If you’ve got nothing else going on, swing down to the KGB bar at 85 E. 4th Street at 7:00 tonight to hear short stories read by Matt McHugh, M. M. De Voe and me.

Here’s a teaser of the one I’ll be reading tonight, which appears in the new anthology, The Best of The First Line: Editors’ Picks 2002-2006.

I was born Rosa Carlotta Silvana Grisanti, but in the mid-Eighties, I legally changed my name to Eve. As you have guessed in your letter, after the shocking affair of the Dutch steamship Friesland, my dear friends Dr. Watson and Mr. Sherlock Holmes suggested that my safest course of action would be to distance myself from my family.

But I get ahead of my story; I have not Dr. Watson’s gift for explaining Mr. Holmes’s methods, and I fear your wish that I relay the particulars of this strange case may be met with inadequate measures.

On the twelfth of October, 1887, I was being taken by the steamship Friesland from our home on the Venetian isle of Murano to Africa; there to meet my betrothed, Hans Boerwinkle, a man several years my senior with whom my father had very recently made arrangements. Living as we do now, in the nineteen-twenties, it is difficult to remember what a sheltered life we girls led forty years ago, but at the time it seemed natural that my brother, Orazio Rinaldo Paride Grisanti, escorted me as chaperone.

Did I mention it’s a bar? Fiction and drinks, can you ask for a better combo?

I knocked off work around 9:00 so I could catch up with the folks who’d gone to the Shirley Jackson reading tonight. The Puppet Kitchen is on the same street so I’d actually gone over at 7:00 to hear the reading, but it was too crowded to get in. Later I heard that there were seats up front. It’s just as well, I suppose, since I was able to get some work done.

Plus, it meant I could join the gang for Chinese food afterwards. I had the colon in my bag. Nick Kaufman asked to see it (blame him) so I hauled it out and made it say hello. Strangely, people found this disturbing. I can’t imagine why.