THE STORY: In WORMWOOD, Marika, the wife of a famous but burnt-out writer, Ossian Borg, is invited by a fellow art student to visit the dingy back room of a disreputable tavern where her husband had created his most celebrated works. The owner of the tavern (who had shared in the royalties from Borg’s writings) senses a way to revive Borg’s creative energies by summoning him with an invented story of an affair between the young student and Borg’s wife. But their confrontation, oddly enough, has a different result when it is Marika who comes to realize that it is she who must escape their failing marriage and gain the freedom to pursue her own artistic destiny.
Included in the collection
Zones of the Spirit.
