝚣𝚘𝚗 • 𝚐𝚘𝚘𝚍𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚍𝚜

THIS MONTH…

⚜️ I’ve made pixel fonts before, but not paintings, so I finally tried my hand at making one for the first time & had a lot of fun with it :) A magical kind of fantasy castle…

⚜️ The etsy edition of The Yellow Wall-Paper has been kind of popular recently. Cool! (The etsy edition is different from the amazon one because it’s signed + discounted)

⚜️ I came up with a new recipe for banana-apple muffins (it was so good I had to make it a couple times in a row… for testing purposes!!)

⚜️ I also got a new notebook that’s way more gorgeous than I thought it would be which might not be good because how am I supposed to write notes in something this nice?… the cover is a silvery grey with purplish undertones & it has bronze accents…

If anyone’s reading along with Dracula Daily, I made this playlist a while ago that gives me lots of feelings about Jonathan & Mina—especially their later arc!

💛 AROUND THE WEB 💛

GIVEAWAYS
A Universe Akilter is appearing in 2 giveaways this month!

⚜️ Speculative Fiction ⚜︎ fantasy & science fiction

⚜️ All Things Gothic: Let Yourself be Haunted ⚜︎ stories with a gothic & literary element.

ELSEWHERE ON THE WEB

⚜️ The Shivering Ground reviewed on Liminal Fiction ⚜︎ An intelligently and elegantly written indictment of the human spirit and faults that probably should be avoided if late night reading is your thing […] an author to watch, but maybe an acquired taste. —Tony

SEE THE GIVEAWAYS

this comic is kind of exactly how I feel right now

THIS MONTH…

⚜️ figured out how to add books to google play books. It seems like most people have the same experience, where the initial account setup is really a pain, but the actual updating of books is very quick & easy!

⚜️ figured out how to use calibre (it’s a cool, free app where you can create and edit ebooks—though if you want to get it, just be sure to download a previous version, since the latest update is full of AI features you can’t turn off)

⚜️ speaking of AI: I wrote a little article about my ideas about that on The Sadbook Collections. In that article I refer back to a yet-earlier article about AI… there, I wrote, “since then, I find that my thinking on the subject has evolved.” Well, I only published that article on July 22, but since then, I’ve learned just how LLM companies are getting information for their databases (buying up old used & rare books some of which are only surviving copies, cutting them from the spine, digitizing them & trashing the originals). Which is awful & I think many people don’t know about it!

⚜️ joined storyorigin (place that you can put your books into giveaways/group promos etc)

AND SPEAKING OF SAID GROUP PROMOS…

💛 AROUND THE WEB 💛

GIVEAWAYS
A Universe Akilter is appearing in three giveaways this month!

⚜️ All Things Gothic: Let Yourself be Haunted ⚜︎ stories with a gothic & literary element. ♱♱♱

⚜️ The Fiction Giveaway Extravaganza ⚜︎ stories in the horror/fantasy/mystery/Sci-Fi/thriller genres.

⚜️ Free Science Fiction/Fantasy Stories ⚜︎ stories in Sci-Fi & fantasy genres.

ELSEWHERE ON THE WEB

⚜️ Otherside review from B.R. “Different from everything else I've been reading. A fascinating book that had me rooting for the characters. Empathy-inducing, nostalgic-feeling, and poetic.”

OTHERSIDE

SEE THE GIVEAWAYS

a space opera about culture, grief, and hope

An abductee from earth and a broke young aristocrat. An idealistic gunner and her sometimes-partner, sometimes enemy. They all have deep-seated reasons to fight the Others, but what if it’s an unwinnable war?

OTHERSIDE

$4.99

digital copy
limited-time sale

The First Review Is In

Otherside is an inventive, creative, and imaginative story. It is both within the tradition of science fiction and outside it. Perhaps most of all, it is an expression of how we deal with grief, and how we look for affirmation and recognition within that grief. —Glynn Young

Explore Otherside

THIS MONTH…

⚜️ TSP released my novella A Universe Akilter (first published in The Shivering Ground & Other Stories) as a standalone! The cover design is so pretty ♥

⚜️ As a thank you for your subscription here, I decided I’m giving exclusive copies of the novella to you. Watch for the private free access link coming soon.

⚜️ I made a new spooky pixel font ⚜︎ Grasping Branches ⚜︎

a steampunk novella

⚜️ This cool event I made → The Yellow Wall-Paper Daily (a read-along newsletter of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic gothic short story) began…
⚜︎ it’s not too late to catch up on the first 2 entries in the archive & join the fun!

⚜️ This month’s newsletter update has a special section in it, around the web—just to list some of the cool places I discovered my books have shown up. :)

💛 AROUND THE WEB 💛

⚜️ Sno-Isle libraries created a staff-curated list, Inspiration from Nature, collecting together 11 books that fit the theme. Included in the list is an anthology I’m proud to have edited (featuring great poems from so many awesome poets) Earth Songs: A Nature Poems Experience.
The tagline of their list: What is art? Nature concentrated. - Honoré de Balzac

⚜️ Sharrukin’s Palace reviewed The Shivering Ground & Other Stories: “Very highly recommended if you enjoy evocative science-fiction stories in a distinctive style.”

⚜️ Germantown Community Library listed The Yellow Wall-Paper: A Graphic Novel in a 10-book list of some of their most popular adult graphic novels (in very good company!) ⚜︎ It’s a long page, so scroll down to the heading: Some of Our Most Popular Adult Graphic Novels

⚜️ Rowan College at Burlington County Library is using the original Yellow Wallpaper short story, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in its English 102 class. After you scroll past the course textbooks, The Yellow Wall-Paper: A Graphic Novel is in a list of suggested books from their catalogue :)

⚜️ Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein reviewed The Colour Out of Space: a graphic novel: “What [Barkat] has is a loose, sketchy but heavily detailed pencil that captures a certain underground aesthetic, the rawness of the art adding a certain texture to the text, especially with the use of mixed media (primarily watercolors) to add color […] the result is a more profound experience than either the art or the text would accomplish on their own.”

THIS MONTH…

⚜️ I published my first novel, Otherside!! It’s a sci-fi literary space opera!

⚜️ I helped paint a red stripe on a sail boat 𓊝𓊝𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟 𓇼 ⋆.˚ 𓆉 𓆝 𓆡⋆.˚ 𓇼

⚜️ I got a cool self-inking stamp!

⚜️ And I finished setting up some stuff for The Yellow Wall-Paper Daily! The newsletter bookclub is starting on June 1!

THIS MONTH…

⚜️ I drew some cute fish for April Fish Day using this handy list of fish…

⚜️ I found a very cool site about the sky, and where you can see the most stars!

⚜️ I also made myself a little random book generator 💛

⚜️ and I decided to update my shop… which now has even more cute things like these sadbook buttons that took a picture of! ⚜︎ (speaking of buttons, the silliest trouble happened when I was working on another product… I was in a text chat with tech support for two+ hours, both of us getting very confused that the screenshots of the site we sent each other were looking different, & why couldn’t I find a specific button I needed to click? Turns out I had my browser window too small…)

⚜️ AND…………. last but not least, we’ve got a cover for my sci-fi novel now! The picture is from Claire Haidar, which I’m so happy about, because ever since I first came up with the idea of this novel I’ve imagined one of her photographs as the cover.

THIS MONTH…

⚜️ I found a whole collection of possible fonts for Upcoming Novel Cover!!

But, I did not focus so much on that because there was another project that took up some time recently…

⚜️ Not only did I write the intro to Sadbook Volume 3, I also put all the pictures into the file, worked on the table of contents + endnotes (yes there are endnotes this time!), & the cover design has been finalized. Which leads into…

⚜️ THE SADBOOK COLLECTIONS VOLUME 3 HAS BEEN RELEASED!

check out sadbook vol 3

⚜️ However, I didn’t make more bread. But I did make a maple-flavored cake that was really delicious! & some cookies that were also delicious (trying a new recipe) but were more work to make than cookies should be in my opinion. You had to leave the dough overnight in the fridge & everything

⚜️ And lastly, I made a newsletter for reading The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in your email! Eleven of her “journal” entries over three months, roughly chronologically (Gilman’s narrator only uses one precise date, but the dates can be approximated fairly well!)

The Yellow Wall-Paper Daily

Join Our Narrator in her 3 month stay in a room with the worst wallpaper imaginable. (A newsletter reading the classic short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.)

By Jekyll & Hyde Weekly

THIS MONTH…

⚜️ So I have this science fiction novel that I finished writing late last year, started editing & there were things left to edit in it…

“So, how’d the mission with the Seekers go?” Jason asked.

“If you mention that again I’ll deck you one,” Dee said mildly. They were at a chrome-lit café in the in-between. The soft semi-processed air had a nauseous mixture of candy-scent and incense from the competing scent-ads lining the pockmarked walls. The table between them was checkered, a blaring sort of neon-green. The food was cheap and the atmosphere was friendly—that is to say, no one was starting blaster-fights on the premises, but if Dee wanted to deck Jason one, no one would look askance.

—from Otherside

I went to the library finally to push through with the last twenty-ish scenes that needed editing. Some just needed tweaked wording, but a lot of the changes were to incorporate worldbuilding elements that had become more clear as I was writing, then I had to get them into the book. I couldn’t leave stuff like this…

& it was taking far too long to do it all piecemeal. So I had grabbed my notebook & my phone where I’d copied down just the parts that needed editing & went to the library. Well, first I went to the store to buy potato chips because I knew that I was not going to have fun editing & when I was done it would be great to have something to celebrate! Because twenty-ish scenes (even if some of them only require a few lines of editing) is A LOT to edit all at once.

It was freezing cold that day and quite grey outside, but once I got in I found a nice spot next to the fireplace (well, near-ish, but you couldn’t really see it from where I sat.) However, it was the warmest part in the library, so I set everything up & I started just writing freehand. (I don’t usually write like that, not for fiction. But this part of the process felt a lot more like note-taking anyway. Actually, it felt eerily like I was in college again studying for a test.)

Did I enjoy it? No. Actually I did not. However I did finish it—all but two sections where I needed access to a timeline regarding the events of the novel that I er… hadn’t created.

When I’d finally finished I took a potato chip & ate it!

The next day, or maybe the day after, I said, “Well I’ve only got 2 more scenes to edit—how long could it take?” It took all day (because of the aforementioned Timeline I Had Not Created In Its Entirety). Well, I did have an earlier draft of the novel where I’d had an idea to put the date of every single scene in regards to one another, so that helped.

⚜️ Recently I also baked bread. It was delicious.

This month I colored in one of last year’s comic strips from The Sadbook Collections, which will be the basis for a new cover… Sadbook Volume 3 will collect all the comic strips from the third year of the newsletter into one handy little book, with pages & everything!

The Sadbook Collections

the (mostly) daily comic strip of a stick-figure human

By Sara Barkat

THIS MONTH…

⚜️ worked on editing the comic strips, cropping to make sure there’s no extra white space around the edge (to get a smaller file size) + made sure the resolution was good for printing (since I draw with pen & paper, these are photographs; I only color digitally).

⚜️ made a linkedin account—connect with me if you like :)

⚜️ was featured in the Fall/Winter 2025 Purchase College alumni magazine!

⚜️ & plenty of snow shoveling…

explore the sadbook collections vol 1

graphic novel • amazon

graphic novel • etsy

⚜️ The Color out of Space (an unabridged adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s classic short sotry) is available in print! ⚜︎ amazon ⚜︎ etsy (preferred)

⚜️ The Colour out of Space: A Graphic Novel has been added to the H. P. Lovecraft Archive & has also appeared, along with The Yellow Wall-Paper: A Graphic Novel, in the International Journal of Comic Art. It’s also been added to the Lovecraft Wiki!

⚜️ I’ve just finished writing a new novel (SF/gothic/weird fiction)… here’s a little excerpt: Black velvet hangings had covered the walls, in the House of Jan’s birth. Silver chalices from the same mold, each one like the other, all polished to a sheen. Color had been found in the mosaics, all splintered glass, upon which she would run her fingers, and in the gardens outside, which were filled with a profusion of magentas and brilliant reds, deep purples and the blooded, full orange beauty of the sky above. Everyone spoke the High Tongue in even tones, never breaking into a shout: still sometimes in the maze-turned halls she would see the flash of a bright knife, and sometimes the crack of a cane. (If you like the style of this, you might also be interested in my previous work of fiction, The Shivering Ground & other stories, an Indie Excellence Award finalist)

⚜️ I also wanted to share a really fun zine my art appeared in, the Color Palette Comp Zine! Featuring 20+ artists & 1 awesome color palette:

That’s about all for now! :)

—Sara

get the pre-order

Yes, this is the unabridged adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s short story, The Colour Out of Space—now a graphic novel! The release date should be sometime mid-November—I will update with further details soon.

Rather have the ebook version immediately? Get it on amazon here.

get the ebook now

pre-order the colour out of space

• I made a cozy youtube channel for small animations…
• I put out the first volume of my comic strip as a print book
• & drew a small children’s book called The Girl Who Cried Wolf

What have you been up to?

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And not only that! :) If you’d rather read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a physical copy, there is also a brand new illustrated version with pen and ink drawings for every chapter!

Buy Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde

{ text }

“If I had your talent with charcoal I would add another, and that would be the birdsong angle of your wrist, reaching to tie the ribbon on your shoes. I only saw it once, and it was not such a pretty picture then, for your shoulders were sun-peeling and red and you had a tired annoyance in your rust-dust eyes as you tugged at the string. Away from the here and now, in memory, it becomes one of Degas’ ballerinas, something unselfconscious and echoingly real.” (from The Shivering Ground)

It’s quite nice! My favorite bit might be the numbers, which turned out super lovely imo:

If you’re interested in using the font, you can get it here:

Download Normal Family

The second font I made is called Pixel Enochian!

In the 16th century, the magician John Dee created a language that, he claimed, had been revealed to him (through his associate Edward Kelley) by the heavenly host themselves: the language of angels. This language, known as Enochian, was written down by hand in his journals.

This font was drawn based off of the facsimiles from Dee's journal available in "The Complete Enochian Dictionary" by Donald C. Laycock. 

You can read more about the font-making process & download it here:

Download Pixel Enochian

I created this little short film for a college class & I still love it quite a lot—it was very fun to make! There is just something very magical about stop-motion. :)

—S.B.

p.s. yes, there is also a “monster 1” and “monster 2”

April is the best month for celebration. Not only is there National Poetry Month (want a free weekly poem?) there’s also Poetic Earth Month—basically, it’s National Poetry Month + Earth Day, all month! :) You can get into it by joining ecochallenge, which is a cool site where, in April, people from all over the place can choose actions that help the environment while also gaining points. I’ve signed up for it before although… I am not a very game-y person so it didn’t exactly work but! the concept is so cool that I signed up for it again. This time I made a team, too.

Oh yes! There are also one or two other cool April things (created by the awesome LL) — a 30 Days 30 Poems challenge (eco/poetry prompts you can follow at your own pace) or Poetry on the Menu, a poetic earth month inspired series on food!

Guess what? I have another substack in which I share recipes that are all gluten/dairy free and also, they don’t suck. Not only that, but I also review stuff you can buy. All in a very casual manner.1

gluten free recipes that don't suck

If that doesn’t convince you, maybe looking at this picture will?

yeah that sounds like fun!

In the back of the walled garden, the path leading through brambles to come upon it, suddenly—first sunflowers in tilted rows, the tumble of stones and dirt turned over, spiderwebs strewn with dew; then, behind the brambles, past the pachysandra and ferns, up it came: the wall, and the doorway in red crumbling brick, and ivy. It had no keyhole, as a door should; nothing to peek through and wonder about: it had no knob at all—indeed, if it were not for the fact that it was, very clearly, a door; set within a frame, still with its weathered wood, splintered and greyed by years, it would not have seemed very much like a door at all. There was no indentation; no marks where a handle might once have been, and Shelley had spent long enough pulling her hands along the grasses by the wall’s end, poking amidst the dirt with sticks and pointed rocks. She would have found a handle, if it had fallen off or been thrown there; the way she had found the pottery, the broken bottles of glass, blue and green and brown, and put them in a pile in the old stone bird-feeder that was never filled with anything but a thin skim of muddy water and, in the autumn, a drift of leaves. Sometimes, she would lean her head very close to the ground as though maybe she could peer under the door, but it was flush with the brick, and the scree of dirt across it was never disturbed by as much as a runnel of water coming through.

So impenetrable was this door that it became the indefatigable imaginative resource: anything could be behind it, and sometimes was. On peaceful, sunny afternoons, she could hear the hooves of horses going by, and imagine lords and ladies dressed in their fine clothes as though in a mediaeval Romance; on grey, sullen days the washing on the line flapped as women bustled quickly out, glancing toward the sky, putting everything into baskets as fast as they could before those first, cold, unforgiving drops of rain.

Shelley had tapped on the door, too, and sometimes in the winter when the snowdrifts fell with great shuddering crackles, she could almost fancy that another little girl, quite like her, tapped back from the other side.

No one else saw the purpose of the door; for they did not venture so far into the wilds of the back garden, near the wall, in the corners. Perhaps, in truth, the most mundane possible explanations existed: but even those had their thrill. Another house, near their own, had once wanted a doorway from yard to yard, but after a feud had sawn off the handles; an artist with a flair for the mysterious had commissioned a false door to be built just for the occasion, never intending it to be opened at all.

In the mornings Shelley had her tutors and in the afternoons she played, but in the evening she sat with her family in the long, crooked dining room on the ground floor. It was a most peculiar room, and I am sure that most people would agree not a singularly pleasant one. For, long ago, it had been a hallway connecting the kitchen to other rooms in the house; and when the other walls had been knocked aside to create a photography studio of the rest of the floor, the hallway had been neglected: and so it was that it became a dining room.

The great wooden table fairly scraped the walls on either side, and to climb onto the small chairs with their seats that smelled like old fabric Shelley had to duck under the table and shimmy up on the other side: while her mother sat on one end, where the door to the photography studio was; and her father on the other, where lay the door to the kitchen and the front hall and the stairwell. And on each of the walls, which were papered with the most peculiar old paper in innumerable zebraesque stripes, were the photographs her mother took.

It was art, and many people paid highly for it, and sometimes if Shelley was very good and very quiet she could stand in the corners of the room and watch the lights being positioned and the sets propped up and the customers with their tall buttoned coats. But though there was always an air of mysterious business in the studio itself, the photographs were strange things, and certainly did not help the atmosphere of mashed peas.

Lying at odd angles amid pools of blackness were the skins of animals with staring eyes, and upon it in varying states ranging from fancy dress to artfully-placed sheets were the figures, which sat or contorted themselves with the oddest countenances, as though they were being statues. Some, in fact, looked almost lifeless; and one particular young woman, with long, winding hair, lay on what seemed to be the side of a cliff-fall with her hair about her neck. In monochrome it looked strangely like blood, or a rope; her palms, opened below her, were like pieces that had been cut off, coming from the bones of animals in a huge and solemn pile on either side.

“Did your studies go well today?” Mother would ask, and Shelley would tell her about Geography and History and the maps she had traced with her fingers, wondering about that so-vast world beyond, and the ships and engines that could take one there.

“Did you find anything new in the garden?” Father would ask, and Shelley would tell him about the new species of butterfly that had alighted on the milkweed, or the precise route of the ants from their sandy home near where the hose connected to the wall with a spinning wheel like a pirate’s ship.

Neither of them asked about the door in the wall, and if Shelley mentioned it, and what had been happening beyond it that day, they would say, “That’s very nice, dear,” and that would be all.

When the plates had been cleared off Shelley would be sent up to her room again, and would read, or play with the strange carven animals her mother had made. But they looked very much like the photographs, and so when Shelley was done playing she would put them back in their shelves, facing the walls, so that nothing could look at her when she slept: and a very sensible precaution she thought it was, too.

Now there was one particular model who came to the house on occasion, and he had a false eye which he’d chosen to get in a different color, to be more inspiring: it was like a lion’s eye, and he would sometimes take it out to scare Shelley. But Shelley, who found it much less intimidating than the pictures in the hall, would only nod politely and agree that it was indeed a ghastly sight.

This particular model never was as brusque or as harried as the others, and did not carry a watch. “What time is it, dear lady,” he would always ask Mother, who would know quite off the top of her head; and when he went to be posed they always spent some time walking this way and that before the lights were adjusted, with Mother showing him just how he ought to look this time, and tilting his face as she pleased, while his one real eye watched her, and his cane, which he had put down by the door, watched Shelley with its bird-shaped head.

Funny thing, isn’t it? the bird-head might ask occasionally. No one else seems to need so many pictures taken as that man.

Oh, well, Shelley might reply, I’m sure he must be famous and rich; and he is obviously quite vain of his appearance—though it is a bit grotesque when he takes out his eye.

But the bird-head always cackled at Shelley’s careful answers, as though it knew something that she had not said, and that it would never say. And Shelley would give it a terrible glare, and, if it persisted in its sly expression, would hood it with the piece of cloth used to stop up reflections.

Father, of course, went out to work; and in the morning he was always very busy. Sometimes, after breakfast, Shelley would watch him run about fifteen times from his room to the washroom and back again, as he found things he had forgotten and added other papers to his ever-growing stack. Father’s work, Shelley found, was much harder to understand than Mother’s. All she knew was that it encompassed Figures, and that many people were always making Predictions. She wondered how it was that though anyone could make Predictions, and they could even be accurate Predictions, the only ones paid for it were those who had framed pieces of paper to account for it.

“Have a good day, seashell,” he would say before he left, while Shelley held his hat and peered out onto the street, which was always filled with dust and unaccountably loud as soon as Father opened the door. Then, taking his hat and shoving it onto his head, he would rush out into the mass of busy people and all at once look nothing at all like Father anymore: in fact, if it were not for the particular way his hat had been squished ever since one of her wooden animals sat on it, Shelley would hardly have been able to tell his brown-coated figure from anyone else’s.

One afternoon, when Shelley had just finished her walk around the garden, nodding, at last, to the door in the wall and pressing her fingers against the wood, tugging on vines, she came in to find that the kitchen door was blocked by buckets and booted feet, and recalled that there had been something with pipes that needed fixing. She was quite shy of the workmen, and so instead of walking through the kitchen she sneaked around the house to the side door. Taking off her muddy boots outside she slipped into the photography studio, muffling the bell on the door with one hand so as not to cause an interruption.

Shelley could tell right away from the bird-head cane by the door that the famous gentleman must be about, and she walked ever so quiet past the strange, unfathomable shapes of stands and things that cluttered up the corners of the large room. The empty, tattered wood floor beneath her was very soft and helped her along without creaking a bit. On the other side of the room was the door to the hallway, and once she got there, she could open it a crack and be up to her room to change into something appropriate for evening wear.

The lights were pointed inward toward the modeling space, and a grand table was set up covered in fine foods, as in some of Mother’s Greek themes. The man with the glass eye was holding a bunch of grapes in his hand, and Shelley thought to herself that it didn’t look at all like the right prop for him: they were so round and dark and fragile they made him seem quite intimidating and piratical; while with something else he might have come across as full of mournful hauteur. He picked one of the grapes between his fingers, which caught the bright lights like a bloody circle, and held it out to Mother, who leaned forward with her teeth and bit down right in the middle. It popped, and the juice went flying; and Shelley felt something that was neither revulsion nor dismay, but quite so overpowering that she felt all of a sudden overcome with the need to hide. But at that moment, as though springing out in answer, the trembling rack of false swords by her hand caught her finger and fell with a deafening clatter to the floor.

Mother and the famous gentleman sprang up as though startled, and Mother called out, carefully, “Shelley… dear? Is that you?”

But Shelley had found a very smart place to hide; in a false-coffin, and when Mother and the man with the false eye went tromping past, they saw only the pile of swords lying on the ground.

“Hmm,” Mother said, and that was all; then she bent to place them all back.

It was late when Shelley made it to the dining room that day, and when she looked down the hall to Mother and Father, the photographs seemed especially strange: for one, in the corner, was tilted as though it were about to jump!

“Mother,” Shelley said, when she had talked about her studies and the wonders of the garden, “why do you never put pictures of the man with the glass eye on the wall with the rest?”

There was a silence that seemed, if anything, vaster than the usual silence; and then with a careful click of silverware Mother put down her fork.

“Not everyone is capable of becoming Art,” she said carefully.

Father picked up his glass of wine and stared into it. “A man with a glass eye, did you say, seashell?” he asked. “What does he look like?”

“Well he—” Shelley said, and jumped when Mother stood up very quickly.

“This isn’t the place nor the time,” she said.

“It never quite is,” Father said mildly. But he stood up too, and without saying another word Mother and Father both left, Mother through her door and Father through his, and all at once Shelley was sitting in the center of a long, empty table, right in the middle of dinner, by herself.

She waited, because she didn’t want to be scolded if Mother and Father came back to find her having gotten up without being excused, but they didn’t come back very soon. She could hear the rumbling of the workmen’s steps in the kitchen, and other steps going up to the floor above, and she built a tower of her silverware: and then, finally, she became bored and uncomfortable enough to get up regardless.

Without even bothering to put on her boots—for she had no wish to creep through the photography studio again—she slipped quickly through the kitchen, past the things being opened and the smell of something rotten in the pipes, which was stronger here than anywhere in the house. The workmen were all standing around and exclaiming in odd tones, and the lines of their backs stood up like fence-posts. At the kitchen door Shelley slipped out in only her stockings, and ran out into the garden, feeling a terrible, uncomfortable itch; she felt that she had done something wrong, but did not know what, and only knew she could not stay still. And the only place Shelley could think of to go was to her door, which always seemed to have a story behind it.

But when she got to the back of the garden, there, where the door had always been, was only a gaping, empty spot, with a mailbox nailed to it. And on the other side of a very discreet fence went zooming past all the cars and bicycles and carriages along the street, moving faster and faster like the ants by the water hose, as though they were afraid!

from The Shivering Ground & Other Stories.