Read Online The Angel of Losses by Stephanie Feldman - Free Book Online Page A

bright and gray like tin. “ Juan Espera en Dios, ” I said.
    He laughed. “It’s Simon, actually.” He offered me his hand, and I took it. “Nice to meet you. Officially.”
    “Are you following me or something?” I asked. The question, I realized, was meant for the old man—his reappearance, coincident with the notebook’s, was uncanny—and only bubbled to the surface now. I voiced it with a shade too much urgency. I was shaken, maybe a little bit scared.
    Simon just laughed. He seemed primed not to take me too seriously. Usually that made me crazy, but I appreciated it now. Sometimes I even exhausted myself. I smiled too.
    “Three thousand people,” I said. “It makes for a big university but a small town.”
    “Yeah, I think maybe we’ve met before. But I decided against mentioning it this morning. You seemed kind of upset.”
    “I didn’t mean to be rude,” I said. “I just had a rough morning. And I haven’t been sleeping well.”
    He shrugged off my apology. “What did you think of the book?” It was a given, in his mind, that I had read it immediately—just as he would do, probably.
    “It’s interesting,” I said. “It’s interesting—actually—that you picked it out. It’s similar to another book that just fell into my lap.”
    “A book on our mutual acquaintance?” he asked.
    “No. Well. No. Not really.” I paused. “No.”
    “Hmm,” he said, unfazed by my nonanswer. “The Wandering Jew wanders on. So why do you like him so much?”
    I had never thought of it that way—that I didn’t want to deconstruct the Wandering Jew, clinically unpack him like I would a sentence. Neuter him with theory. Maybe I just liked him.
    “I like ghost stories,” I answered.
    “I never thought of him as a ghost,” Simon said. “Being immortal and all.”
    “Death-in-life,” I said. “Life-in-death.”
    “Like the Ancient Mariner. ‘Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.’ That won me the oratory award in ninth grade. The girls were very impressed.”
    “Sure,” I said. “It’s only the most famous line of poetry maybe ever.”
    Simon drew his shoulders back and brought his hand to his chest. “ ‘About, about, in reel and rout, the death-fires danced at night,’ ” he said, taking a few steps toward me. “ ‘The water, like a witch’s oils, burnt green, and blue and white.’ ”
    He delivered the raging words as quiet facts—fire just a blossom of perfume, the sea just a swirl of paint—as if the right intention could turn a word that destroys into a word that heals.
    “All right,” I said. “Maybe a little impressive.”
    He was right in front of me now, his eyes on my throat, and I felt my face grow hot. “Is that an evil eye?”
    I put my hand on the charm, cradled in the hollow of my collarbone, warm as my skin. “Is it?”
    Simon came an inch closer and then stepped back. The cool night rushed in between us. “I thought so,” he said. “But there’s something different about it.”
    The old man at the bar gave it to me, I almost blurted out. I could feel the flood of words cresting in my mind. If I began speaking, I wouldn’t be able to stop: That old man knew my grandfather. He knows me. I think he’s following me. Is that crazy? Do I sound crazy?
    The door flew open, a few drunk girls exiting, their high-pitched laughter like breaking glass. They stumbled down the street, toward the corner where a hunched figure slowly merged with the shadows as he rounded the corner.
    Grandpa’s friend, disappearing again.
    “Shit,” I said. “I have to go.”
    I ran down the block. The drunk girls had separated to the curb and the wall, but just as I tried to move in between them, they coalesced again, blocking me. How could I have missed the old man’s departure? I had been right by the door the whole time. Though he must have been in his seventies or eighties, when I finally came to the corner, he was already at the end of the block, the city