Wildalone (53 page)
Authors: Krassi Zourkova
“Then don't interpret. Just tell me what you see.”
He kept looking at the sky. In the distance, the sun was starting to rise above the water.
You helped my sister kill him, yet now refuse to help me?
I didn't say it out loud, but with him that was just as well.
“My help wouldn't change the outcome for you any more than it did for her. When there's a will, there's a way. Isn't this what you humans say?”
I thought he would leave it at thatâvague, as usual. But he added:
“The thing about mankind's wisdom is, it often misses the point. Your sister, for example, had more will than anyone could hope for. And yet she failed to achieve what she wanted.”
With that, he turned me around. I saw a familiar building against the silhouettes of trees and distant hills. The same haphazard arrangement of stones, the terrace overlooking the sea: a replica of the Tsarevo church, but older.
“I shall be seeing you again soon, Theia Nymph of the Moon and the Sun . . .”
He held the door open for me. Inside, a familiar table stretched all the way to a stone fireplace from where the vastness of Procter Hall extended out toward the vestibule.
“So this really
is
a church! Only nobody knows itâ”
But he was gone. Through the door behind me, all I could see was the golf course, the fence of Wyman House, and . . . night! Everything outside was now dark. How could it not be? While the morning sun was already rising over Greece, hereâon a college campus that had become my home halfway across the globeâthe night was just beginning.
A natural-born storyteller,
KRASSI ZOURKOVA
grew up in Bulgaria and moved to the United States to study art history at Princeton. After college, she graduated from Harvard Law School and has been practicing finance law in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, where she currently lives. Her poems have appeared in various literary journals, and her essay “Book Collecting in the Absence of Books,” about compiling a personal library under Communist censorship, won first prize in essay contests at Princeton and Harvard.
Wildalone
is her first novel.
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Cover design by Amanda Kain
Cover photographs © by Vic Pigula/Getty Images
Map by Danae Blackburn
Excerpt in
Chapter 14.
from Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Birth of Tragedy
, trans. Ian Johnston (Arlington, VA: Richer Resources Publications, 2009), accessed online August 22, 2014. https://archive.org/stream/BirthOfTragedy/bitrad_djvu.txt.
Art used throughout by Marina99/Shutterstock, Inc.
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
WILDALONE
. Copyright © 2015 by Krassi Zourkova. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-232802-1
EPub Edition January 2015 ISBN 9780062328045
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