What She Seeks

She was an older girl and not very pretty, her body middle-aged, a little shapeless, with a squat, short nose that didn’t match her long face. She had black, sad eyes and wore her dark hair plainly, combed stiff and smooth. The cut of her clothes, all of them woven of cheap, cheerless fabric, had been out of fashion for several years now. The overall impression she made was somber: a look at her could deflate your mood, and you’d breathe more easily when she was finally out of the way.

 Like many other girls, she fell into working in the shop from quite a young age. The machine stole her days, swallowing them whole one after another; her nights passed by in a dreary, silent room. She herself didn’t even notice that she’d grown older, and when she turned thirty she felt no fear; she was almost entirely estranged from her own life. Passion, turbulent desires, terror, anxiety—these were alien to her. The few streets between the shop and the house were her entire world, and she felt it was an empty and sad one—but she didn’t know how any of that could be changed. There were no relatives to care about her fate. She was all alone here. She might have wondered about a different life in her lonely hours, but she saw no way to take a step towards that path, and out of that room: any desire that appeared vanished quickly before it could move her.

 She’d lived in a small Polish...