She is walking on the street when she sees a very elegant lady sitting on the sidewalk. The dog stops and starts to sniff her. Normally she pulls the little one, but this time, the woman looks back and smiles. She has white hair, very close to her skull, and wears a scarf around her neck, a checked shirt, and sunglasses. She looks like a French woman. The purse beside her seems to be from an important brand as well. She smiles to the stranger, a bit embarrassed.
Someone robbed the car from her driver, and she was warned by her husband, who still doesn’t know if he will pay the ransom. She speaks automatically, as though she was giving a testimony in a police station. “Nobody prepares us to death,” the unknown woman says, scraping her foot against the asphalt, as though the sole of her feet was dirty. “Don’t worry, I’m certain that your husband and the police will find a solution,” she answers, introducing herself, “Maria, nice to meet you.”
Isabella cries because she’s lost her mother two months ago. She is new, and probably not even forty, a distant gaze. She has no children because she can’t have them. But nothing, she says, “nothing prepared me for the death of my mother.” The emptiness she feels is part of her existence now, for, unknowing, she believed her being was conditioned to that other.
In a gap between a deep breath and another, her phone rings and she starts to reply with grunts. “They found the car near here. The driver was dropped off near a slum. They got the wrong one, robbed him by mistake,” she explains. “I got to go. Good luck,” she says, getting up and walking in the opposite direction.
Desirée Jung is a writer and translator. Her background is in film and literature. She has received her M. F. A in Creative Writing and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada. She has published translations and poetry in Exile, The Dirty Goat, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Antagonish Review, among others. She was born in Brazil and lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.