Her eyes watered, but there was no way she was going to let anyone catch her blinking, not now. Steadying her weight, she threw the window wide open, exposing her body to the light.
Acknowledgments
Here I should like to acknowledge an aesthetic debt to my favorite actresses: Liv Ullmann, Setsuko Hara, Gena Rowlands, Monica Vitti, Hanna Schygulla, and the films of theirs I like best, respectively: Cries & Whispers, The Idiot, Love Streams, Red Desert (which made me laugh), The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (which made me cry).
Further, my thanks are due to Jackie Ko, Dan Meyer, Tash Aw, Ben Metcalf, KJ Lee, Nancy Koe, Kirsten Tan, and the Strand bookstore, whereupon in the fine-art photography aisle, searching for Nan Goldin’s “Heart-Shaped Bruise,” I was waylaid instead by one faithful Alfred Eisenstaedt monograph containing the curious picture (and its kinetic twin) that would begin (and end) this all.
To consort in closing with the sentimental studium of Barthes in Camera Lucida:
The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.
A Note About the Author
Amanda Lee Koe was the fiction editor of Esquire Singapore, an honorary fellow of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and the youngest winner of the Singapore Literature Prize for the story collection Ministry of Moral Panic. Her working manuscript for Delayed Rays of a Star won the Henfield Prize, awarded to the best work of fiction by a graduating MFA candidate at Columbia University. Born in Singapore, she lives in New York. This is her first novel.
What’s next on
your reading list?
Discover your next
great read!
Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.
Sign up now.
Delayed Rays of a Star Page 40