Face: A Novel of the Anthropocene - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jaspreet Singh's short pieces have appeared in Granta, Brick, Walrus, Zoetrope, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and the New York Times. He is the author of the novels Helium, Chef, and Face; the story collection Seventeen Tomatoes; the poetry collections November and How to Hold a Pebble; and the memoir My Mother, My Translator. He is a recipient of several awards and has been translated into many languages. He lives in Calgary, the traditional territory and home to the diverse Indigenous peoples such as: Niitsitapi, Siksika, Kainai, Piikuni, Tsuut'ina, Métis, Îyâxe Nakoda. You can find him online at jaspreetsinghauthor.com

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When I see a child playing with plastic dinosaurs these days the tape of memory starts rolling. Our kitchen window had a little hole slightly bigger than three swollen fingers, and through that hole a squirrel would make its way in. My parents asked a carpenter to block the hole with a piece of plastic, and from that day on the one-eyed squirrel and I would look at each other’s faces for long periods of time through plastic.

The squirrel was trying to say something to me. I understood completely. It needed my help. But I could not help, not even in a small way.

I have never looked at a human face from so close and for so long. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that it only happened once. Only once did I look at a human face the way I had looked at the squirrel and there was no glass partition or plastic between us. I don’t know about you, but for me things that only happen once feel as if they simply did not happen.

***

The lights turned red again and a few random people in a downtown street—the ones who got clogged on one side, the ones who made a slight effort—might have witnessed something strange going on inside the second floor of a building. Their eyes might have rested on two women inside. Perhaps for a brief unhurried second.

The women were sitting anomalously close to each other, not saying a word, not gesturing, simply staring at each other’s faces. Both were at once the observer and the observed. Two strangers who had just met.

They did not even know each other’s names; so far neither one of them was aware that within the next fifty-one days one of them was going to die.

—From Face