Checkout 19
Early in Checkout 19, the unnamed narrator describes how, as a schoolgirl, she tried to draw the face of an English teacher she admired in the back of her textbook. The result was unsatisfactory—“shameful”, in fact—and had to be effaced. She began scrawling over it with “tight little obliterating spirals,” before widening her hand’s orbit, sending the pen across page in “a wavy line that flew up into exuberant loops, throwing off the tightness of the tight spirals that were a kind of steel wool...