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The Scab on his Left Knee
We’d bunked off school that afternoon. Me and Pauline were lying in the tall grass. Henry was sitting away, with his back to us. For ages I looked, at his dark hair, deep black, almost purple, like a crow, and the whiteness of his neck, like ice-cold milk. His head was down, and he was…
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Lemon Perfume
One time after school, I’d gone back to Yvonne’s place. We sat in the living room, watching television. Mrs Morelli brought us cups of tea and slices of fruit cake on a tray decorated with labels from Italian liquor bottles. After she’d put the tray onto the coffee table, she lit a cigarette with the…
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Meat
We were in a seafood restaurant. Herman was chewing a mussel, over and over. I asked him if it was okay. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s tough. Like meat. I want to spit it.’ ‘Then spit it,’ I said. I looked around for him. ‘No one’s watching us.’ ‘A pity,’ he said. Why, he asked, did…
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It was called Cassidy’s (excerpt)
I was over at Sam Disher’s place last Friday night. I walk past his house every day after work, and that evening, because of the heat, I’d picked up as many bottles of beer as I could carry. They were clanking around in the bags as I walked, straining the plastic, and he was standing…
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The Ministry Man (excerpt)
Of course, I was just holding out for adventure. I had a filmic view of the world, taken from watching movies on television with my mother. I tended to leave the room before the endings—I dreaded the sudden shift from film-world to reality. So I learned to love the snatches more than the whole. To…
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Barry Lee Thompson 