Prose Archives | Giramondo Publishing

Paris, 2006: The gloom is thick and slow as suet, glutinous on eyeballs, eyeballs out on sticks already, in fact.

Of all the things I took to the front for Ukrainian soldiers, the most important was a kilogram of freshly roasted coffee from a hipster coffee house in the centre of Uzhhorod.

There was a kind of shuffling about. People looked uneasy, as though a crime were about to be committed. Somebody coughed as sirens sounded in the distance, then an old woman who looked as though she had been asleep, her head back and her mouth open, took up the skein of talk like a trout after a fly.

It was my turn to hold her. I wrapped her in the special stuff. Then he wrapped us both in the special stuff, leaving a corner untucked to fold himself into.

I’ve said it several times, both in public and in private: I do not lead an interesting life. Though many would say that my field of action, as the Detective called it, is fiction, I’ve always secretly believed that my field, my action, belongs to poetry.

Dear editor, The problem isn’t that the young desire to do wrong but, often, their inability to separate right from wrong. This ability arrives only with a sense of consequences, which is linked to an idea of time. The young cannot imagine a time outside their time.

I arrive at the doctor’s office early in the morning. I have forgotten my mask and ask for one at the front desk. Then I take a seat in the waiting room, which looks like a professionally managed Airbnb. Exposed light bulbs and plastic ivy hang from the roof. There is a pink neon sign on the wall that says, in cursive, ‘better together’.

It comes back to me that I married K. because he whistled Bach perfectly – that was, as I remember, the reason I gave myself and others. It’s as good a basis as any for marriage and I was not disappointed.

The last months of his life were a race against time, yet he maintained an abundant and cheerful correspondence, imagining, for example, a quiet life in an outback town, reading HEAT, drinking beer and brushing away flies.

On the seventh dune we stopped, searched, and found the plant. It was almost anticlimactic to see it extending out of the red crest of dune. A pale, unremarkable-looking shrub with small bell-shaped flowers.

The rain was merely a gauze, a softening of the early autumn air, but now and again Ruth saw a young mother dart out from her avidly talking group to bend over her child, to pull up and settle a hood of yellow, scarlet, or cobalt blue.

To place a bet on the Booker Prize, I had to leave the bright noise of Finchley Road and walk down lurid, carpeted stairs, past a row of old men whose faces were lit by flickering TV screens, and across to a perspex counter. A young woman with spiky pink hair stared at me impassively.

I don’t know much about cheese, but I know what I like. Crumbly wensleydale. Comté. Provolone. Taleggio. Stilton. Cumin-studded leyden. Sage derby…

March: The days very still and very hot. The light dusted over the city. No one called, no one came. Very pleased with the silence.

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Prose

On not seeing Worstward Ho!

Roasted Uganda

Brief Lives

Special Stuff

Death Takes Me

Dear Editor

Father Figures

Journal 2004–2005

In Memoriam Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003)

Trading Stories

Project! Project!

How Prizes Work in the Literary Economy

Still Life With Cheese

Journal I