Lucía Lijtmaer

Translated by Maureen Shaughnessy

Fantasies, or are they premonitions, of a great wave, an impending apocalypse, threaten to swamp a young woman in a slowly curdling relationship in Barcelona. From the outside it all looks good: 'we have friends who design jewellery, who make politically committed electronic art, who are concerned about their mobile devices being monitored, who talk about climate change'. However, her discontent means she’s not living up to her part of the bargain.  Four hundred years earlier, Deborah Moody marries, loses a child, loses her husband, loses everything, and flees England for the Massachusetts Bay Colony. But if relying on a husband proved a mistake, independence doesn’t mean freedom from the dangerous vanities of men.  Funny, cutting, and a savage indictment of the cheap consolations of meme-ified faux feminism, misplaced solidarity, and sacrifices for the supposed greater good, Cautery offers us two women (one based on a historical figure, one imagined) who share one final vision of true happiness — burning it down and beginning again.