workspace - Lower Manhattan Cultural Council

May 2012
SAMUEL LEADER
Samuel Leader grew up in the UK and France. He holds a BA in Philosophy and Modern Languages
from Oxford and an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Irvine. From 2009-2010, he was a fellow at the
Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Leader is working on a novel entitled Dust, featuring, among
other things, a goldfinch, a missing woman, and an aged demographer on trial for crimes against
humanity.
Excerpt from Dust, a novel in progress
Perhaps now is the time to tell your shouting wife that someone
you both love - let us say, for the sake of economy, at least, that
this someone is your daughter; and let us say that she has been
missing for some time and no one has been able to find her, despite
her cloud of hair that is bright orange and her eyes that are
zinc-blue and her outlandish clothes and her tendency also
to shout - that someone you love is, for certain, dead, but
there are no words in you to tell your wife this, and when your
silence proves unending your wife says she is going out. She
will not be back for lunch. There is some leftover choucroutte
on the kitchen counter, she says. She is going to Mass to
pray for the children in Rwanda, then to the Bingo, then to
Chantal’s to get her hair done, and then to Hyper-U, where
there is a special on oysters. She is in the mood for oysters.
The door slams (she always slams it) and you are alone in the
house.
You are alone in the house and you do not know what to do
with your body, nor with the news – so cumbersome - that your
daughter is dead, so after pacing for a while you do various
things merely not to do nothing - go to the kitchen and sweep the tiles; wash the plates from breakfast
that your wife has left in the sink; put some of that left-over choucroutte on your plate - but these things
you do, even as you do them, strike you also as superfluous, and you feel guilty for these acts that are not
relevant to your daughter, whom perhaps you did not love correctly, and you stand up and look around at
the things in the kitchen – the crumb-strewn terracotta tiles; the branch of bay leaves dangling over the
black stove; the stove itself; the row of white mugs with blue polkadots on the pegs above the sink; the
porcelain figurine of a greyhound on top of the sarcophagal fridge; the nesting stack of jade-green pots
with white polkadots on the pine sideboard (your wife has an affinity for polkadots) – the particularity of
everything you see offends you and, like all this gratuitous stuff in the kitchen, the things that you did
and still are doing that are not relevant to your daughter (who is dead now, you must remind yourself;
who is nobody; whose corpse is divided, perhaps, into little rotting pieces) – for instance you were tired
so you took a nap; you were restless so you read an article in yesterday’s egg-stained newspaper; you
are hungry so you went to the kitchen to eat some leftover choucroutte; you were bored and agitated
so you swept the kitchen tiles; you were upset so you cried, and prayed - these acts now feel to you like
physical things, actual and protuberant; they are decorations festooning a ship’s stern – the intricate gilded
scrollwork, garlands, emblems, balustrades, coats of arms, the mermaid figurehead with jutting breasts - and
as you stand there in the kitchen amidst the profusion of your things and your acts not relevant to the dead
person you loved, you feel giddy, the ship will keel under the weight of its pretty ornamentation, and you
look down at your plate and regard the cold fat sausage and little heap of sauerkraut with an
inkling of disgust.
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