Wherever they are, just picture them reminiscing at a small burnished rosewood table, but with no half-naked girls around to interrupt the conversation.
“Nice story. It improves with age, like our favorite drink here.”
Ketch raises his glass. “Like we once told Angelina, alcohol’s a real boon to the imagination. Are you sure we didn’t dream up those islands?”
“Hard to believe, but such places do exist.” Joel’s eyes seem bluer since leaving Navidad, his hair more platinum blond.
“Finding it was a stroke of luck.”
“For us?”
“For the tale that needed telling. Good thing we happened along at the right time.”
“You said it. We can be halfway around the globe, but set some glasses down in front of us and we’d still be telling it. Though it helps having each other to remember all the details.”
“Words are such dialectic things. Two talkers are always better than one.”
“So talk we shall, till we polish off this bottle. You start this time: tell us about Matías and his women and that naughty bus.”
“Yes, and the land. The three islands. The sea and palm trees and sky. The tiny propeller plane. The Yuuka and the Elders. And Matías’s unborn daughter.”
“How about it, shall we start all over again from the beginning? From the first faint hints of dawn, the part about all good stories starting at daybreak?”
“Fine by me. We’ve got all the time in the world,” says Ketch, casually refilling their whiskey glasses.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Natsuki Ikezawa was born in Hokkaido in 1945. As a young man, he quit school at Saitama University to become a poet. He lived in Greece for three years in the mid-1970s. Presently, he writes both fiction and criticism and is an active public speaker. Of Ikezawa’s works, Still Lives and A Burden of Flowers are available in English, and the Tanizaki Jun’ichiro Prize–winning The Navidad Incident: The Downfall of Matías Guili has been translated into German.
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