The Journey Prize Stories 25 Read Online Free
Author: Various
love her.
It seems that my boss has been crying.
—Avenue de Choisy? he asks from the doorway to my office. His hair is rumpled with stress and humidity; he is a stray dog, river-eyed and wild, his matted coat licked against the grain.
—I know what I’m doing.
His cheeks burn red. —If there are sinkholes in rue de Rivoli because you want to pump all of our efforts into Chinatown, you’ll be out of a job. I won’t think twice.
Through my office window, I make out the north face of Hotel Raphaël – the lace balustrade, the limestone carvings of pomegranates and lions’ heads – and I want, badly, to go home.
My boss lowers his gaze to his polished Valentino loafers. On his left toe, he notices a pigeon dropping and looks as if he might cry again. He is a tweed suit with no man in it; his body has slipped out, vanished into tedium, rain poised to wash away any trace that he may have existed.
In any flood, there are abandoned vehicles. I have flown to Chongqing, Queensland, and Cologne to plan for rebuilding after natural disasters, and seen miles of sedans deserted, dead headlights wired to dead batteries.
Down de Choisy, the water is low enough to walk through – or, we walk through it because we can’t be still – but nothing smaller than a bus can clear the overflow. I follow the road like a salmon going downriver, netted by the quiet pull of magnetic fields, to Chinatown. At some point, the wind picks up, and I huddle under the domed awning of a magazine stand.
I settle beside the gossip glossies while the proprietor, a man with a puddle for a chin, clears his throat over and over. From there I look out into the street, to an imagined chalk outline overwhelmed by the flood but not washed away, the nipped waist and tulip hem of a sundress.
Here, it takes work to filter beauty from the ugliness, the vibrant trains of mounted paper lanterns from the ones that have fallen, detritus scattered in the ocean, taking on theshapes of pried-open clams, sunfish bones, red coral caked in salt. How to find anything beautiful while sadness folds itself around us, a beach blanket of steel wool?
Before stepping out from under the awning, I raise a newspaper over my head. Two steps into the road, the newspaper is already soggy. Still I cling to it; not for shelter, but for its semblance of structure, as something I can hold in my hands.
Colette paces the Alcove Suite, an architect surveying her building site, industrious but aware of its limitations. I perch on a red-velvet bergère, watching her luminous face as she decides what, together, we have room to construct.
—I can’t believe it, she murmurs. Hotel Raphaël.
While she slips off her slingbacks, I unseal my rainboots from my calves and peel away my socks. We line up side by side on the king bed, each half-starfished on the silk duvet, nowhere touching.
—I went on a vacation once, Colette says, after so much time has passed that I thought she was asleep. When I was twelve, my father and I took a charter flight to Dakar.
Across my mind runs a panorama of a clammy city, the opening montage of a New Wave movie: high-rises sweating like leather, women ripe on hot-waxed mopeds, men with rickety carts hawking dried plums and chevron beads. In this world I expect Colette’s words to be silver floss, to glisten.
—He grew up there, but he was ashamed of growing up without money. When we visited, he rented a hotel room for me to stay in, alone, while he stayed in his childhood home.
—Bet your hotel wasn’t like this one, I answer, unsure of the shades in my voice.
—It was a Radisson. No shred of personality in that place. Not a single honest smell or mismatched piece of linen. Who can stand beige throw pillows?
The sun, which had, for a spell of fifteen minutes, poked out from behind the cirrus clouds, disappears from view. Colette fits her palm to mine, and the darkness we are left in doubles for the low light of intimacy.
Hell or high water, the
It seems that my boss has been crying.
—Avenue de Choisy? he asks from the doorway to my office. His hair is rumpled with stress and humidity; he is a stray dog, river-eyed and wild, his matted coat licked against the grain.
—I know what I’m doing.
His cheeks burn red. —If there are sinkholes in rue de Rivoli because you want to pump all of our efforts into Chinatown, you’ll be out of a job. I won’t think twice.
Through my office window, I make out the north face of Hotel Raphaël – the lace balustrade, the limestone carvings of pomegranates and lions’ heads – and I want, badly, to go home.
My boss lowers his gaze to his polished Valentino loafers. On his left toe, he notices a pigeon dropping and looks as if he might cry again. He is a tweed suit with no man in it; his body has slipped out, vanished into tedium, rain poised to wash away any trace that he may have existed.
In any flood, there are abandoned vehicles. I have flown to Chongqing, Queensland, and Cologne to plan for rebuilding after natural disasters, and seen miles of sedans deserted, dead headlights wired to dead batteries.
Down de Choisy, the water is low enough to walk through – or, we walk through it because we can’t be still – but nothing smaller than a bus can clear the overflow. I follow the road like a salmon going downriver, netted by the quiet pull of magnetic fields, to Chinatown. At some point, the wind picks up, and I huddle under the domed awning of a magazine stand.
I settle beside the gossip glossies while the proprietor, a man with a puddle for a chin, clears his throat over and over. From there I look out into the street, to an imagined chalk outline overwhelmed by the flood but not washed away, the nipped waist and tulip hem of a sundress.
Here, it takes work to filter beauty from the ugliness, the vibrant trains of mounted paper lanterns from the ones that have fallen, detritus scattered in the ocean, taking on theshapes of pried-open clams, sunfish bones, red coral caked in salt. How to find anything beautiful while sadness folds itself around us, a beach blanket of steel wool?
Before stepping out from under the awning, I raise a newspaper over my head. Two steps into the road, the newspaper is already soggy. Still I cling to it; not for shelter, but for its semblance of structure, as something I can hold in my hands.
Colette paces the Alcove Suite, an architect surveying her building site, industrious but aware of its limitations. I perch on a red-velvet bergère, watching her luminous face as she decides what, together, we have room to construct.
—I can’t believe it, she murmurs. Hotel Raphaël.
While she slips off her slingbacks, I unseal my rainboots from my calves and peel away my socks. We line up side by side on the king bed, each half-starfished on the silk duvet, nowhere touching.
—I went on a vacation once, Colette says, after so much time has passed that I thought she was asleep. When I was twelve, my father and I took a charter flight to Dakar.
Across my mind runs a panorama of a clammy city, the opening montage of a New Wave movie: high-rises sweating like leather, women ripe on hot-waxed mopeds, men with rickety carts hawking dried plums and chevron beads. In this world I expect Colette’s words to be silver floss, to glisten.
—He grew up there, but he was ashamed of growing up without money. When we visited, he rented a hotel room for me to stay in, alone, while he stayed in his childhood home.
—Bet your hotel wasn’t like this one, I answer, unsure of the shades in my voice.
—It was a Radisson. No shred of personality in that place. Not a single honest smell or mismatched piece of linen. Who can stand beige throw pillows?
The sun, which had, for a spell of fifteen minutes, poked out from behind the cirrus clouds, disappears from view. Colette fits her palm to mine, and the darkness we are left in doubles for the low light of intimacy.
Hell or high water, the
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