The Mothers

“All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we’d taken a moment to swish this one around our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season.”

The collective “we” of the Mothers establishes a narrative chorus that defines the community’s relationship to information. The author employs synesthesia, attributing a “taste” to secrets, and extends the metaphor by comparing Nadia’s secret to an “unripe” fruit. This figurative language introduces the theme of The Corrosive Power of Secrets, suggesting that some gossip, like prematurely harvested fruit, is damaging.

“Her mother had died a month ago and she was drawn to anyone who wore their pain outwardly, the way she couldn’t. […] An inside hurt was supposed to stay inside. How strange it must be to hurt in an outside way you couldn’t hide.”

As Nadia observes Luke’s limp for the first time, this passage reveals her internal philosophy on managing grief. The contrast between her concealed “inside hurt” and Luke’s visible, “outside” pain establishes a central psychological motivation for their attraction. This passage gives context to the symbolic weight of Luke’s limp, a tangible wound that Nadia envies because her own trauma remains hidden.

“Oh girl, we have known littlebit love. That littlebit of honey left in an empty jar that traps the sweetness in your mouth long enough to mask your hunger. We have run tongues over teeth to savor that last littlebit as long as we could, and in all our living, nothing has starved us more.”

The Mothers’ collective voice shifts from gossip to a lament born from shared experience, adding historical and emotional depth to their narration. The extended metaphor of “littlebit love” as a scant residue of honey conveys a sense of enduring dissatisfaction and unfulfilled longing.