Collected Fictions

Начало книги

FINE, FINE — now here’s a trope for you.

To fetch groceries, to collect rations, to supply the place with vittles, unless it be deemed better spelt victuals, I do not have to but indeed do choose to make my arthritic, rachitic grudge down a steep hill and thereafter to groan my way back up the steepness steeper still, what remains of my proprium all the while suffering ever more keenly the impudent yearage step by hideous step, whereas, please be so good as to be listening to me, I could just as well carry out my commerce among the aisles of a spankingly swell food-o-rama no more distant from my door and, more’s the madness, reachable via a byway latitudinous to a fault.

But I go down, down, down, up, up, up.

You hear?

Now down, now up — to and from where the grisly shelves are stocked with little in the line of the recognizable, to and from where the ether within is never not vicious with infection and disinfectant, to and from where the personnel (am I kidding? — personnel, personnel?) would even on Easter sooner spit in your face than to face it in a faint-hearted experiment in decency.

Читать дальше →