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    Distant Ships: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
    Distant Ships: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
    Distant Ships: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
    Ebook32 pages21 minutes

    Distant Ships: 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
    ISBN9780062001900
    Distant Ships: 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

      Distant Ships - Simon Van Booy

      Distant Ships

      A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love

      Simon Van Booy

      Dedication

      To Maddie

      Contents

      Dedication

      Distant Ships

      Acknowledgments

      An Excerpt from Tales of Accidental Genius

      About the Author

      Praise

      Credits

      Copyright

      About the Publisher

      DISTANT SHIPS

      I think of Leo very often these days. I think of him tonight as I sort packages for a truck that’s headed for London. It is so cold in the warehouse that we wear our breath like beards. The office sent down a box of gloves last week, but I enjoy the feel of cardboard against my old cracked hands. I have worked for the Royal Mail for almost three decades now. I thought they would let me go when I stopped speaking twenty years ago, but they’ve been good to me, and when I retire in ten years I’ll be given a state pension and a humble send-off. I enjoy my work. It’s the only reason I leave the house, except for my walks on the beach.

      Each package has somewhere to go and the contents remain a mystery. Occasionally I’ll find a box where the address has been written by a child. I used to put these boxes to the side until the end of my shift so I could study the penmanship and compare it to Leo’s. In a child’s handwriting, language is exposed as the pained and crooked medium it really is. Since losing Leo, these packages are like shards of glass.

      The warehouse is divided into sections. There are no windows, and sometimes I imagine the factory is in Oslo, Mumbai, or Rotterdam. Outside, the sopping Welsh hillsides roll away in one direction like

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