Valleyesque by Fernando A. Flores

Author:Fernando A. Flores
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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The following morning, having breakfast at his favorite taco joint, Gabriel felt, in some way, spiritually unsound. He felt vaguely that his life was lacking something. It wasn’t that he was single, or that his mother seemed to have aged decades in the past few years. It was something less tangible, less from the world of the senses, something that had deep psychic roots within him.

Gabriel checked his messages and found no missed calls. He finished his tacos and threw away the brown bag, walked to his truck. As he drove he told himself, I am Gabriel Spencer, the son of Eugene Spencer and Magdalene Carlisle. I am here in this world because. I am here in this world because … He accentuated the word “because,” asserting it, as if the word itself could unravel his hidden destiny.

He found himself driving toward his mother’s place. The truth was, a young woman had moved into an apartment close to his mother’s. She had brown skin and messy dark hair. The young woman was from Bolivia and was a graduate student at the local university. Gabriel knew this because his mother had befriended her, and had even let this young woman snap photographs of her for a forthcoming art show. Though he was suspicious at first, after he exchanged a few passing smiles and hellos with her, he felt it could do no harm to have his mother make young friends and be creative at her age.

A few times he’d said her name aloud: Araseli. It had a distant ring to it, like the bounce of a gold coin, if the coin were the sun. Gabriel couldn’t remember having a foreign acquaintance since he was a boy. He’d been a combination of nervous, skeptical, and shy when he first approached her; on this occasion he’d filled two fancy thirty-six-ounce jars with honey, sealed with blue lids: one for his mother, the other to start a conversation with Araseli.

Gabriel sat at a kitchen table in his mother’s apartment, and mostly he listened to her as she told him, once again, about the time when she was a girl and her neighbor won every shoe at the shoe raffle in Davenport. He’d left the second jar of honey in his truck, and before leaving Gabriel set it by the door of Araseli’s apartment without a note.

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