Save as Many as You Ruin: 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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Save as Many as You Ruin - Simon Van Booy
Save as Many as You Ruin
A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
Simon Van Booy
Dedication
To Maddie
Contents
Dedication
Save as Many as You Ruin
Acknowledgments
An Excerpt from Tales of Accidental Genius
About the Author
Praise
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
SAVE AS MANY AS YOU RUIN
By the time Gerard leaves the office it has stopped snowing. Lights are coming on, but it’s not yet dark. At the end of each block the sidewalk disappears under a pool of gray ice water.
Gerard thinks of everyone’s footprints in the snow. Manhattan was once a forest. He imagines the footprints of an Indian slipping home, on his shoulders a warm carcass with clumps of snow stuck to its fur.
Gerard thinks of his own footprints and how soon they will disappear. He exhales into the world and his breath disappears. He recalls Rilke, what is ours floats into the air, like steam from a dish of hot food. He wonders if his life is an extraordinary one.
Gerard remembers the freezing cross-country races at his English prep school. Bare white legs spotted with mud. Plum-sized hearts thumping.
He remembers Hetherington, the physical education teacher, his strong jaw and sweet blue eyes—the desire to see his boys drink up the glory of victory. Hetherington ran in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. He won a medal. Hitler watched. Millions were about to be killed as a teenage Hetherington crossed the finish line. A few years later, children walked into gas ovens after a long journey from home. They were scared but trusted their parents.
Gerard feels stabbing love for his daughter. He crosses Fifty-third Street. Her name is Lucy, and she is eight. She has