At the No Frills on Saturday night; everyone seemed in a hurry; yet these were not the kind of people who seemed to hurry for anything; I soon found out why; the store was closing in five minutes; people rushed around; looking like leaky balloons; people yelled at each other; a very old man in a tattered suit raised his voice to the cashier; he'd already given a charitable donation two times this week; and asked two more times on top of that; and why did everyone think he was a millionaire; when I got up to the checkout, the cashier was relieved when I nodded 'fine' to the same request; it's awkward for everyone, I said; as I packed my groceries, a soft-spoken wide-eyed woman told me that she had forgotten potatoes, and now she couldn't make Shepherd's Pie; why do people talk to me?; I certainly wouldn't talk to me; in the nearly empty parking lot, some guy in a truck was playing the Eagles really, really loud.
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 like the one sentence approach.
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