from I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings
by Maya Angelou
"What you looking at me for?
I didn't come to stay . . ."
I hadn't so much forgot as I couldn't bring myself to remember. Other things were more important.
"What you looking at me for?
I didn't come to stay . . ."
Whether I could remember the rest of the poem or not was immaterial. The truth of the statement was like a
wadded-up handkerchief, sopping wet in my fists, and the sooner they accepted it the quicker I could let my hands
open and the air would cool my palms.
"What you looking at me for . . . ?"
The children's section of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church was wiggling and giggling over my well-known
forgetfulness.
The dress I wore was lavender taffeta, and each time I breathed it rustled, and now that I was sucking in air to
breathe out shame it sounded like crepe paper on the back of hearses.
As I'd watched Momma put ruffles on the hem and cute little tucks around the waist, I knew that once I put it on I'd
look like a movie star. (It was silk and that made up for the awful color.) I was going to look like one of the sweet
little white girls who were everybody's dream of what was right with the world. Hanging softly over the black Singer
sewing machine, it looked like magic, and when people saw me wearing it they were going to run up to me and say,
"Marguerite [sometimes it was 'dear Marguerite'], forgive us, please, we didn't know who you were," and I would
answer generously, "No, you couldn't have known. Of course I forgive you."
Just thinking about it made me go around with angel's dust sprinkled over my face for days. But Easter's early
morning sun had shown the dress to be a plain ugly cut-down from a white woman's once-was-purple throwaway. It
was old-lady-long too, but it didn't hide my skinny legs, which had been greased with Blue Seal Vaseline and
powdered with the Arkansas red clay. The age-faded color made my skin look dirty like mud, and everyone in
church was looking at my skinny legs.
Wouldn't they be surprised when one day I woke out of my black ugly dream, and my real hair, which was long and
blond, would take the place of the kinky mass that Momma wouldn't let me straighten? My light-blue eyes were
going to hypnotize them, after all the things they said about "my daddy must of been a Chinaman" (I thought they
meant made out of china, like a cup) because my eyes were so small and squinty. Then they would understand why I
had never picked up a Southern accent, or spoke the common slang, and why I had to be forced to eat pigs' tails and
snouts. Because I was really white and because a cruel fairy stepmother, who was understandably jealous of my
beauty, had turned me into a too-big Negro girl, with nappy black hair, broad feet and a space between her teeth
that would hold a number-two pencil.
"What you looking ..." The minister's wife leaned toward me, her long yellow face full of sorry. She whispered, "I
just come to tell you, it's Easter Day." I repeated, jamming the words together, "Ijustcometotellyouit'sEasterDay," as
low as possible. The giggles hung in the air like melting clouds that were waiting to rain on me. I held up two
fingers, close to my chest, which meant that I had to go to the toilet, and tiptoed toward the rear of the church.
Dimly, somewhere over my head, I heard ladies saying, "Lord bless the child," and "Praise God." My head was up and
my eyes were open, but I didn't see anything. Halfway down the aisle, the church exploded with "Were you there
when they crucified my Lord?" and I tripped over a foot stuck out from the children's pew. I stumbled and started to
say something, or maybe to scream, but a green persimmon, or it could have been a lemon, caught me between the
legs and squeezed. I tasted the sour on my tongue and felt it in the back of my mouth. Then before I reached the
door, the sting was burning down my legs and into my Sunday socks. I tried to hold, to squeeze it back, to keep it
from speeding, but when I reached the church porch I knew I'd have to let it go, or it would probably run right back
up to my head and my poor head would burst like a dropped watermelon, and all the brains and spit and tongue and
eyes would roll all over the place. So I ran down into the yard and let it go. I ran, peeing and crying, not toward the
toilet out back but to our house. I'd get a whipping for it, to be sure, and the nasty children would have something
new to tease me about. I laughed anyway, partially for the sweet release; still, the greater joy came not only from
being liberated from the silly church but from the knowledge that I wouldn't die from a busted head.
If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that
threatens the throat.
It is an unnecessary insult.
from ‘No Name Woman’
by Maxine Hong Kingston
Whenever she had to warn us about life, my mother told stories that ran like this one, a story to grow up on. She
tested our strength to establish realities. Those in the emigrant generations who could not reassert brute survival
died young and far from home. Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the
invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America.
The emigrants confused the gods by diverting their curses, misleading them with crooked streets and false names.
They must try to confuse their offspring as well, who, I suppose, threaten them in similar ways-always trying to get
things straight, always trying to name the unspeakable. The Chinese 1 know hide their names; sojourners take new
names when their lives change and guard their real names with silence.
Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is
peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from
what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?
If I want to learn what clothes my aunt wore, whether flashy or ordinary, 1 would have to begin, "Remember
Father's drowned-in-the-well sister?" I cannot ask that. My mother has told me once and for all the useful parts. She
will add nothing unless powered by Necessity, a riverbank that guides her life. She plants vegetable gardens rather
than lawns; she carries the odd-shaped tomatoes home from the fields and eats food left for the gods.
Whenever we did frivolous things, we used up energy; we flew high kites. We children came up off the ground over
the melting cones our parents brought home from work and the American movie on New Year's Day-0h, You
Beautiful Doll with Betty Grable one year, and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon with John Wayne another year. After the
one carnival ride each, we paid in guilt; our tired father counted his change on the dark walk home.
Adultery is extravagance. Could people who hatch their own chicks and eat the embryos and the heads for
delicacies and boil the feet in vinegar for party food, leaving only the gravel, eating even the gizzard lining-could
such people engender a prodigal aunt? To be a woman, to have a daughter in starvation time was a waste enough.
My aunt could not have been the lone romantic who gave up everything for sex. Women in the old China did not
choose. Some man had commanded her to lie with him and be his secret evil. I wonder whether he masked himself
when he joined the raid on her family.
Perhaps she had encountered him in the fields or on the mountain where the daughters-in-law collected fuel. Or
perhaps he first noticed her in the marketplace. He was not a stranger because the village housed no strangers. She
had to have dealings with him other than sex. Perhaps he worked an adjoining field, or he sold her the cloth for the
dress she sewed and wore. His demand must have surprised, then terrified her. She obeyed him; she always did as
she was told.
from Fever Pitch
by Nick Hornby
I don’t recall much about the football that first afternoon. One of those tricks of memory enables me to see the
only goal clearly: the referee awards a penalty (he runs into the area, points a dramatic finger, there’s a roar); a
hush as Terry Neill takes it, and a groan as Gordon Banks dives and pushes the ball out; it falls conveniently at
Neill’s feet and this time he scores. But I am sure this picture has been built up from what I have long known about
similar incidents, and actually I was aware of none of this. All I really saw on the day was a bewildering chain of
incomprehensible incidents, at the end of which everyone around me stood and shouted. If I did the same, it must
have been an embarrassing ten seconds after the rest of the crowd.
But I do have other, more reliable, and probably more meaningful memories. I remember the overwhelming
maleness of it all – cigar and pipe smoke, foul language (words I had heard before, but not from adults, not at that
volume), and only years later did it occur to me that this was bound to have an effect on a boy who lived with his
mother and his sister; and I remember looking at the crowd more than at the players. From where I was sitting I
could probably have counted twenty thousand heads; only the sports fan (or Mick Jagger or Nelson Mandela) can do
that. My father told me that there were nearly as many people in the stadium as lived in my town, and I was
suitably awed.
(We have forgotten that football crowds are still astonishingly large, mostly because since the war they have
become progressively smaller. Managers frequently complain about local apathy, particularly when their mediocre
First or Second Division team has managed to avoid a good hiding for a few weeks; but the fact that, say, Derby
County managed to attract an average crowd of nearly seventeen thousand in 1990/91, the year they finished
bottom of the First Division, is a miracle. Let’s say that three thousand of these are away supporters; that means
that among the remaining fourteen thousand from Derby, there were a number of people who went at least
eighteen times to see the worst football of last or indeed most other seasons. Why, really, should anyone have gone
at all?)
It wasn’t the size of the crowd that impressed me most, however, or the way that adults were allowed to shout the
word “WANKER!” as loudly as they wanted without attracting any attention. What impressed me most was just how
much most was just how much most of the men around me hated, really hated, being there. As far as I could tell,
nobody seemed to enjoy, in the way that I understood the word, anything that happened during the entire
afternoon. Within minutes of the kick-off there was real anger (“You’re a DISGRACE, Gould. He’s a DISGRACE!” “A
hundred quid a week? A HUNDRED QUID A WEEK! They should give that to me for watching you.”); as the game went
on, the anger turned into outrage, and then seemed to curdle into sullen, silent discontent. Yes, yes, I know all the
jokes. What else could I have expected at Highbury? But I went to Chelsea and to Tottenham and to Rangers, and
saw the same thing: that the natural state of the football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score.
from Writing Home
by Alan Bennett
Had it been only stories that didn’t measure up to the world it wouldn’t have been so bad. But it wasn’t only fiction
that was fiction. Fact too was fiction, as textbooks seemed to bear no more relation to the real world than did the
story-books. At school or in my Boy’s Book of the Universe I read of the minor wonders of nature – the sticklebacks
that haunted the most ordinary pond, the newts and toads said to lurk under every stone, and the dragonflies that
flitted over the dappled surface. Not, so far as I could see, in Leeds. There were owls in hollow trees, so the nature
books said, but I saw no owls – and hollow trees were in pretty short supply too. The only department where nature
actually lived up with the text was frog-spawn. Even in Leeds there was that, jamjars of which I dutifully fetched
home to stand beside great wilting bunches of bluebells on the backyard window-sill. But the tadpoles never
seemed to graduate to the full-blown frogs the literature predicted, invariably giving up the ghost as soon as they
reached the two-legged stage when, unbeknownst to Mam, they would have to be flushed secretly down the lav.
It was the same when we went on holiday. If the books were to be believed, every seashore was littered with
starfish and delicately whorled shells, seahorses in every rockpool and crabs the like of which I had seen only in
Macfisheries’ window. Certainly I never came across them at Morecambe, nor any of the other advertised treasures
of the seashore. There was only a vast, untenanted stretch of mud and somewhere beyond it sea, invisible,
unpaddleable and strewn with rolls of barbed wire to discourage any parachutist undiscerning enough to choose to
land there.
These evidences of war and general shortage of treats and toys made me somehow blame the shortcomings of the
natural world on the current hostilities. I don’t recall seeing a single magnolia tree in blossom until I was fifteen or
so, and when I did I found myself thinking ‘well, they probably didn’t have them during the war.’ And so it was with
shells and starfish and the rest of Nature’s delights; she had put these small treasures into storage for the duration,
along with signposts, neon lights and the slot machines for Five Boys chocolate that stood, invariably empty, on
every railway platform.
from Notes From A Small Island
by Bill Bryson
There are certain idiosyncratic notions that you quietly come to accept when you live for a long time in Britain. One
is that British summers used to be longer and sunnier. Another is that the England soccer team shouldn't have any
trouble with Norway. A third is the idea that Britain is a big place. This last is easily the most intractable.
If you mention in the pub that you intend to drive from, say, Surrey to Cornwall, a distance that most Americans
would happily go to get a taco, your companions will puff their cheeks, look knowingly at each other, and blow out
air as if to say, "Well, now, that's a bit of a tall order," and then they'll launch into a lively and protracted discussion
of whether it's better to take the A30 to Stockbridge and then the A303 to Ilchester, or the A361 to Glastonbury via
Shepton Mallet. Within minutes the conversation will plunge off into a level of detail that leaves you, as a foreigner,
swiveling your head in quiet wonderment.
"You know that lay-by outside Warminster, the one with the grit box with the broken handle?" one of them will say.
"You know, just past the turnoff for Little Puking but before the B6029 miniroundabout."
At this point, you find you are the only person in the group not nodding vigorously.
"Well, about a quarter of a mile past there, not the first left turning but the second one, there's a lane between two
hedgerows -- they're mostly hawthorn but with a little hazel mixed in. Well, if you follow that road past the
reservoir and under the railway bridge, and take a sharp right at the Buggered Ploughman --"
"Nice little pub," somebody will interject -- usually, for some reason, a guy in a bulky cardigan. "They do a decent
pint of Old Toejam."
"-- and follow the dirt track through the army firing range and round the back of the cement works, it drops down
onto the B3689 Ram's Dropping bypass. It saves a good three or four minutes and cuts out the rail crossing at Great
Shagging."
"Unless, of course, you're coming from Crewkerne," someone else will add knowledgeably. "Now, if you're coming
from Crewkerne..."
Give two or more men in a pub the names of any two places in Britain and they can happily fill hours. Wherever it is
you want to go, the consensus is generally that it's just about possible as long as you scrupulously avoid
Okehampton, the North Circular in London, and the Severn Bridge westbound between the hours of 3 P.M. on Friday
and 10 A.M. on Monday, except bank holidays when you shouldn't go anywhere at all. "Me, I don't even walk to the
corner shop on bank holidays," some little guy on the margins will chirp up proudly, as if by staying at home in
Clapham he has for years cannily avoided a notorious bottleneck at Scotch Corner.
Eventually, when the intricacies of B-roads, contraflow blackspots, and good places to get a bacon sandwich have
been discussed so thoroughly that your ears have begun to seep blood, one member of the party will turn to you and
idly ask over a sip of beer when you were thinking of setting off. When this happens, you must never answer
truthfully and say, in that kind of dopey way of yours, "Oh, I don't know, about ten, I suppose," because they'll all be
off again.
"Ten o'clock?" one of them will say and try to back his head off his shoulders. "As in ten o'clock A.M.?" He'll make a
face. "Well, it's entirely up to you, of course, but personally if I was planning to be in Cornwall by three o'clock
tomorrow, I'd have left yesterday."
"Yesterday?" someone else will say, chortling softly at this misplaced optimism. "I think you're forgetting, Colin, that
it's half term for schools in North Wiltshire and West Somerset this week. It'll be murder between Swindon and
Warminster. No, you want to have left a week last Tuesday."
"And there's the Great West Steam Rally and Tractor Pull at Little Dribbling this weekend," somebody from across
the room will add, strolling over to join you because it's always pleasant to bring bad motoring news. "There'll be
three hundred and seventy-five thousand cars all converging on the Little Chef roundabout at Upton Dupton. We
once spent eleven days in a tailback there, and that was just to get out of the car park. No, you want to have left
when you were still in your mother's womb, or preferably while you were spermatozoa, and even then you won't
find a parking space beyond Bodmin."
Once, when I was younger, I took all these alarming warnings to heart. I went home, reset the alarm clock, roused
the family at four to protests and general consternation, and had everyone bundled into the car and on the road by
five. As a result, we were in Newquay in time for breakfast and had to wait around for seven hours before the
holiday park would let us have one of its wretched chalets. And the worst of it was that I'd only agreed to go there
because I thought the town was called Nookie and I wanted to stock up on postcards.
The fact is that the British have a totally private sense of distance. This is most visibly seen in the shared pretense
that Britain is a lonely island in the middle of an empty green sea. Of course, the British are all aware, in an
abstract sort of way, that there is a substantial landmass called Europe nearby and that from time to time it is
necessary to go over there to give old Jerry a drubbing or have a holiday in the sun...
from The Bird Artist
by Howard Norman
At that instant all the elements of the entire unnerving night thus far gathered and sent some kind of poison up to
my brain. I took Botho’s frivolity as a personal insult. He could not know this, of course. He could not know that out
on his lawn I was so addled, had such disdain for him, that I was suddenly short of breath. Holding the revolver
tightly in my right hand at arm’s length, steadying it with my left, I slammed a shot through the window. I walked
to the door, stepped back about ten yards, and waited for Botho to show.
The door opened and Botho peered out until he saw my figure in the yard.
“Who’s that? Who’s there?”
He had on his galoshes and nightshirt.
“Fabian Vas,” I said.
As he stepped from the doorway, I heard gramophone music coming from upstairs.
“Is that a revolver in your hand?”
“I shot the window out just now.”
“There’s glass all over the floor. It’s rained-in, too. It’s a goddamned mess.”
“Fine by me.”
He looked at me for a moment. “I didn’t force your mother to visit me so often,” he said, “just like I didn’t force
Margaret to be here now. She did it on her own volition. She wasn’t bewitched. She walked up the stairs on two
feet like anyone.”
“You’ve done damage.”
He sighed deeply, puffed out his cheeks, made a loud blowing sound. “Congratulations on your forthcoming
marriage,” he said. “Why, just earlier in the evening, Margaret told me. We’ll make a little toast later on, clink
glasses and the like.”
Botho lurched toward me. I shot him in the neck. The bullet spun him sideways, and by the time he turned back to
me he had clutched his neck and appeared to be strangling himself. He took his hands away and inspected them.
He rubbed them together like a child washing his hands with rain. Then, with awkward deliberation, he searched
for the entry hole as if he might simply stop it up and be saved.
Loudly the gramophone music scratched to a halt. I shot him in the stomach.
He slumped to his knees. “I’m shot,” he said.
“This was supposed to happen. It’s what I came here to do.”
“I’m shot in the body, Fabian. I’m just the lighthouse keeper.”
“You’re more than that.”
“How old are you? How old is my murderer?”
“Twenty.”
“I don’t suppose you’d say goodbye to Alaric for me, whom I loved, if I could anyone.” He wheezed.
“No, not in good conscience,” I said.
He could barely talk now. “Imagine that,” he whispered, “– a murderer’s good conscience. You’re going to visit
Mr. Ellis.”
Since childhood I had heard any hangman, Canadian or otherwise, referred to as “Mr. Ellis”.
Botho was curled in the mud. It was pelting down rain.
“Mr. Ellis will be the man breathing good air right next to you on the scaffold.” He was now half facedown in the
mud.
I think that it was near one o’clock in the morning. Retching blood, Botho jerked his head back and forth, then
lurched forward as though loosing his earthly form. This was followed by a sharp intake of breath, as though he was
trying to suck it back in again. The bullet had lodged near his shoulder; it had not damaged his throat, and he could
still utter, “I’ll pay the devil my soul twice over to watch you hang.” That sentence seemed to take an eternity to
work its way through. I all but felt his grimace clamp down on my heart; blood bubbled along his lips. As he spoke
those last words, his eyes had wandered crazily, which somehow made his prediction of my fate less plausible.
Still, looking away just then, I was suddenly bent over with a true or imagined bodily pain and overpowering dread.
If saying a thing more forcefully than it is felt makes it an outright lie, still, I dropped to me knees, knelt over
Botho, drew his face close to mine, and confessed: “I’m glad I did this. And that’s what I’ll have to live with,
however long I do live.” His eyes rolled back, his Adam’s apple seemed to lock like a gear fitting. I thought surely
he was dead. He was leaking into the mud and grass. I saw the bullet hole and powder burn through his soaked
shirt. An image came forth, of myself as a small boy on my knees by my bed. I said the Lord’s Prayer.
from The God Of Small Things
by Arundhati Roy
May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge
on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously
in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.
The nights are clear, but suffused with sloth and sullen expectation.
But by early June the southwest monsoon breaks and there are three months of wind and water with short spells of
sharp, glittering sunshine that thrilled children snatch to play with. The countryside turns an immodest green.
Boundaries blur as tapioca fences take root and bloom. Brick walls turn mossgreen. Pepper vines snake up electric
poles. Wild creepers burst through laterite banks and spill across the flooded roads. Boats ply in the bazaars. And
small fish appear in the puddles that fill the PWD potholes on the highways.
It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, plowing it up
like gunfire. The old house on the hill wore its steep, gabled roof pulled over its ears like a low hat. The walls,
streaked with moss, had grown soft, and bulged a little with dampness that seeped up from the ground. The wild,
overgrown garden was full of the whisper and scurry of small lives. In the undergrowth a rat snake rubbed itself
against a glistening stone. Hopeful yellow bullfrogs cruised the scummy pond for mates. A drenched mongoose
flashed across the leaf-strewn driveway.
The house itself looked empty. The doors and windows were locked. The front verandah bare. Unfurnished. But the
skyblue Plymouth with chrome tailfins was still parked outside, and inside, Baby Kochamma was still alive.
She was Rahel's baby grandaunt, her grandfather's younger sister. Her name was really Navomi, Navomi Ipe, but
everybody called her Baby. She became Baby Kochamma when she was old enough to be an aunt. Rahel hadn't come
to see her, though. Neither niece nor baby grandaunt labored under any illusions on that account. Rahel had come
to see her brother, Estha. They were two-egg twins. "Dizygotic" doctors called them. Born from separate but
simultaneously fertilized eggs. Estha--Esthappen--was the older by eighteen minutes.
They never did look much like each other, Estha and Rahel, and even when they were thin-armed children, flatchasted, wormridden and Elvis Presley-puffed, there was none of the usual "Who is who?" and "Which is which?" from
oversmiling relatives or the Syrian Orthodox bishops who frequently visited the Ayemenem House for donations.
The confusion lay in a deeper, more secret place.
In those early amorphous years when memory had only just begun, when life was full of Beginnings and no Ends, and
Everything was Forever, Esthappen and Rahel thought of themselves together as Me, and separately, individually, as
We or Us. As though they were a rare breed of Siamese twins, physically separate, but with joint identities.
Now, these years later, Rahel has a memory of waking up one night giggling at Estha's funny dream.
She has other memories too that she has no right to have.
She remembers, for instance (though she hadn't been there), what the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man did to Estha in
Abhilash Talkies. She remembers the taste of the tomato sandwiches--Estha's sandwiches, that Estha ate--on the
Madras Mail to Madras.
And these are only the small things.
Anyway, now she thinks of Estha and Rahel as Them, because, separately, the two of them are no longer what They
were or ever thought They'd be.
Ever.
Their lives have a size and a shape now. Estha has his and Rahel hers.
Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits have appeared like a team of trolls on their separate horizons. Short
creatures with long shadows, patrolling the Blurry End. Gentle half-moons have gathered under their eyes and they
are as old as Ammu was when she died. Thirty-one.
Not old.
Not young.
But a viable die-able age.
from Feeling Sorry For Celia
by Jaclyn Moriarty
Dear Ms. Clarry,
It has come to our attention that you are incredibly bad at being a teenager.
I mean, take a look at your bedroom.
You haven't got any posters on your wall. (Don't try to tell us that that picture counts. A kitten drowning in a
strawberry milkshake? Designed by your mother as an ad for carpet cleaner? Give us a break.)
You have a paper chain made of old Christmas cards hanging from your curtain rod. The only makeup you have is
banana flavored lip gloss and it's melting all over your Little Mermaid quilt cover. (Actually, we don't think that lip
gloss counts as makeup at all.)
Not to hurt your feelings or anything, but you are an embarrassment to teenagerhood. Therefore, could you please
climb into the refrigerator and wait very quietly until your teenage years end?
Thank you.
Yours sincerely,
The Association of Teenagers
PS. Also, you don't seem to understand how to get a snow tan. You look like a slice of watermelon.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------!!!!IMPORTANT!!!!! LOOK AT THIS NOTE!!!!
!!!ELIZABETH!!!! OVER HERE!!!! ON THE FRIDGE!!!!!
LIBBY,
I HOPE YOU SAW THIS NOTE.
GOOD MORNING.
EAT THE OATMEAL IN THE BIG, SILVER SAUCEPAN ON THE STOVE. PUT SOME ALOE ON YOUR FACE.
DON'T BURN YOUR FACE LIKE THAT AGAIN. YOUR SKIN WILL ALL PEEL AWAY AND THERE WILL BE NOTHING LEFT BUT
BONES AND BRAIN AND EYEBALLS.
IT IS VERY AND EXTREMELY COLD TODAY. WEAR SEVEN PAIRS OF STOCKINGS.
HAVE A NICE FIRST DAY BACK AT SCHOOL,
LOVE FROM YOUR THOUGHTFUL AND CONSIDERATE MOTHER.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Mum,
Take it easy. I saw the note.
I didn't eat the oatmeal, I gave it to Lochie. I hate oatmeal. If you really cared about me, you would know that.
I am not wearing any stockings at all. It's not that cold. You have some kind of body temperature problem.
The really weird thing is that I didn't burn my face like this on purpose.
And I'm not using aloe because it's disgusting. Thank you for your nice warning about the bones and brains and
eyeballs though.
WITH LOTS OF LOVE FROM YOUR DAUGHTER
from Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit
by Jeanette Winterson
Like most people, I lived for a long time with my mother and father. My father liked to watch the wrestling, my
mother liked to wrestle; it didn't mater what. She was in the white corner and that was that.
She hung out the largest sheets on the windiest days. She wanted the Mormons to knock on the door. At election
time in a Labour mill town she put a picture of the Conservative candidate in the window.
She had never heard of mixed feelings. There were friends and there were enemies.
Enemies were:




The Devil (in his many forms)
Next Door
Sex (in its many forms)
Slugs
Friends were:





God
Our dog
Auntie Madge
The Novels of Charlotte Brontë
Slug pellets
…and me, at first, I had been brought in to join her in a tag match against the Rest of the World. She had a
mysterious attitude towards the begetting of children; it wasn't that she couldn't do it, more that she didn't want to
do it. She was very bitter about the Virgin Mary getting there first. So she did the next best thing and arranged for a
foundling. That was me.
I cannot recall a time when I did not know that I was special. We had no Wise Men because she didn't believe there
were any wise men, but we had sheep. One of my earliest memories is me sitting on a sheep at Easter while she
told me the story of the Sacrificial Lamb. We had it on Sundays with potato.
from Bumface
by Morris Gleitzman
‘Angus Solomon,’ sighed Ms Lowry. 'Is that a penis you've drawn in your exercise book?'
Angus jumped, startled, and remembered where he was.
Ms Lowry was standing next to his desk, staring down at the page. Other kids were sniggering.
Angus felt his mouth go dry and his heart speed up. For a second he thought about lying. He decided not to.
'No, Miss,' he admitted, 'it's a submarine.' Ms Lowry nodded grimly. 'I thought as much,' she said. 'Now stop wasting
time and draw a penis like I asked you to.' She pointed to the one she'd drawn on the blackboard.
That's not fair, thought Angus. I wasn't wasting time.
He took a deep breath.
'Excuse me, Miss,' he said, 'I wasn't wasting time. I was working on my pirate character for the school play. He lives
in a submarine and –'
'Enough,' interrupted Ms Lowry. 'You know perfectly well play rehearsals aren't till tomorrow. Today we're doing
human reproduction. I don't want to hear another word about pirates.'
Angus sighed as Ms Lowry turned away. I bet pirates don't let themselves be treated unjustly by teachers, he
thought. I bet pirates stand up for themselves. I bet pirates have got really good lawyers.
He felt something prod his arm. It was Scott Mayo's ruler.
'Russell Hinch reckons you've called your pirate character Bunface,' whispered Scott. 'Is that right?'
'Bumface,' whispered Angus. 'His name's Bumface.'
'Angus Solomon,' yelled Ms Lowry. 'What did you just say?'
Trembling, Angus wondered if he could explain without dobbing in Scott.
He couldn't.
'B-Bumface,' he stammered.
A gasp ran through the class. Ms Lowry looked stunned. Oh no, thought Angus, horrified, she thinks I mean her.
'Not you,' he said hurriedly. 'My pirate.'
from Midnight’s Children
by Salman Rushdie
I was born in the city of Bombay ... once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: I
was born in Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then:
at night. No, it's important to be more ... On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms
in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India's arrival at
independence, I tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps. And, outside the window, fireworks and crowds. A
few seconds later, my father broke his big toe; but Ms accident was a mere trifle when set beside what had befallen
me in that benighted moment, because thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been
mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country. For the next three
decades, there was to be no escape. Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos
ratified my authenticity. I was left entirely without a say in the matter. I, Saleem Sinai, later variously called
Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and even Piece-of-the-Moon, had become heavily embroiled in Fate - at
the best of times a dangerous sort of involvement. And I couldn't even wipe my own nose at the time.
Now, however, time (having no further use for me) is running out. I will soon be thirty-one years old. Perhaps. If
my crumbling, over-used body permits. But I have no hope of saving my life, nor can I count on having even a
thousand nights and a night. I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning - yes, meaning something. I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.
And there are so many stories to tell,-too many, such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places
rumours, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane! I have been a swallower of lives; and to
know me, just the one of me, you'll have to swallow the lot as well. Consumed multitudes are jostling and shoving
inside me; and guided only by the memory of a large white bedsheet with a roughly circular hole some seven inches
in diameter cut into the centre, clutching at the dream of that holey, mutilated square of linen, which is my
talisman, my open-sesame, I must commence the business of remaking my life from the point at which it really
began, some thirty-two years before anything as obvious, as present, as my clock-ridden, crime-stained birth.
(The sheet, incidentally, is stained too, with three drops of old, faded redness. As the Quran tells us: Recite, in
the name of the Lord thy Creator, who created Man from clots of blood.)
‘Little Things’
by Raymond Carver
Early that day the weather turned and the snow was melting into dirty water. Streaks of it ran down from the little
shoulder-high window that faced the backyard. Cars slushed by on the street outside, where it was getting dark. But
it was getting dark on the inside too.
He was in the bedroom pushing clothes into a suitcase when she came to the door.
I'm glad you're leaving! I'm glad you're leaving! she said. Do you hear?
He kept on putting his things into the suitcase.
Son of a bitch! I'm so glad you're leaving! She began to cry. You can't even look me in the face, can you?
Then she noticed the baby's picture on the bed and picked it up.
He looked at her and she whiped her eyes and stared at him before turning and going back to the living room.
Bring that back, he said.
Just get your things and get out, she said.
He did not answer. He fastened the suitcase, put on his coat, looked around the bedroom before turning off the
light. Then he went out to the living room.
She stood in the doorway of the little kitchen, holding the baby.
I want the baby, he said.
Are you crazy?
No, but I want the baby. I'll get someone to come by for his things.
You're not touching this baby, she said.
The baby had begun to cry and she uncovered the blanket from around his head.
Oh, oh, she said, looking at the baby.
He moved toward her.
For God's sake! she said. She took a step back into the kitchen.
I want the baby.
Get out of here!
She turned and tried to hold the baby over in a corner behind the stove.
But he came up. He reached across the stove and tightened his hands on the baby.
Get away, get away! she cried.
The baby was red-faced and screaming. In the scuffle they knocked down a flowerpot that hung behind the stove.
He crowded her into the wall then, trying to break her grip. He held onto the baby and pushed with all his weight.
Let go of him, he said.
Don't, she said. You're hurting the baby, she said.
I'm not hurting the baby, he said.
The kitchen window gave no light. In the near-dark he worked on her fisted fingers with one hand and with the
other hand he gripped the screaming baby up under an arm near the shoulder.
She felt her fingers being forced open. She felt the baby going from her.
No! she screamed just as her hands came loose.
She would have it, this baby. She grabbed for the baby's other arm. She caught the baby around the wrist and
leaned back.
But he would not let go. He felt the baby slipping out of his hands and he pulled back very hard.
In this manner, the issue was decided.