Ways to Disappear by Novey Idra

Author:Novey, Idra [Novey, Idra]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction / Magical Realism, Fiction / Literary
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2016-02-08T19:00:00+00:00

To: [email protected]

Subject: Re: if you don’t hear from me tomorrow

Emma, your email was incoherent. Whose ear are you talking about? You need to get up RIGHT NOW and take a cab to the American embassy. The address is at brazil.usembassy.gov. I can’t get to Salvador until 9:23 tomorrow night.

Did you click on the link yet? brazil.usembassy.gov. GO NOW. This writer, her children—they are strangers. What you’re doing down there is not your life.

For breakfast, they ordered omelets and slices of guava. When room service knocked, Marcus wrapped a towel around his waist and sauntered to the door with the ease of someone who was not unaccustomed to receiving his breakfast in this manner.

When she woke earlier, Emma had given in to the impulse to check her email while Marcus slept on beside her. She’d tried for a few minutes to just lie there, half-dozing, listening to the rattle of vendors’ carts assembling along the beach. She was sorry she hadn’t tried a little longer. Having seen her email, there was no postponing her dread of reckoning with Miles.

Unless she was willing to be cruel and switch hotels.

Divino! Marcus exclaimed over the toast, wiping some crumbs from his mouth. He reached down into his backpack lying open beside the bed and Emma assumed he was reaching for another condom, but he pulled out the new edition of Have You Tasted the Butterflies.

Did you see this at the airport? I’ve never finished any of my mother’s books. He handed Emma the new edition. I knew her books were all in the apartment, but so was she. It never felt right to read her when I could hear her in the next room. Or maybe I wasn’t ready to know what she said in them. He shrugged. Or it was just laziness.

Emma touched the book’s sleek new cover, its austere fork and knife. Even her author’s work had become unfamiliar to her now.

I had no idea so much of it was about adultery, Marcus said.

Well, and also the dream lives of pigeons.

That part I couldn’t follow. He pulled the sheet up as if he’d gotten cold. Will you read it? he asked. From the part about the pigeons?

Still naked, her fingertips sticky with guava, Emma began to murmur the words for Marcus that his mother had written before he was born. At first, she spoke the words so softly that she could barely hear herself, and Marcus drew closer.

With each sentence, she sank further into the words and her voice began to rise. She’d lived with these descriptions for so long, had mulled over them as she drove through the snow and while she brushed her teeth.

And wasn’t the splendor of translation this very thing—to discover sentences this beautiful and then have the chance to make someone else hear their beauty who had yet to hear it? To arrive, at least once, at a moment this intimate and singular, which would not be possible without these words arranged in this order on this page?

For I know something, she read, about the dream life of pigeons.

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.