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    The Mute Ventriloquist: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
    The Mute Ventriloquist: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
    The Mute Ventriloquist: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
    Ebook42 pages29 minutes

    The Mute Ventriloquist: 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
    ISBN9780062001955
    The Mute Ventriloquist: 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

      The Mute Ventriloquist - Simon Van Booy

      The Mute Ventriloquist

      A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love

      Simon Van Booy

      Dedication

      To Maddie

      Contents

      Dedication

      The Mute Ventriloquist

      Acknowledgments

      An Excerpt from Tales of Accidental Genius

      About the Author

      Praise

      Credits

      Copyright

      About the Publisher

      THE MUTE VENTRILOQUIST

      I.

      Oskar was a Polish ventriloquist who lived in Drake’s basement. People thought he was mad and were afraid of him. Sometimes he went for long walks. He never spoke to anyone he saw but carried small bites in his pocket that he handed to passing dogs.

      Those who didn’t know that Oskar was a puppeteer might have thought him mute. Nobody quite knew what to make of him because though he was the quietest resident of Greenpoint, with a small wooden puppet on his knee, the words and sentences flowed like water from a faucet.

      Drake was an only child.

      He lived in a brownstone at 999 Lorimer Street. Red paint peeled above the front door. The stairs groaned when Drake ran up and down them in his socks. His best friend growing up was called Kristine. She was very tall and flopped her legs when she walked as though stepping over something invisible. Drake liked to mimic the voices and sounds he heard coming from the man in the basement because it made her laugh. Sometimes, when he and Kristine talked in whispers on the steps, Oskar would suddenly appear with two plums.

      As they put on the years like new coats, Drake and Kristine became strangers to one another. The intimacy of unbroken silence was replaced by the awkwardness of conversation. Words fell from their minds like a rain of hard stones, snapping branches of blind desire, trapping the fresh blooms of feeling within the darkness of meaning.

      Twenty-five years later, Drake saw Kristine at a sales convention in Glasgow, Kentucky.

      At first he didn’t recognize her because she was so much bigger. Then he felt suddenly very light. His breath quickened as though he’d been running.

      With her body occupied by the journey of age, beauty had flooded her eyes.

      There is little joy in those first moments of recognition—for the reality is that most encounters of such depth, most first glances of love come to nothing. And while the sincerity of that rare moment when your heart is bursting should be the signal to fling yourself on the ground

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