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workshop just where the cliffs begin. She would expect him to have an ice cream in one hand and a grey sea stone in the other hand, a stone not much larger than his boy’s heart.

Why Cupid is Painted Blind
    LEAH SWANN

    The people longed for summer and when summer came it was too hot and they longed for autumn. Blasted, exhausted and boiled, the people looked up from their backyards into the still skies and hoped for clouds. In the suburbs people crowded the beaches or the ubiquitous shopping malls, and fought over shaded car spaces. Among these people was Mallory, a woman who’d danced with a man who was not her fiancé and could think of nothing else.
    She’d heard that love could be a madness that descended on you, like an illness, like the flu, with symptoms that nagged and whined; but she had never experienced such a thing. It began when the man chose her as his dancing partner at a folk festival.
    â€˜You have to come,’ her friend Emily had insisted. ‘This is the first big event I’ve organised.’
    â€˜I’m so tired Em. The heat, the sleepless nights…’
    Emily didn’t have a baby. She didn’t know how a baby blurred the world, till everything seemed formless, even your sense of self.
    â€˜You’re coming. Brush your hair and put on a dress.’
    And so there was Mallory at the Family Folk Festival, among people baking bread, playing the dulcimer and spinning wool on the grass reserve. And there he was, Karl, playing the guitar and singing to his wife, and she was singing back to him; and they formed such a tender picture that Mallory paused to watch.
    She was not yet obsessed. She merely expressed surprise to Emily that someone so unromantic looking with that hawkish nose, and narrow eyes set so deeply under the bench of his forehead, could sing so beautifully. Later, she longed to return to the calmness of this observation, the calmness of the calm woman she was before Karl.
    She’d tried once to talk to this man at a party and he said so little she imagined he was bored; and yet, like many others, she admired him, for three reasons.
    He was the director of an organisation that helped the needy.
    He was very tall.
    His opinion was precious and not easily given.

    She and Emily spread the picnic rug under a shady tree.
    â€˜Where’s Rick?’ asked Emily.
    â€˜Oh—he and the guys have gone to some car race.’
    â€˜A speed-freak. I would never have picked him for you.’
    â€˜Yeah, sometimes I wonder at it myself,’ replied Mallory, lifting Daphne from her pram to feed her. ‘He’s a good person.’
    â€˜Bit young. Is it nine years, the gap between you?’
    Karl and his wife were singing ‘Scarborough Fair,’ laying out impossible courtship tasks for each other. Mallory had heard of the cambric shirt without any stitch or needlework but not about ploughing a field with a ram’s horn, or shearing the field— presumably the same one—with a sickle of leather. Poor baby Daphne was hot. She pressed the baby’s silken mouth onto her cracked nipple, feeding her baby with milk and the tiniest bit of blood.
    â€˜Let’s buy Daphne a hand woven Moses basket,’ said Emily.
    â€˜You’ve done a great job organizing all this, Em.’
    â€˜Thanks. There’s even a lace-maker stall. You could get a bit for your wedding dress.’
    Two tall children were threading their way through the crowd to sit at the front. Emily said they were Karl’s and Mallory saw they shared the pale hair and severe features of their parents, overlaid with the softening loveliness of childhood.
    â€˜Poor things,’ remarked Emily, getting to her feet.
    â€˜Why? Is he strict?’
    â€˜I doubt it—excuse me darl, the town crier’s beckoning me.’

    The dance took place toward evening. Daphne was asleep in her pram and Mallory wanted to walk home before she got too tired, but