An Easy Passage by Julia Copus: AS Level
An Easy Passage by Julia Copus Once she is halfway up there, crouched in her bikini on the porch roof of her family's house, trembling, she knows that the one thing she must not do is to think of the narrow windowsill, the sharp drop of the stairwell; she must keep her mind on the friend with whom she is half in love and who is waiting for her on the blond gravel somewhere beneath her, keep her mind on her and on the fact of the open window, the flimsy, hole-punched, aluminium lever t owards which in a moment she will reach with the length of her whole body, leaning in to the warm flank of the house. But first she steadies herself, still crouching, the grains of the asphalt hot beneath her toes and fingertips, a square of petrified beach. Her tiny breasts rest lightly on her thighs. – What can she know of the way the world admits us less and less the more we grow? For now both girls seem lit, as if from within, their hair and the...