The world “gathered in dreadful suspension,” then “glided backwards into an atmosphere of broadening redundancy, intersected by a vertical and rather searing sense of abnegation.” In her house, she steps out of her boots and starts looking through a book of photographs. She thinks of the imagined rape, a vision that “had not been incited by fear of him but rather by the horror I had felt towards my own twisted longing.” She walks back home as the man’s figure recedes, dispassionately narrating the mundane psychosis familiar to anyone who has ever spent too much time alone. The narrator looks around at the pasture, at the cows, the incremental sunset. That was all.” The imagined danger is all the more frightening for the swiftness of her acceptance-the toll many women pay to make the experience of danger go away. I stood at a gate and a young man passed by. “Wouldn’t it serve him right?” And then: “I became aware of myself from the young man’s perspective-my shabby sealskin boots, the cerise snowflake pattern around the top of my thick Norwegian socks, the thin lace trim along the hem of my nightdress. It occurs to her that she’ll pee on him during the act it’s still raining, she’s had a lot of ginger tea. Maybe it’ll be “fairly recreational, like the way dogs are,” she thinks. “Unable to withstand or accommodate the panic,” she says, “I found myself attempting to wrong-foot it with the speculation that perhaps the worst thing that could happen right now might not be quite as diabolical and frenzied as the thought of it jaggedly decreed.” By “it,” she means rape-and right away she tries to ratchet the vision down. The sight is so alarming that it sets her “blood and organs into crashing disarray until I was soon drained of all former purpose, as slender as that was.” She braces herself against a fence. So she heads down a road where she often sees cars passing.

This is the time, she says, “when my mind is least disposed to fuss or hypothesis.” The rain has stopped, but the sound of it continues tiny drops slide down through thick trees with the sound of a “squandered chandelier dashing headlong down the hillside,” a noise that could cause a “peripheral insanity” if you stopped and listened too long. It begins simply, with the collection’s unnamed narrator, who lives mostly in solitude on the west coast of Ireland, deciding to take a walk on a damp afternoon.

Three-quarters of the way through Claire-Louise Bennett’s début collection, “Pond,” there’s a story called “Morning, 1908” that altered my state of consciousness like a drug. Photograph by John Greim / LightRocket / Getty The stories in Claire-Louise Bennett’s “Pond” convey a sense of real time.

Pond claire