#chllc

If she quit, the person who’d written that scene would never speak to her again. She thought about that, drew a tiny box on the corner of her layout page—a rough flowchart, the vestibule of a cracked marble temple at the base of a long and spiderous stairwell; she filled it in with tight hash marks first in one direction and then the next, blackening and blackening the space without ever violating its boundaries, keeping the rest of the page very pure and very clean.