The Host Family
“Novalis 2025” by Milena Makani
The bookshelf is the first thing Sim notices. Eighteen feet high, color-coded in rows of red, yellow, green, and blue. A monument to taste, or its illusion. She’s here on a fellowship, one wrapped in glossy brochures and talk of global citizenship. Her high school counselor had called it a rare opportunity for someone her age, almost unheard of. Around her, the host family scrolls and squints at their phones, barely noticing each other. Least of all her. No one reads the books.
A week in, they throw her a party. “To welcome you,” they say. Guests in linen ask if her people use utensils, if they marry for love or for duty. Sim smiles. Practiced, pleasant. Just enough. The mother, cheeks stiff with filler, poses by the blue shelf, matching her dress.
The party ends. The aftertaste lingers. Sim had come expecting exchange, not display. After the guests leave, she can’t help herself. She slips a yellow book into the reds, savoring the discord. Then a green among the oranges, a blue in the whites. A quiet sabotage. A flicker of control.
The mother doesn’t rise the next morning. Sim steps outside, where people rush by, leaving behind Instapots, sweaters, stuffed animals, and paperbacks on stoops. By the time she returns, the stoops are bare.
“Did you enjoy the party?” the mother asks, her eyes on the kale salad.
“Yes.” Sim drags her fork across the plate. The scrape makes Sim flinch.
“You were a hit. Everyone said how articulate you sounded.”
“Your bookshelf is impressive,” Sim says.
“Oh, thanks. We were going for timeless.”
“Do you read them?”
“All kinds of things. I try to stay open.”
Later, the mother is absorbed in episode #87 of a poorly dubbed serial. Sim watches, wondering if she will notice the rearranged books. She doesn’t. A gin and tonic slips from her fingers. Sim catches it, hands trembling, resisting the urge to let it fall.
That night, Sim finishes a Ferrante novel and copies a line into her notebook: The circle of an empty day is brutal. Below it, she writes: No shit.
The next morning, the mother lies on the sofa in a cheerful pink robe, a half-eaten avocado browning beside her. Sim slips out, Ferrante under her coat, and leaves it on a stoop beside Velcro sneakers. A squirrel sniffs the cover, then darts off. By the time she returns, the book is gone.
It becomes routine. Long walks. Books in small heaps. Sim rearranges the shelf daily now, daring someone to notice. No one does. She delights in the quiet redistribution.
The mother reaches episode #107. The father returns with roses wrapped in cellophane. They kiss. Sim hears their argument through the drywall.
“I want to come next time,” the mother says.
“Who’ll watch Sim?” the father asks.
“It was your idea,” she replies.
The next day, Sim stuffs four paperbacks into her bag and slips out, walking past stilettos and a blender still in its box. She drops the books onto a curb. A man with a limp scoops them up and leads her to a crooked bookstand. His prices are scribbled on cardboard: Paperbacks $2, Hardcovers $5, Rare $10+.
He scans her face, guesses her accent, and rattles off facts about her country, offering her a milk crate to sit on. He talks too much. She lets him.
People come and go, discussing Hemingway or the corrupt mayor. The vendor, a veteran with a coveted license, entertains them all. Maybe he’s lonely.
She brings more: gilded hardcovers, ghostwritten memoirs, history books full of hype. Sim waits for the family to notice the thinning shelf. Nothing. She could strip it bare, and they’d still ask for a picture.
“You get it,” the vendor says one afternoon. “Not like the rest. Let me buy you a drink.”
She stops going. He means well. She’s just done.
Now she reads in the park, books she has no intention of returning.
A week later, she spots the host parents at the bookstand and ducks into a deli. She watches through the window, beside a rack of beef jerky: spicy teriyaki, two for $5. The vendor gestures like a magician. The mother laughs, head thrown back. The father stands stiffly, arms behind him. Sim touches her chest, checking she hasn’t vanished. She imagines their bookshelf collapsing – the colored rows crashing to the floor, a pile of curated dust. Instead, she snatches a pack of Mike & Ikes and walks away.
That night, at dinner, the host parents are animated.
“It’s criminal, the way we treat veterans,” the father says, placing a thick WWII hardcover on the table.
“We bought a few things. Doing our part,” the mother adds.
They display their haul: a Picasso monograph, the Ferrantes she had left out, a glossy travel guide that calls her country a “living museum.”
“Would you sign it?” the mother asks, smiling as though it were a gift.
The next morning, Sim clears out an entire section of light blue. Fiction, nonfiction, it doesn’t matter. Her backpack strains, the weight pulling at her shoulders.
“Hello, stranger,” the vendor says, cheerful as ever.
She dumps twenty-one books onto the table. The crate creaks but holds. He launches into a war story involving a dog, one she’s heard before. Sometimes the dog survives. Sometimes it doesn’t. Cities and names shift, depending on who’s listening.
“That story isn’t yours,” she says.
He shrugs. “They like me better when they think it is.”
She stands. Her legs ache. She smooths her coat and walks away. The vendor waves, already mid-story with a passerby. The city hums with sirens, barking dogs, broken chairs. A coffee maker labeled Works. Jars of screws and nails. The scent of exhaust. Objects in transit. She’s one of them.
Tomorrow, she’ll bring more books. Not the travel guide. That one she’ll keep, for now. She’ll rewrite it, invent customs and rituals, and then mail it back.
They’ll thank her. Frame it. Quote it at the next party.
That’s the worst part.
About the author
Rachana Pathak is a Nepali American writer and longtime New Yorker who has spent more than twenty years navigating bureaucracy, standing up for workers, and trying to make city government a little more human. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at City College, where she’s learning to shape that work into story.
about the artist
Milena Makani, born in 1984 in Sofia, Bulgaria, is a German contemporary artist based in London, UK. Marked by gestural, expressionist, and lyrical abstraction, Makani’s deeply psychological paintings depict inner landscapes characterized by layered textures, fluid forms, gradients and contrasts. Employing acrylics, watercolours and inks on mineral stone paper, she blends control and spontaneity through the interplay of intention, organic process and manipulation. Makani lives with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a chronic, incurable condition and the source of constant pain and various disabilities. In a therapeutic, transformative process, her works address the visceral, cerebral and spiritual to channel mindfulness, gratitude and energy amid the complexities of the human condition, as she investigates themes of resilience, serenity, isolation, joy, stoicism and fragility. The German artist has exhibited her work in the United Kingdom and Bulgaria and her paintings feature in various private collections in the United Kingdom, United States, Germany, Bulgaria and Canada.