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Fingerprints of Previous Owners. Rebecca Entel
Читать онлайн.Название Fingerprints of Previous Owners
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781944700430
Автор произведения Rebecca Entel
Жанр Зарубежная классика
Издательство Ingram
Praise for Fingerprints of Previous Owners
“Entel’s delicately crafted debut explores the relationships between the resort, an economic center that distorts the island’s history for its own purposes, and the local people and the ways the past infuses the present, no matter how hard one tries to forget. Entel gives Myrna a distinctive voice and creates a rich history for the island and its residents.”
– Booklist
“Fingerprints of Previous Owners simmers with implicit and explicit violence, with social and economic injustices… Audacious, heartfelt and realistic, I found myself immersed in the perverted paradise of this island world and in the travails of the characters.”
– Maxine Case, author of All We Have Left Unsaid and Softness of the Lime
“Fingerprints of Previous Owners is a memorable debut. Through the force of her sure storytelling and graceful prose, Rebecca Entel makes the unseen visible, and the unspoken past powerfully present.”
– Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, author of Madeleine is Sleeping and Ms. Hempel Chronicles
The Unnamed Press
P.O. Box 411272
Los Angeles, CA 90041
Published in North America by The Unnamed Press.
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © 2017 by Rebecca Entel
ISBN: 9781944700430
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017940133
This book is distributed by Publishers Group West
Cover design & typeset by Jaya Nicely
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are wholly fictional or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to [email protected].
For my parents,
Esther and Leonard Entel
too slow the stones crawling toward language...
Derek Walcott
Pain—has an Element of Blank—
Emily Dickinson
There is no place you or I can go, to think about or not think about, to summon the presences of, or recollect the absences of slaves... There’s no small bench by the road.
Toni Morrison
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
A Note from the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Author
When the planes landed out on the key, we would gather on the beach. We draped ourselves in sheets, the wind turning us into shifting shapes of brown and white, like sea creatures wrestling our own bleached shells.
I’d never arrived here from somewhere northern, frosty. But I imagined that when they filed out of the plane, it was hard not to go rigid, expecting the January cold. The sun would come down to massage their shoulders. They would relax against its warmth and squint through their sunglasses against its glare. From there, they headed to the resort on Furnace Island, though their boarding passes had said the destination was Cruffey. They didn’t know what it meant for this place to have two names.
I’d never even been on the key where the resort landed its planes to see the island as a dot out in the ocean. I’d never arrived here from anywhere.
When they moved toward a gravelly area labeled Baggage Claim, a flurry. A team of people with the name of the resort scripted across their chests would appear, arrange its bodies as prosthetics for whatever they needed to do: move luggage, climb into the small boat that awaited them. Scaffolded in wooden masts and adornments, bearing a flag with the resort’s sunset logo imprinted over a red-and-yellow castle. Across its side in regal script: The Pinta. The boat would jostle against the dock, clacking and swishing, as they waited to be unmoored.
After heaving all of their luggage in a human assembly line onto a twin boat labeled The Nina: Luggage, some team members would don felt hats with feathers and put on the bug-eyed faces of actors. Those staff members without costumes—the ones who’d done the lifting, the ones from the island, the ones like me—would sit down on the floor of the boat and wait.
Some of the newly arrived faced toward the island, some faced backward toward the airport key or the open water. Their backs would touch. The stepping-stone trail of clouds in the sky would lure some of their eyes out to sea while others would lean away, waving their phones around for a signal, frowning. The boat would begin bobbing along.
A throat clearing, followed by a sandy boot planting itself on the bench next to them, bringing all the eyes back.
“Then the Pinta!” the befeathered man would bellow. “Being faster and in the lead! Sighted land!”
Some of the other men would jump up around him, pointing excitedly at the beach that had been in view even from the key.
“In the presence of all of my crew!” the bellower would continue, Columbus embroidered across the front of his hat. “I ask you to bear solemn witness that I am taking possession of this island for their lord and lady, the King and the Queen! And I will call this island, in all her glory, after our sovereigns Ferdinand and Ees-abella: Ferdin-Ees Island. And oh, the glorious heat of the sun that circles our God-given Earth: Furnace Island, then!”
Kids would clap. I imagined the adults, too, cheering.
“Lo and behold, sir!” One of the hatted crew members would put his arm around Columbus’s shoulders. “Natives!”
Finally every head would turn to the beach. The beach where we waited. They’d see a cluster of women gather slowly to face them. Just the local women, no flown-in-from-the-States staff with skin lighter than our driest sand.
“Why, they go about as naked as the day they were born!”
Laughing, they would all feel lighter. Drifting farther from home and its tethers as their boat rocked ever more slowly toward the shore.
They must have seen that the women on the beach were distinctly not naked. The draped gowns shaped out of white bedsheets would whip around in the unpredictably looping wind, both revealing and distorting the shapes of our bodies. Some of us would seem to be looking right at them, our faces hardened into expressions they couldn’t read. They would look away, to the smiling faces with the slightly downcast eyes instead. A hatted team member would begin handing out pennies.
“We will give them coins of small values,” Columbus would shout. “They