Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi

Author:Helen Oyeyemi
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2011-06-21T16:00:00+00:00

I stopped talking to Jonas and Aunt Molly and Uncle Tom and Aunt Jane. It wasn’t easy. I missed them. Especially Jonas. I attended foam parties and tube parties and hedge and highway parties. I took every job my agent could get for me. People looked at my contact sheets and told me I was doing my best work yet. I couldn’t see what they meant—the pictures looked the same as always.

It was at another charity fund-raiser that I remembered where I had seen Daphne Fox. Light hummed in crystal chandeliers. Jonas, decadent Catholic that he was, would have loved the party. Men in dinner jackets and starched white collars, throats pulsing with laughter. Yards of oystercoloured silk, and diamonds, diamonds, garnets, rubies. One old man had a walking stick topped with an emerald the size of an egg. I holed myself up in a corner with a couple of girls I knew from jobs I’d done, and we listened to the speeches and stood there drinking and looking at everything through our sunglasses, waiting for something to happen. The room was in half-darkness, raked by a roving spotlight. Every now and again someone who had been only a silhouette suddenly transformed into a pillar of flashing jewels. I hadn’t thought to wear any jewellery, and when the spotlight finally fell on our group, I stepped out of it. It didn’t take much to make my head spin just then—the sudden change from blinding light to dusk made my hands clammy. That and the cough syrup and the cocktails and the wine. I excused myself and weaved out of the ballroom, towards the toilets; a crowd of women emerged and momentarily surrounded me. “Come back,” I wanted to tell them. “Don’t leave me alone in here.”

But they had, and I walked up the row of cubicles, kicking doors and watching the mirror while a tap dripped bleakly and Muzak floated in through the speakers. I kicked the last door open and clenched my jaw against a scream—the image of a dead woman flashed fiercely, just as it used to when I was eleven; exactly like that.

It was the same woman I conjured up each time, sprawled in the cubicle with wet, dangling hair, and that bashful, almost apologetic expression—Sorry about this. The face was Daphne Fox’s. That was my last clear impression for a while.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.