My sister Zoe, a travel writer, had just returned to New York City from Tel-Aviv or Riga or St. Petersburg when somebody told her I had three months left to live. The news struck Zoe as rather odd: nobody at the headquarters of the travel publishing firm where we both work could trace the source of this information or venture a guess as to the cause of my impending death, and Zoe is not the one to believe uncorroborated rumors. She brushed the idea aside, and proceeded doing business as usual: finished her report on the latest adventure, ordered new custom luggage from Signe Mou on Fifth Avenue, and went out for lunch with her boss, our chief editor Karen Everest. Karen is Zoe’s boss only nominally; in fact, Zoe herself hired and trained Karen during her own brief stint as the chief at Kongo-Roo.

The job kept her stationed in New York for several months at a time—it was the longest period of time Zoe had spent in one place since college, and she almost single-handedly caused the demise of this 100-year old organization driving everybody crazy with her constant flow of ideas for radical change. It was she who opened our surprisingly successful West Coast office (hiring me as a technical editor), and immediately attempted to do the same in China and Ireland, I think. When those ventures almost bankrupted the company, Zoe announced that she was a travel writer at heart and turned her position over to Karen. They say that after two and a half years of tenure my sister’s office had remained a bare white-walled room without a single picture or personal item.

 

Silent Signs features a painting by Gay Degani.  Read the rest here.  Read more about Olga Zilberbourg and Gay Degani.  You can also click here to read another story by Olga in The Writer’s Eye magazine.