Learning to Swim

Ellis Wren

Marin Trahan has everything a woman in New Orleans is supposed to want: a commodities trader for a husband, two loud affectionate boys, a house on Esplanade, and a place in the Carnival season that has been reserved for her since she was nineteen. Then, in the July she turns thirty-two, a boy on an island teaches her to swim, and a shut-door pianist plays something that goes past her eyes and into her body, and the arrangement quietly comes apart. She takes up painting, refuses the ball, moves into four rooms behind a bigger house, and discovers that waking up costs everything and buys nothing. A novel about what happens after a woman stops consenting - and about the sea, which has been talking for a very long time and does not require an answer.

Adapted from Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening (1899). Published by TalesReborn.