The elderly Chinese lady was having trouble with her lottery ticket. The East Indian clerk could not tell her what the problem was, only that the machine would not read the numbers she had selected on her little fill-in-the-dot form. His hair was a bit crazy and his glasses sat at a wild angle so that he looked like he was doing some kind of Jerry Lewis schtick, only in low key and with an East Indian accent. The elderly Chinese lady was not amused. "What is probrem? What is probrem?" she asked. "You tell me probrem." She had her loonies and toonies all over the counter. Then the clerk just shrugged at her, and turned to me and my energy drink.
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 want the cake - and the hats
ReplyDeleteGreat little story :-)
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