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    No Greater Gift: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
    No Greater Gift: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
    No Greater Gift: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
    Ebook30 pages27 minutes

    No Greater Gift: 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
    ISBN9780062001962
    No Greater Gift: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
    Author

    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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      Book preview

      No Greater Gift - Simon Van Booy

      No Greater Gift

      A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love

      Simon Van Booy

      Dedication

      To Maddie

      Contents

      Dedication

      No Greater Gift

      Acknowledgments

      An Excerpt from Tales of Accidental Genius

      About the Author

      Praise

      Credits

      Copyright

      About the Publisher

      NO GREATER GIFT

      Way above the Park, traffic has stopped. A fat woman in tight clothes pushes twins in a stroller. The eyeballs of the twins slide up to the elevated train. The train grieves into the station.

      Gabriel watches the twins and then looks into the space they are being pushed. Gabriel looks down at his watch and shuffles into an alley behind a bakery. His package should be ready.

      A steel door opens separating a word sprayed in white. Two trembling hands emerge holding a box tied with string. There is a bird tattooed on one of the hands. Gabriel places his hands on the top and bottom and only when the other hands feel the responsibility of weight transfer do they release and disappear back behind the steel door. Gabriel taps twice and looks around.

      As Gabriel makes his way through the alley toward the subway, he pauses beside a motorcycle lying on its side. He is tempted to open the box for a quick peek at what’s inside.

      Two men waiting for the train look Gabriel over. Their pants are baggy and remind Gabriel of sails. Their eyes want to know what he is carrying and why he is handling it with such care. They look at the hole

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