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Have a little faith

15 Oct 2006

He picked up that particular file because: you know how it is. Small publishers are a funny, superstitious sort. Just normal, human superstitions, really, but amplified by the quandaries they find themselves in. Si flattered himself, though, that his own rituals were like a sailor's. He had the metaphors all set up for any given dinner party—though he himself hadn't given a dinner party for years, because he had worked out early on that you couldn't drink and cook, not to the full enjoyment of both, anyway; one or the other suffered.

All flesh is grass

17 Jul 2005

That it was called a contract, Gavin mused, was no coincidence. As he thought of it, beyond the piece of paper lying inert in his filing upstairs to the thing in itself, he saw the agreement as something tightening around him, first a starched collar, then manacles, then stocks, then a noose. On the phone to Eleanor, friend since school, he made the mistake of confiding a fraction of this, and she replied:

"Gavin, come on. That's pathetic."

Who dares

13 Jul 2005

"What does it feel like, Stevie?" asked Dan from a thousand million miles away.

Stevie thought: I am lighter than air; I am helium. I am the thermodynamic tail that breaks free of the earth's grip. Whoof. He said: "Oh, wow."

"That good?" he or someone else heard Dan or someone else again say.

You are what you eat (IV)

31 Mar 2005

It hadn't worked. Carbolic soap didn't smell how it used to, somehow. It was at once too pungent and too weak, sweetened with something. Probably a last-ditch effort to sell it to anyone who wasn't twice Amanda's age, she thought. Maybe it only ever smelt right on her dad. Downhearted, she finished washing her face with a squirt of something moisturising and, after a pause, dropped the soap into the bin.

You are what you eat (III)

19 Mar 2005

She'd never rung her sister. There was little point ringing her these days. A quick e-mail—"on nites til sat week may be ring then? Cxx"—or an even more garbled text would deflect conversation for another month or two. It was an ongoing game, with the last round indefinitely postponed. Who would crack first, and lose by going to visit the other? For a week or two, Amanda kept her sister's name on a mental list, but eventually it was swept away by the day-to-day and forgotten.

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