“I was put in hospital because a great gap opened in the ice floe between myself and the other people whom I watched, with their world, drifting away through a violet-coloured sea where hammerhead sharks in tropical ease swam side by side with the seals and the polar bears. I was alone on the ice. A blizzard came and I grew numb and wanted to lie down and sleep and I would have done so had not the strangers arrived with scissors and cloth bags filled with lice and red-labelled bottles of poison, and other dangers which I had not realised before – mirrors, cloaks, corridors, furniture, square inches, bolted lengths of silence – plain and patterned, free samples of voices. And the strangers, without speaking, put up circular calico tents and camped with me”.
From Faces in the Water by Janet Frame
(Edizioni Interno Giallo, traduzione: Lidia Perria