The First Day
Page 18
Sarah arrives, walks towards me. She is almost twenty now. Her voice is changing, sharpening, the loose slang of New York giving way to a new articulation, a new vocabulary. She kisses me, and brushes on past, to Orr, lying peacefully with his eyes closed, as yet unaware. I wait just a little longer, for his inevitable awakening.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Tim Millen, Gail McConnell, Jude Sharvin, Jill Olson, Glenn Jordan, Paul Speirs and Amy Knight, Elliot Ross, Pete Rollins, Ben Behzadafshar; and especially Susan Davey, who always believed.
Also to Ursula Doyle and Ailah Ahmed at Fleet, for patience and encouragement and sharp editing; Denise Shannon; Lauren Wein and the team at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; and my agent Nicola Barr at The Bent Agency, who made mountains out of molehills, and to whom I am endlessly grateful.
Credits
v Pablo Neruda, One Hundred Love Sonnets: Cien Sonetos De Amor, University of Texas Press, 2014 (Sonnet LVII)
v John Caputo, How to Read Kierkegaard, Granta Books, 2007
v Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Routledge, 2007
4 Samuel Beckett, ‘Cascando’ from Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett, Faber & Faber, 2013
11/214 Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, City Lights Books, 1986
22 Samuel Beckett, Watt, Faber & Faber, 2009
30 Samuel Beckett, ‘Malone Dies’ from The Unnameable, Grove Press/Atlantic Monthly Press, 2009
35 Jean Vanier, Becoming Human, Darton, Longman & Todd Ltd, 1999
52 Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, Penguin Classics, 1985
78 Samuel Beckett, ‘Letter to Axel Kaun’ from The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929–1940, edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge University Press, 2009
About the Author
PHIL HARRISON’s first feature film, The Good Man, was released in 2012. An earlier short, Even Gods, won awards at the Belfast, Galway, and Cork Film Festivals in 2011, and was a finalist for the best short script at the 2012 Irish Screenwriting Awards. The First Day is his debut novel. He lives in Belfast.
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