The Voice Behind Her Ear

Elena is forty-four, a freelance copywriter in Benimaclet, Valencia, with a husband who swims at seven, three children, a mother who sews for the falleras, and a voice that has sat behind her left ear since she was fifteen. It is polite, formal and exhausting, and its whole purpose is to keep her from being hurt: by writing, by failing, by being read.

Then, one hot September night, Elena opens a laptop and starts the story she has been not-writing for twenty-nine years, with a deadline of 15 January for a short-story contest at the Ateneo.

She writes in the ninety-minute windows she negotiates with her family, under a borrowed pseudonym, beside a grandmother's saints' calendar, a neighbor who watches her sheets at night, and a novelist-juror who is far too interested in her pages. La Voz argues, counts, schedules catastrophes at three in the morning and, little by little, loses the argument.

Elena has to decide what she is willing to hand to a stranger on a tram, and what it costs to press "send".