Netsuke (13 page)
Authors: Rikki Ducornet
19
AKIKO HAS FINISHED her triptych and begins to prepare the entire show for the photographer and framer. For weeks she has been thinking about what she needs to say to him for weeks, what she needs to know. She calls him. She says, I am wanting to talk; I am ready to talk. She proposes they meet in town for dinner. She says: Vietnamese? Yes, he says. O.K. Vietnamese. And he offers to pick her up at home. She agrees. Off they go together in the Studebaker.
The Vietnamese is on a busy intersection, just off a major highway. Tonight the traffic is even heavier than usual, resolute, rageful. Death sings within his skull like a knife of ice within a tempest. When the light turns yellow he accelerates. When it turns red he tears into the unspooling highway, smack into the thick of it. When Akiko screams, her voice is as thin as any creature’s struck down in the silence of the wood.
The author of eight novels as well as collections of short stories, essays, and poems, Rikki Ducornet has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, honored twice by the Lannan Foundation, and the recipient of an Academy Award in Literature. Widely published abroad, Ducornet is also a painter who exhibits internationally. She lives in Port Townsend, Washington.
COLOPHON
Netsuke
was designed at Coffee House Press, in the historic Grain Belt Brewery’s Bottling House near downtown Minneapolis. The text is set in Spectrum.
FUNDER ACKNOWLEDGMENT
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19