Read the beginning of Chapter 2 from Death as a Side Effect by Ana María Shua, Translated by Andrea G. Labinger:

"The telephone woke me like a scream. It was my father. It was nighttime. I called a taxi. There are several dangerous blocks between his house and mine, but in an armored car, I felt safe. Taxis are little fortresses on wheels, one of the few trustworthy institutions we’ve got left.

Until a few years ago, you could still walk in the city. When we started seeing each other, I allowed myself to dream that one day we would walk along the street together, that one day you wouldn’t mind being seen in public with me. I even imagined holding your hand on some solitary stroll, caressing your short, delicate fingers, the sensitive oval of your fingernails. You didn’t like your hands; you thought they were too small: you used to spread out your fi ngers, displaying them for me, comparing them with the size of your palms, criticizing their shortness. You didn’t like them, but to me, your childlike hands on my chest were so beautiful—deceitful, touching, and perfect: yours.

To walk together. We could still do it, if you wanted to. Not just at shopping centers or in guarded neighborhoods: there are many walking tracks in the city, secured places that pretend to be ordinary neighborhoods where, for a modest fee, it’s possible to wear yourself out walking, passing infinite—or finite—landscapes, almost real. Almost. Just like those artificial substitutes that replace natural foods. Good enough for those who never knew any different, and for them, even better than the Real Thing.

I’m getting old.

My father’s voice on the phone sounded terrified. No way to know if he was pretending. Whenever I see him, I can almost always tell; years of living with him have taught me to detect the difference, but his voice confuses me—it’s too much like mine. Mama was there, as always, and so was his secret physician, as old and nasty as my father, and for that very reason quite trustworthy as long as their interests coincided. Never trust a decent man, my father taught me: he’ll always be ready to betray you just to keep his conscience clear.

When I’m not driving, the motion of cars puts me to sleep. Even during that short trip, I fell asleep. The screeching of brakes jolted me awake. There we were at Goransky’s studio, and already, from a prudent distance, the security guards were pointing their weapons at us. Logy with sleep, I had asked the taxi driver to take me there as quickly as possible. It’s the address I repeat most often—except for my own—whenever I climb into a taxi. My last workplace. From outside, you can’t see the vines.

You’d never guess what my job is with Goransky. You might think he hired me as a makeup artist for his new film project, and you’d be right, but only partially. That’s how our relationship began. I have a surprise for you: I’m Goransky’s latest—but not his last—scriptwriter.

At first the opportunity struck me as very strange. Every morning, I’d look in the mirror and think that my life had begun again: I was going to work on a film script. I think naïve enthusiasm was what kept me going afterward. You know how much movies mean to me. How many times did we recite movie plots to each other, happily entertaining ourselves with stories that were so unlike our own poor, limited one?

How pretentious of me! To think you’d remember my words, my gestures, my enthusiasm, as vividly as I remember the exact shade of your eyes, like dark honey, nearly transparent in the sunlight, almost black when shadow and desire widened your pupils.

I know, you don’t need to interrupt me: I was about to tell you what happened last night when my father phoned me, terrified or maybe just pretending to be terrified. But there are so many hours of my life that I could never tell you about, so I don’t care if I sound disconnected or digressive now, tugging at the fragile thread of my story till its resistance—or yours—weakens. For many years I lived only to tell you what was happening in my life, and my every action or thought was transformed, at the very moment it was happening, into the words I would use to describe it to you, as though including you in my story like that, even just as a listener, could somehow make all the randomness and confusion coherent and give meaning to the chaos of reality. Later on, for years after you’d gone, I gave in to that chaos, to the muck of history. I let the amorphous material we call life—or the memory of life— accumulate, knowing it can only be shaped in the telling, by choosing, sorting, or by introducing a cleverly encoded disorder whose key is given to the listener, the reader. I know you’re probably eager to find out more, right now, about my father’s urgent phone call, but I’m not going to tell you anything just yet. This is a deliberate digression."