All Our Shimmering Skies

Greta sucks on another cigarette, pulls her sunglasses down over her nose. ‘Did anyone ever tell you that you talk too much, Molly Hook?’

‘Yeah, everyone,’ Molly says.

‘I trust your father then told that shocked limestone salesman how those nights I take my clothes off might represent my finest role of all.’

‘He didn’t say anything about any role you were playing.’

‘Of course it’s a role I’m playing,’ Greta says. ‘I’m playing Greta Maze, a thirty-three-year-old actress with too much talent and not enough opportunity who stayed in the arse end of the earth because she thought she loved an older man.’

Greta closes the script, tucks it under her arm and swings her legs over the side of the truck tray, the rubber soles of her laced saddle shoes leaving imprints in the dirt driveway where she lands.

‘And what role are you playing today, Molly?’ Greta asks. ‘Or are you still working on that twelve-year-old gravedigger girl who has convinced herself she’s not being raised by monsters?’