“What a weird thing reading is,” reflects Joad, the protagonist of Rebecca Miller’s short story, I Want You to Know. Joad’s marvelling arises less from a sense of wonderment than menace. She and her partner have left behind their city lives to become blogging smallholders. Upon discovering an old desk in the attic, she takes a “before” photo and sets about stripping it down, inadvertently unlocking a secret drawer in which lie sheets of onionskin paper that tell a terrible tale.
“Joad felt as though reading the typed pages had infected her with a virus that she had to carry around now, nasty images downloaded into her head,” Miller writes. Where I Want You to Know really expands on the twisty delight of reading, however, is in its closing pivot, a turn that at once defuses this specific threat and underscores the form’s wonderfully insidious ability to unnerve.
