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    Conception: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
    Conception: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
    Conception: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
    Ebook31 pages46 minutes

    Conception: 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
    ISBN9780062001894
    Conception: 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.

    Read more from Simon Van Booy

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      Book preview

      Conception - Simon Van Booy

      Conception

      A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love

      Simon Van Booy

      Dedication

      To Maddie

      Contents

      Dedication

      Conception

      Acknowledgments

      An Excerpt from Tales of Accidental Genius

      About the Author

      Praise

      Credits

      Copyright

      About the Publisher

      CONCEPTION

      I am sitting at the kitchen table with the lights off. There is broken glass strewn across the red stone floor. The back door is wide open, and moonlight drips through the trees and pools in the doorway. I am sitting at the table drinking tea in darkness, while my wife is somewhere in the fields that stretch endlessly behind our house. I hold the cup with both hands, as though engaged in holiness. I can imagine her in mud up to her ankles, her glasses spotted with rain, hair breaking like black sea on her shoulders.

      When I arrived home and saw the broken glass and the open door, I knew she had received news from the doctors. Flapping in the breeze on the table like a white tongue is the letter, which may confirm her worst fear. I dare not read it. In the darkness I can see the cluster of words scattered across the page; like small fallen bodies they reach out for us.

      I wonder if she smashed the glass on purpose or if one of her walking poles nudged it as she twisted her back and thrashed all limbs, negotiating her crutches like giant chopsticks as she made for the empty, moonlit pasture.

      Her legs are so deformed you’d think they were rubber. I touched them for the first time on our wedding night

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