When I was a young man living in Paris, I found myself walking down the street next to an attractive woman. When she asked me for a light, I recognized her: Juliette Binoche! Her film BLEU had just come out, and she was in the early days of becoming one of the most famous actresses in the world–especially in France. There was only one problem: I didn’t have a light, because I didn’t smoke.
This has haunted me for decades. A few months ago, I finally wrote a story about it, set in a more perfect world where the protagonist finds a box of matches in his pocket. The characters and situations are all fictitious, but the original encounter was authentic.
This story, MATCHES, just came out in Oxford University’s literary journal, The Vanity Papers.
