Thrust: A Novel

Strewn across my desk on cream-colored parchments, my own drawings stare back at me: designs in red Conté crayon, at once regal and sublime and then mocking, like specters who materialize only to laugh at my incompetence before they dissolve into abstraction again. I cannot seem to find the form. The body. In the dim piss-yellow light of my office, my project demands a design: a sculpture like no other. A monument to the Franco-American alliance. I push the failed drawings aside until I uncover Aurora’s most recent letter. I close my eyes. I smell it. Ocean water and the faintest hint of lavender. And perhaps dirt.

Sometimes I think my relationship with my cousin Aurora is like the relationship France has with America. She has always inspired me and simultaneously challenged me. So it is fortuitous, and both exciting and frightening, that we will reconnect as a result of my work. When I open one of her letters, for a moment, I want to cross oceans of time and water to reach her. When I open her letters, I have to sit down. I smell the envelopes, eager for hints of her, of lavender and skin. My hands shake as I open the envelope.