"A Good Hiding Place"

A Good Hiding Place takes up the story of Ada as she is faced with the end of her knowledge of her mother who, as the work opens, has broken from reality and become another person, an understudy. The religious atmosphere that her mother isn’t able to see through in her psychosis calls back to a time seven years ago, when her mother had a series of dreams that the Biblical apocalypse was imminent. She took her dreams as visions, as truth, and with her husband prepared for an end that never came. Central to this work is the narrator wondering “how many times this has happened, the world not ending, not ending again.” Through writing and remembering, in tandem, “as though each word is remembering the next” the narrator reinvigorates scenes over a period of seven years that have culminated in a personal apocalypse if not a Biblical one.