“The Queen of Bad Influences”
Fiction by Jim Shepard, the author of “The Book of Aron” and “The World to Come”: It is possible I’m too flexible for virtue and too virtuous for villainy.
Throughout her childhood, Constance called the gorse that grew on the hillsides above her house "honey-bottle," and gathered fistfuls of it despite the spines, so that her hands would smell of it, a smell that seemed to combine oatmeal and hot metal and sun.