More packing away my studio last night when I came across this, a framed picture of my friend *Nicole*. I remember when this was taken, a winter night in Winnipeg, Nicole coming by my apartment just off Corydon, that apartment a vast and creaking place, like a leaking ship, and hissing too, with the steam heat, yet still chilly with its high ceilings and windows all around, and the Hungarian girl I lived with, the one who cried all the time, but she wasn't home that night, and here is Nicole standing on a chair and looking through my cupboards, for just the right glass, because she is about to *mix drinks*.
People are always telling me that my work is too dark. So I've put up this sunnier story, but even it has a shadow, as its original publisher – a fine Atlantic Canadian literary magazine called the Gaspereau Review – is no longer in business. ---------------- It was a simple enough thing and that thing was simply this: Edmund Kelley was a gentleman. Of course his mom called him her 'little gentleman', as in 'Oh Edmund, you are my perfect little gentleman,' which did seem to hold to a certain logic that these type of things often follow, considering her affection for him and the fact that he was, after all, only ten years old. Still, Edmund himself was not particularly fond of the diminutive aspect of that title. Gentleman was enough; gentleman summed up the whole thing rather nicely, thank you. He was definitely a more refined version of your average child. He lived in a state of perpetual Sunday m
I loved that place - I remember that night! Because the crying hungarian woman came home and I think I had an allergic reaction....See the swelling on my face? haha!
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