The Journey Prize Stories 25 Read Online Free Page A

suggestions have trickled in. Alternative routes for public transit, wider boulevards, new fountains. The people want to revive Old Paris.
    I refuse to reshape this city into its own shortcomings. Wider boulevards will only increase traffic; pigeons will drown in new fountains. I will not suffer for someone else’s nostalgia.
    The public doesn’t understand. Simply because the city is broken, and we are forced to rebuild, doesn’t make this an opportunity to carve out a dream world.
    I uncap a 0.18 millimetre pen – with it, I could perform surgery – and steady the nib in the heart of Chinatown.
    In the next room, my boss is singing Josephine Baker in a vaudevillian boom, filling each wordless bar with the mimicked lilt of an accordion.
Paris! Paris! Paris!
For people like him, this city is a Vincente Minelli movie – Leslie Caron sipping from a champagne flute, lovers picnicking on the Seine, Gene Kelly serenading a baguette.
    As I’m plotting pedestrian crosswalks at the south end of de Choisy, I can almost hear his voice.
For the love of God, focus on the downtown core
.
    A feeling steals into the bones at the base of my skull, not apain but an awareness, blood pulsing over and over against my temple, like a madman throwing himself endlessly at the same idea. It must be a shift in the weather.
    Before Colette, I loved someone as hard as anyone can be loved. Claire called herself Ourson, the masculine of little bear, because she said she felt like a little boy hibernating. She was twenty-six when I met her, and by that time had already lived ten years on the street.
    Cities work in a different way for people with no home to return to – subways, gravel alleys serve a distinct utility; sycamore-treed parks far outgrow aesthetics – and I knew that. In my head, I knew that.
    We dated for months. We went to second-run movies, and she kissed me in the dark. I often tried to get her to stay overnight, without sounding lonely or expectant. And when I finally bought a place for us to live together – lofty popcorn ceilings, a claw-foot tub that looked like it might run away – I still felt the weight of that trying.
    She would wear jackets inside the apartment, two or sometimes three, double her jeans, pile on extra socks and sweaters, no matter how many times I would say,
Make yourself comfortable
. On her body, she carried everything she owned.
    She fled after midnight on New Year’s Eve, while I slept, champagne-tongued. I wish I had been surprised when I woke up alone.
    —You really don’t have to stay, Colette says, passing a turquoise ring from one finger to another as she waits for her tailor to finish hemming one of her pantheon of yellow dresses.I unbutton the front of my overcoat to indicate my intention of remaining with her.
    —When the rain stops, I will wear nothing but sundresses, she says. I will be a little sun myself.
    She tilts her face down and looks up at me, the coy angles of a child. I can tell she is looking for a response, so I search the hurricane of my brain for a way to please her.
    —Lovely as Saturn, but close as the sun.
    These the tailor’s words, spilling out as he rises to his full six feet. He hands the dress to Colette, who studies the seams, makes sure no golden threads have been left loose. The little sun needs secure hems.
    —Oh, Ray, she tells him, you are a dream.
    She leads me outside. Or maybe just walks ahead of me.
    —I need to buy persimmons, she says, again twirling her turquoise ring. Will you walk me to the Peking Market?
    My nod is a mechanism no more thoughtful than a sneeze. Satisfied, she squeezes my hand.
    She begins to walk south, her feet fragile as glass under all the flood water, and suddenly I draw her to my chest, moor the ferry of her body so it does not float – it must not float away from me – but catch her palm in the swing of my arm, knocking her delicate ring to the ground.
    My boss sits with legs crossed behind his seagrass-teak desk, imported