The Journey Prize Stories 25 Read Online Free Page B

from Copenhagen on the city’s tab, and flutters visibly between comedy and pain, as if a shadow puppet show is playing on the crystal stage of his cornea.
    —I looked at your plans, he begins, amusement deepeninghis laugh lines. And then, darkly, —Do you think nothing of our city’s golden past?
    I imagine he is watching two paper cut-outs scale the lattice of the Eiffel Tower, propelled by the power of love, belting out a duet that, at some point, rhymes “bébé” with “mais oui.”
    —You mean my work around the 13e arrondissement? It’s vital.
    —You’re saving Chinatown and letting the heart of Paris stop beating.
    I flex my wrists. —Blood can’t circulate without arteries.
    His sweaty, overgrown eyebrows form a road map of mixed emotions, hills of wonderment at the centre bottoming out into vales of anger near the pink pulp of his tear ducts.
    —I have to submit the plans to city council tonight, he tells me.
    The choice for him is simple: submit my plans and seem illogical, or ask for an extension and seem weak. A wet sound passes between his lips, the last bubble rising to the lake’s surface above a drowning man.
    With his back turned, he carries the blueprints past the recycling bin and folds them safely under his arm. —If you have nothing more to say, he manages, then show yourself the door.
    Colette is a lover of cubism. She tells me on our walk to Montmartre that, at one time, she had a tattoo of Georges Braque’s
Le Portugais
, but had it removed because too many people asked her what it was supposed to be.
    I have come to this neighbourhood only once, to step inside the Sacré-Coeur after Claire slipped away. I was afraid, racingagainst a riptide of darkness, and had little left to believe in but the spirit of the ancient basilica.
    —Look at that townhouse, Colette says, pointing to a grey box with a For Sale sign. Just look at the stone siding.
    All I can think of is the gutters to be swept of cypress leaves, the faucets to be sponged and polished, the furnace air filters to be replaced.
    —Do you want to live in a hotel forever? she asks, scratching down the realtor’s number on a folded receipt.
    —The room service is nice.
    —Well, then, she says, slapping the receipt into my palm, it’s me or the lobster canapés.
    What I remember of childhood autumns is Bordeaux, hunting wild boar with a recurve crossbow, rifling the life from ring-neck pheasants. I would swat horseflies into the oil slicks of my forearms, pressing hard when I caught one between my thumb and forefinger, until I heard a crunch and saw what was inside.
    On a boar, tusks gleaming through the gooseberry bushes, you would aim straight for the meaty bell of the mid-shoulder. But the only way to hunt a pheasant is to gun into the air a foot ahead of them, in the direction of flight.
    —Boys are mean by nature, my mother would say, and then fold me, star-eyed, into sleep.
    In the pond beside our cottage, I sometimes caught flashes of a Rouen duck – black banding on the crown, royal-blue speculum feathers – when it flickered between the bulrushes. Though it moved like this from place to place, it always went alone.
    I was in bed, laid up in eiderdown, when through my window I saw the duck catch his webbed feet on a jag of basalt and snap his legs like sticks of cinnamon. I watched him tumble through the thistled border of the pond, plunge deep below its canopy of lily pads. For hours, I heard the awful scraping of his wings against the water, and then nothing.
    I know now, as I knew then: I could have saved that bird.
    A cold front has sliced through the humidity, Paris slipping off its mantle of rain. For the first time in weeks, I can sit comfortably in my office.
    My boss enters the room wig first. —I’m letting you go, he says, so nonchalant that he might as well conclude the sentence with “for an early lunch.”
    Any possible reaction of mine would satisfy him. So I look straight ahead and ask, without