In our continuing coverage of the work of Russell Bittner, we now present the second chapter of the novella Something Special. Click here to read chapter one, or continue below:
]]>Not even two weeks later, I’m sitting next to Angie as we begin our decent into San Francisco’s international airport. She snores like a marmot, her head wedged in between the headrest and the window and about as far away from mine as she could possibly have put it. I might, of course, take advantage—but I’m no dentist; which is to say, I like mine alive, alert, fully conscious. Still, I can appreciate skylines as much as the next guy, and San Francisco’s got a good one. I lean over Angie to look out the window, but get bogged down in the scenery most immediately below. My-oh-my… buttons have been popped in the eagerness, I suppose, of firm young lungs to breathe some California air. The view is breath-taking—yet not so overwhelming that I fail to notice once again her honeyed scent. The smell—dare I say?—is divine.
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.
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