The Graces Of Bliss Hall.

Excerpt from new dystopian novel “The Graces of Bliss Hall “

By E. Micheal Bablin

She remembered, with a kind of lucid, silent ache, what it meant to be at Bliss Hall—the first and only time in her life that rules had shaped her as much as love. The rules were strict, almost monastic in their precision, and the older Graces enforced them with the same blend of ferocity and tenderness that the matron herself possessed. The matron, even now, was a shadow in Grace’s mind: upright in her woolen skirts, eyes quick as buttons, voice never raised but always absolute. Don’t leave the dormitories without your apron. Don’t speak unless addressed. Don’t let your hair fall loose, don’t let your slippers scuff the corridor tile, don’t, don’t, don’t. The phrase “a Grace must always follow her keeper” had been printed in curlicued letters over every mirror and embroidered in blue silk on the dining hall banners. In the beginning, Grace had thought of the rules as a maze; later, she saw the walls were not meant to confine, but to guide, and she’d begun tracing their logic not with resignation, but relief.

It was the older Graces who instructed the new girls in the art of yielding. They would gather the youngest at dusk, herded in the tiled vestibule outside the chapel, and teach them to smile, to bow, to speak in the quiet, careful way that left room for another’s thought. Some of the girls bristled at first, and some had to be taught twice, or three times. A few, like Grace, learned instantly. She never asked why; she simply understood that to surrender was to belong, to submit was to be noticed, and to be noticed was to be loved, even if the love came as a stern glance or a corrective hand on the shoulder. As months passed, the rules became less like instructions and more like the quiet interior skeleton of her body, holding her upright and directing her movements as surely as any muscle or nerve.

She remembered the Fall semester, when Simon was selected to be her Keeper. The staff smiled with a particular pride that Grace only understood much later; to be chosen as a Grace was an honor, but to have a keeper like Simon was something else entirely. The first time she saw him, he was standing stiff and uncertain in the parlor, his broad hands knotting and unknotting themselves behind his back. He was only eighteen but had a gentle smile and everyone could tell he really cared. Grace had been summoned to the parlor for a brief introduction, but the air between them was so charged that even the matron’s voice seemed to slip away, leaving only the thrum of Grace’s own pulse.

With Simon, everything became a kind of grace. The night he undressed her, it was not boldness or demand but a certain carefulness—a gesture remade. Water ran over them as he guided her gently through the shower, his hands saying what words could not. Then he wrapped her in a towel, brushed the hair from her face, and settled her into the bed as though it were a quiet promise. He curled around her, his arms folding her into a hush. She felt herself yield to it, to him, and inside the surrender was something astonishing: she let him take control, and she loved it—not as captivity, but as belonging.

The rules were simpler, but the feelings behind them were not. Obedience was no longer just a performance; it became a way to forge a tunnel, straight and glowing, between her heart and his. When he visited, he would walk with her through the frost-bright orchard, and she would watch the way his boots sank and then rose from the snow, each step leaving a perfect cavity, as if the earth itself had been waiting for his weight. Sometimes he would take her gloved hand, and they would walk together, silent and sure. Once, in a moment that felt like the shocking flare of a match in a cold room, he pressed his lips to her cheek, just below the eye, and she realized—for the first time, truly—that he loved her not for her obedience, but for the way she wanted to obey.

After that, the rules at Bliss Hall became less like a puzzle and more like a promise. Every lesson, every restriction, every small triumph of self-control had been for this: the slow, deliberate matching of two people who might otherwise drift, soft as dust, never finding a shore. No one ever said this out loud, not even the matron, but Grace began to see it everywhere: in the way the dining room candles were arranged in pairs, in the patient hand of the gardener as he tied up the clematis, in the hush that fell between Graces and keepers when they passed each other in the corridor.

By the time she left Bliss Hall, Grace had come to crave the boundaries it had imposed. She realized this in the first days at Simon’s house, when she rose before dawn to sweep the hearth and lay the table, even though no one expected it of her. She realized it again when Simon, gentle but insistent, corrected the way she folded his shirts or stirred his tea. These small corrections made her feel visible, real, woven tightly into the fabric of the house and the day.

In the new house, Simon moved with a certainty that awed her. He was not loud or boastful; he inhabited the rooms the way roots inhabit soil, invisible but essential, holding everything together beneath the surface. Grace watched him as he made the rounds each evening, clicking off the lamps in the parlor and kitchen with a kind of ritual solemnity. Sometimes he would pause behind her in the hallway, one hand resting light on her shoulder, and she would look up to see him smiling—not indulgently, but with a clear, steady affection that left no room for doubt. The world had narrowed to the shape of his gaze, and in that focus she found a peace that was almost narcotic. The endless, nervous calculations of her old life—the fear of misstep, the constant scanning for cues—fell away. There was only Simon, and the strong, silent system of his approval and correction.

She learned to read him as she once read the matron, but with a difference: where the matron’s rules had been iron bars, Simon’s expectations were more like the lines of a sonnet, giving shape and music to her days. If she forgot to leave his coffee by the window, he would say nothing, but she would notice the flicker of disappointment, quick as a moth’s wing, and correct herself the next morning. If she spoke out of turn in front of guests, he would gently squeeze her hand under the table, a warning and a comfort all at once. These small, wordless lessons became the current of her life. She began to anticipate his needs, to move through the house as if tracing a secret map known only to the two of them. Each time she pleased him—a well-made bed, a perfect roast, a moment of quiet deference—she felt a glow inside her ribcage, a sweetness so rich it sometimes caught in her throat.

She was not foolish; she knew some would call it submission, or worse. But Grace understood that power passed between people in more ways than mere command, and that the deepest kind of belonging required both boundaries and a mutual yielding. Simon gave her a structure as intimate as a skeleton, and in return she gave him the soft, vital tissue of her attention, her effort, her care. When she succeeded, the approval in his eyes was not just for her service, but for the fact that she had understood him, had met him fully in the world he wished to build. She had never known love could feel like this: not a fever, not a hunger, but a kind of shelter, a wall against the jagged cold of uncertainty.

Sometimes, in the evenings, she would watch the shadows lengthen across the living room carpet and think how strange it was that she had ever needed the vigilance of the matron or the chorus of her fellow Graces. Now she needed only the structure of Simon’s days and the assurance of his presence. The memory of Bliss Hall faded, not into nothing, but into a kind of softened echo, a set of lessons transformed by the new context of their life together. Her former longing to be singled out, to be chosen, had become the quiet constancy of being seen and valued, every day, in small but perfect increments.

And when she lay awake beside him at night, his breathing deep and even, she would sometimes try to remember the girl she had been before all this began—before the endless rules, before the compact certainty of Simon’s regard. She reached for that girl in her memory, groping for the clever, brittle self that had arrived at Bliss Hall with a battered suitcase and the crust of a strange aunt’s affection. That girl had trembled at the prospect of being called out in chapel, of having her faults displayed. Now, the idea of correction—of being seen, measured, and guided—felt less like a threat and more like a gift, something spare and glowing and infinitely precious.

Her memories were a chain, each link bright and distinct: the first time Simon touched her neck, the time he carried her across a rain-slicked path instead of letting her shoes get muddy, the afternoons they spent reading together in the parlor, his voice low and deliberate. There were darker memories, too—the stiffness of the matron’s hand, the cold fury of a punishment administered in the silent corridor—but even these had lost their sting, turned to something instructive and almost necessary. Everything led to now, to this moment: Grace, in the kitchen, her hands sunk deep in bread dough, the scent of yeast thick around her, Simon’s footfall steady on the stairs.

It was in this moment, more than any other, that she understood the secret lesson of Bliss Hall: that all the rituals and boundaries were not about subjugation, but about safety, about creating a world where it was possible—at last, and entirely—to belong. The girls who became Graces, the boys learning to be men; each finding their place by loving and being loved, by linking their lives as neat and sure as the latticework on a garden wall. To belong, to be brought inside someone else’s logic, securely enclosed where nothing could startle you loose or leave you floating untethered.

That memory lived inside her, glinting sharp and bright—a thread running through everything she did: the first shy shock of Simon’s fingers, the way it thrilled her to discover how Simon watched over her, kept her close, made her his own. The sensation was more than simple happiness; it filled her head and bones with something complete and certain—a gentle, flawless relief, knowing she belonged. Kissing her Simon was only about sweetness; it was a yielding, a deep letting-go, trusting that he would keep her safe, invisible connections drawing her to him, so steady and sure she never had to question her place.

To love Simon was to find her rightful shape: boundaries clear, edges marked and known. There was comfort in it, a deep peace in never having to wander lost, never dissolving or trembling on the verge of vanishing, never facing the dark echo of solitude. Safety shone in obedience, in the knowledge that her place was hers alone; she could rest in that enclosure, never lost, always, always held.

Now Grace was pregnant with the product of Simon’s love, and it was written everywhere on her: in her shy, delighted smile, in the way she held herself a little differently, as if something delicate and astonishing had taken root inside her. She almost couldn’t believe it herself. The thought sat new and ridiculously sweet in her mind, like the secret candy she used to steal from the pantry as a girl, something secretly hers, a tiny sweetness she could let dissolve on her tongue, day after day.

Simon stayed close. He knew what the weeks meant, knew how every flicker of her body mattered now, and so he watched her with careful, constant eyes, ready to catch the smallest change. Maybe that’s what being in love was: living inside someone else’s heartbeat, afraid that if you missed a single signal, you’d lose the whole world. The days stretched out around her, slow and golden, every one thick with impossible, ridiculous hope: would the child be a boy, or a girl; would their hands be delicate or strong; who would they love, who would teach them how? Questions multiplied, filling whole rooms, making the house seem larger, softer, as if the simple air had turned to possibility. Always Simon, always his hands, steadying her through each day.

Grace could feel it—the new tilt to the future, the way everything seemed to glow and blur outward from this small, secret kernel of hope. She was the good earth now, full of what Simon had planted, and all either of them could do was wait to see what would take shape, who would come next, and how love would grow.

With Grace’s due date drawing near, she leaned in to his care—not a lapse or an experiment, but a sequence of gestures rehearsed with such precision they became their own sort of ceremony. Her hands, constant now, would smooth the counter, refold his shirts, tip the pills into his palm as if each movement might be inspected for faults neither of them had yet named. There was a rhythm to it, something that felt at once unfamiliar and inevitable, as if the arrival of this first child had started a quiet reordering. Their household, once a loose collection of habits, was beginning to knit itself around the child to come, and all the unseen others that suddenly, impossibly, seemed almost certain to follow.