Fiction of the Day
The Beautiful Salmon
By Joanna Kavenna
I’ve always loved salmon. Not to eat, as I don’t eat fish, but I’ve always loved salmon in general because salmon jump and no one knows why.
I’ve always loved salmon. Not to eat, as I don’t eat fish, but I’ve always loved salmon in general because salmon jump and no one knows why.
I’d come expecting to detest Tao Thinh, I left detesting him, but for a strange moment in between, a moment that was of hours’, perhaps days’, duration, I experienced with him a kind of devilish sympathy that made for an intimacy closer, and, in its way, more disarming, even incantatory, than would have been possible had our natures harmonized.
A pockmarked red headed man with a leather case in hand hurried along End Street, humming. Endell Street used to be the Tin Pan Alley of London. It is short, drab and quiet. The trade has
He hoped his voice wouldn’t change tonight. “Old Man River” was coming up and he could do the accent, the bent back, the glory-struck expression. He knew how to use the whites of his teeth and eyes.
It turned out Harry Barnes was on his way back to the States from China. His friend Barney Jenkins had died from an infection of the kidneys the doctors in Hong Kong had been unable to diagnose
I suppose you would have to call our apartment cozy. Two and a half rooms in a basement on Fourth Street, where the coats and the roaches mingle freely in the bathtub, the sink works often as not and the people wash their feet in the toilet. Cozy but not sanitary.
It was grandmother who encouraged me to leave school, just as it was, just where I was. “With your education,” she explained, “you’re practically sure.”
“Of what!”
“Don’t be laggard.”
“Before I give up school I ought to know a few things.” I don’t say what. I have no prejudices. (Then.)
Mr. Bean and Mr. Muller were in the Coffee Cup sharing a grinder when the notion came to Mr. Bean to paint a lion. He got up at once without excusing himself and went to the hardware store
“Oh yes, Valerie will like it very much,” said the energetic young man with blue-black hair and a sharply cleft chin, in an accent that was vaguely ‘English’. He and Jacob Eisenman were standing in the large shabby room that overlooked the crashing Pacific, on Kauai, one of Hawaii’s outermost and least populated islands.
1. A wall. Once, the wall was white; now it's an ugly yellow... the color of dried urine, old newspaper or faded hopes-and-longings. (Brings to mind the principle that beauty is unstable: while