Where They Hide Is a Mystery: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
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About this ebook
The Secret Lives of People in Love is the first short story collection by award-winning writer Simon Van Booy. These stories, set in Kentucky, New York, Paris, Rome, and Greece, are a perfect synthesis of intensity and atmosphere. Love, loss, human contact, and isolation are Van Booy's themes. In radiant prose he writes about the difficult choices we make in order to retain our humanity and about the redemptive power of love in a violent world.
Included in this updated P.S. edition is the new story "The Mute Ventriloquist."
Simon Van Booy
Simon Van Booy has written more than a dozen works of fiction (including Night Came with Many Stars and The Presence of Absence) and is the editor of three volumes of philosophy. Raised in rural North Wales, Simon currently lives between London and New York, where he is a volunteer EMT for Central Park Medical Unit and RVAC. In early 2020, he rescued his first mouse.
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Where They Hide Is a Mystery - Simon Van Booy
Where They Hide Is a Mystery
A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
Simon Van Booy
DEDICATION
To Maddie
CONTENTS
Dedication
Where They Hide Is a Mystery
Acknowledgments
An Excerpt from Tales of Accidental Genius
About the Author
Praise
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
WHERE THEY HIDE IS A MYSTERY
Since his mother’s funeral, Edgar had begun to walk alone through the park. When he was a baby, she pushed him along its many paths. In the afternoons she read books to him, and though he couldn’t talk then, she knew he was listening, and he remembered her voice. When she died, his childhood split open beneath his feet.
His father, a handsome, stern man who smelled of smoke and cologne, had forbidden Edgar to leave the apartment without a grown-up, but his father generally stayed at the office until late into the night. Edgar knew he would not be missed.
Slipping out past Stan the doorman was not difficult. Stan liked a drink and would disappear every couple of hours for fifteen minutes, after which he’d sit in his room and try to appear as sober as possible, which made him look even more drunk.
Once Edgar crossed Fifth Avenue, he followed a path far into the woods. On entering the park, he often saw tourists having their portraits made, fire jugglers, slow games of chess, forlorn secretaries, and the homeless who gathered in groups to debate the weather in loud voices.
Nestled between a sycamore tree and a cluster of lilac bushes, there was a bench where his mother had told him secrets.
Without you,
she had once said, the world would be incomplete.
The bench was not particularly ornate. It was small and wooden and in the rain would soften and grow dark.
Edgar had overheard his father say on the telephone that he would never get over his wife’s death but that he would just learn to live with it. Stan the doorman had told Edgar that she was in a better place, but Edgar could not imagine anywhere better than the park, especially in spring when the lilacs—like