The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel by Greer Andrew Sean

Author:Greer, Andrew Sean [Greer, Andrew Sean]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2007-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

Her stars would not be performing tonight. Kathy stood on the stern of the boat, and above her glowed a Southern Hemisphere sky filled with constellations she could not recognize. No Libra, no Orion. Their parts were being played tonight by rougher, tropical understudies: the Peacock, the Cross. Nothing that Eli had taught her. Nothing at all familiar.

From where she stood, the island was completely dark, invisible against the night sky. The lamps along its mountains, its volcano and the houses that edged the beach had been extinguished by the sultan’s edict. So, from the departing boat, from Kathy’s view, the island was gone. No lights, no fires, no radio towers blinking their red eyes above the mountain; only, if Kathy looked carefully, a rabbit-shaped place in the sky where the stars stopped. Even that absence grew less distinct as the boat moved away, and it would have taken an astronomer indeed to recognize the missing space. Yet Kathy stood on deck, a shawl around her shoulders, and watched what she assumed to be the island’s retreat into the distance. She hadn’t looked back at first, caught up in a novel she was reading in the fluorescence of the cabin, but it occurred to her that this was what people did. So she closed the novel, headed out to the stern where a young island man in a white shirt stood smoking a cigarette. The stars were everywhere, randomly, and the boat’s wake was a pale ruffle in the blue dark.

“You are leaving?” Kathy heard beside her. It was the young local with the cigarette, who then noted in his island accent: “You are much sad.” He had a wide, dark face, perhaps the widest she’d ever seen, and his upper lip rested high on his teeth in an unintended smile. She saw now that he wore a hemp necklace around his throat, set with shells, hiding a tattoo. Where he held his cigarette, his fingernails looked two inches long.

“No,” Kathy said. “I’m not.” She was suspicious; she knew that she wasn’t pretty to a young man like him, so it interested her to think there might be another trick here. Kathy was nearing forty, her face overcome by her thick glasses, her wiry hair threaded with silver in its tight barrettes, fitting more and more the role of a librarian as time passed. She didn’t care; her body was an old favorite dog-eared book from her childhood, and nothing but a passing fancy now.

He smiled and pointed his cigarette at her. “I think you are!”

“Maybe you’re the one who’s sad, is that true?” she asked, and he didn’t say anything, but elegantly brought the cigarette to his mouth with those long, shining nails and, closing his eyes, inhaled. Then the young man turned and went inside and she was left alone with the receding waves.

Kathy unknotted her shawl and knotted it again, better. She did this without thinking, just as she looked out at the view-that-wasn’t-there without any deeper consideration; her mind was often elsewhere.

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