Eula by Deesha Philyaw, 2017
The magic trick:
A solution that in fact is just a new conflict
We wish you a happy new year 2025 with a trip back in time to New Year’s Eve 1999. Caroletta and her childhood friend Eula are celebrating in a hotel room as they have each NYE for the last 10 years.
The nature of this celebration – and yes, it is a sexual relationship for at least one day a year – remains a secret in both women’s regular lives. So it should be sweet that they have found a solution, temporary and limited as it is, in each other. But instead that would-be solution is in reality an even bigger conflict. They don’t see the situation in similar ways. One wants it to be more than New Year’s Eve. One wants to pretend that even New Year’s Eve isn’t really what it appears.
It’s heartbreaking for the reader as we are forced to see the conflicts sit unresolved and in some ways only multiply.
And that’s quite a trick on Philyaw’s part.
The selection:
In the end, both Eula and Reese got a surprise that night. Their romantic dinner at a rooftop restaurant (the original surprise) was interrupted by Reese’s estranged wife.
Later, when Eula called to tell me what had happened, her fury just about leaped through the phone. I sat up in bed, listening, eating my second bowl of gumbo – with okra – another woman’s husband snoring lightly beside me.
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