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    Where They Hide Is a Mystery: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
    Where They Hide Is a Mystery: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
    Where They Hide Is a Mystery: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
    Ebook38 pages28 minutes

    Where They Hide Is a Mystery: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love

    By Simon Van Booy

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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."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateFeb 23, 2010
    ISBN9780062002044
    Where They Hide Is a Mystery: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
    Author

    Simon Van Booy

    Simon Van Booy is the author of two novels and two collections of short stories, including The Secret Lives of People in Love and Love Begins in Winter, which won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. He is the editor of three philosophy books and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, NPR, and the BBC. His work has been translated into fourteen languages. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.

    Read more from Simon Van Booy

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      Book preview

      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

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