If you’ve got nothing else going on, swing down to the KGB bar at 85 E. 4th Street at 7:00 tonight to hear short stories read by Matt McHugh, M. M. De Voe and me.
Here’s a teaser of the one I’ll be reading tonight, which appears in the new anthology, The Best of The First Line: Editors’ Picks 2002-2006.
I was born Rosa Carlotta Silvana Grisanti, but in the mid-Eighties, I legally changed my name to Eve. As you have guessed in your letter, after the shocking affair of the Dutch steamship Friesland, my dear friends Dr. Watson and Mr. Sherlock Holmes suggested that my safest course of action would be to distance myself from my family.
But I get ahead of my story; I have not Dr. Watson’s gift for explaining Mr. Holmes’s methods, and I fear your wish that I relay the particulars of this strange case may be met with inadequate measures.
On the twelfth of October, 1887, I was being taken by the steamship Friesland from our home on the Venetian isle of Murano to Africa; there to meet my betrothed, Hans Boerwinkle, a man several years my senior with whom my father had very recently made arrangements. Living as we do now, in the nineteen-twenties, it is difficult to remember what a sheltered life we girls led forty years ago, but at the time it seemed natural that my brother, Orazio Rinaldo Paride Grisanti, escorted me as chaperone.
Did I mention it’s a bar? Fiction and drinks, can you ask for a better combo?
Gee, that sounds familiar! 😉
Have a great reading!
I thought it might.
I so wish I could be there, but the subway ride from Boston won’t get me there until tomorrow. Happy reading. It sounds like a wonderful story.
Break a leg.
SamA