Book of Wings excerpt

By Tawhida Tanya Evanson

PARIS IN THE SPRINGTIME

Today I left my lover for a room with a view. He had trouble managing his time

travel with me. It took only a few days for him to pack up and sail on—two wings, un

oiseau. He was careful, came with intention but left no seed. We dive like birds, even

into shit.

Outside the window, pigeons picked at invisible morsels on rue St-Jacques. Invasion

took flight. Overcast sky that morning in the Latin Quarter. I took unsettled steps

down the steep, winding, velvet staircase at l’Hotel de Médicis without ever looking

back. How could I? My heart lay burst on the horizon, a red ocean haemorrhage; it

was Paris in the springtime.

Did he think I would remain under such conditions? On our final night I chose to

sleep on the wooden floor of our dusty room, waiting for daylight, waiting for the

descent into Hell. I listened for Guan or Hausa voices to come save me, prayers of

redemption, otherworldly African women to chant around my tomb. All I got were

the heated moans of a woman making love in a nearby room.

My vulva pulsed. I touched myself when Shams went out that morning before the

flood. I hadn’t finished by the time he returned and resented him for it. In his

outstretched hands, a bouquet of roses the colour of cowardice—as if this would lift

my spirits beyond our departures.

In a blunt second, Shams had aged a decade. Barely twenty-nine with wrinkles on

the forehead now pronounced, a furrowed brow of doubt, the face of a guilt

complex. There was no concealing a human being in supplication for falling out of

love. Who knows how the heart moves, until it stops moving towards you. I did not

see it coming. What do you do when the object of your love disappears in plain

sight? Love lifts and is itself, a veil, said a voice from the other side of the story. This

is the difference between rose-coloured and a hit of direct sun.

Shams left for a moment to use the bathroom in the hall and I finished myself off

outside of him quick, deep, for the first time without him in over a year—my own

unfamiliar finger between the legs.

In the end, I left the room because so little of him was still in it. The only part that

mattered had disappeared. I left the roses behind because l'odeur de la mort était

insupportable. Walked out into the cloudy fifth arrondissement. A late April

morning, 2002. There are three versions of this story: mine, his and the Truth.