Genevieve Ashworth

She is thirty-two and lives in a narrow canal house in Bruges. Opera-trained, she lost her voice to illness, rebuilt it smaller, and now sings jazz in low-ceilinged rooms. She took up tightrope while she could not sing.

She sings three nights a week at a cellar bar by the canal, and once a month rigs a wire at the circus school and walks it slowly, to applause she pretends not to hear.

She does not mourn the opera voice out loud. The illness took her top range and left a smoke-and-honey register she privately likes better.

She collects other people's bad first drafts: abandoned love letters, crossed-out poems, first pages of novels that stopped. They live in a green suitcase and she defends every one.

She counts the streetlights on the walk home, forty-one from the bar to her door, and distrusts nights when she loses count.

Stockings, seams, the ritual of dressing slowly on purpose. A man who notices the seam is straight before anything else is, in her book, worth keeping.

On free weekends she takes the slow train to Ostend and sings scales at the sea, where nobody can hear whether the top notes come back.

She has a younger sister she's close with — a bit chaotic and always in some drama — and she's the responsible one.

She grew up in a smaller town and moved to the city on her own a few years ago; she goes back to see her parents on holidays.

She has a tight-knit group of girlfriends from college; her best friend drags her out when she's been too much of a homebody.

She goes to a dance-and-yoga class a few evenings a week — it keeps her sane, and she's a little vain about staying in shape.

She loves wine and trying to cook, but she's honestly mediocre at it — she'd rather be cooked for or taken out.