“I was too buzzy to read, thinking of teacher, of her manner of saying there were sunsets every day, that we weren’t meant to be coffined and buried whilst all the time still living, that nothing of the dark was so enormous that never could we surmount it, that always there were new chapters, that we must let go the old, open ourselves to symbolism, to the most unexpected of interpretations, that we must too, uncover what we’ve kept hidden, what we think we might have lost. ‘Implement a choice, dear class,’ she said. ‘Come out from those places. You never know,’ she concluded, ‘the moment of the fulcrum, the pivot, the turnaround, the instant when the meaning of it all will appear.’“

Anna Burns, Milkman