How Can a Gate be So Selfish, So Lacking in Tact?

 

When she, no longer exactly a wife, but now soon to be an ex-wife, passed through the unoiled garden gate each morning, that insensitive gate had the effrontery to squeal and squeak in the same old familiar way, as if her life had not been wrenched inside out.

Ian McEwan, Solar

[excerpted from the book by U.R. Bowie, Here We Be. Where Be We?]