Every thread is stirred by coffee.
The coffee enters her like a hot dark phrase. Something in its ferocity is deeply excellent: it reaches her stomach and she sighs. She takes another mouthful. Fuck coffee is wonderful. It takes hold of things in her mind and starts to pull them steadily apart: showing through like silvery light is nuance, subtlety, intricacy. She loves the Sonnets, oh god, their plainness and glitteringness, they sparkle in her head like leaves in sunlight. Be where you list, your charter is so strong, That you yourself may privilege your time To what you will, to you it doth belong. As the caffeine turns things faster all these words seem to pant in her: a word like privilege spreads itself out until she is top-heavy, saturated: she could let her head thump forward onto the desk with the weight of it. Every thread is stirred by coffee, like a field of fine grass.
— Rosalind Brown, Practice: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 25, 2024)
