"What I Have Been Doing Since I Was Last With You" by Isabell Serafin was published in PANK last September. Along with being able to read this pretty short story, you can listen to the author read it aloud (which aside from being a nice, bonus feature, helped me in this particular story as there are some Vietnamese words that I was definitely not pronouncing correctly when I read the story to myself).
Serafin writes this particular story, which is one where the protagonist does pretty much what the title details, tells her former lover what she's been doing the past two years, since he left her (something not in the title, but detailed within, though I think Serafin makes it pretty clear early on that the choice was not the protonigist's).
It begins:
I have been married. I have been divorced. I have been pregnant, since I was last with you.
I have sat on the banks of Hoan Kiem Lake in the afternoon–the lake in Hanoi’s Old Quarter, whose waters are a mysterious moss green.
There is something about the clipped off nature of the sentences, their abruptness, their distance, that allowed me to not be surprised when some two-thirds of the way through the story she notes that the person this story is being written to was the one that broke off the previous relationship. There's also a great distance in the fact that there's that whole first sentence that never gets looked into again--no more mention of the marriage, the divorce, nor the pregnancy.
The story goes on to, explore seems a bit much but I suppose it works, explore a new relationship, one with a Russian man, a man married with children, that the protagonist is in. There's a line though that I believe captures this relationship perfectly:
He holds me close as we walk back to his room, down hallways attired in chinoiserie furniture and vibrant purple orchids doomed to live what remains of their short lives in vases.
These purple orchids and their doom is how I see the woman's current state and I love the way that Serafin slides it into the story in a subtle manner, while describing a hallway. Subtle is a word I'd use to describe her writing, and I mean that in a very positive way. This story will stick with me and have me remembering Isabell Serafin's name as one to look for in Tables of Contents from now on.
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