All Saints by K.D. Miller

Author:K.D. Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2014-03-13T04:00:00+00:00

Owen James. James Owen. He used to think that if he ever started to publish, he would do so as James Owen. Yes. The poet James Owen. The Collected Works of James Owen.

He has never particularly cared for his given name. But it was his father’s name, and it didn’t lend itself to shortening. After all, what were the possibilities? Owe? Wen? Then when he went away to university, his first year roommate—a nastily clever type who said everything in a tone of such dripping irony that Owen could not object to any of it without appearing petulant—nicknamed him Ovoid.

“Enter the Ovoid!” greeted him whenever he returned to their residence room, which this roommate never seemed to leave. Though he was fairly sure of its meaning, he looked the word up, hoping he was wrong. He was not wrong. Ovoid. The aptness of it, the cruel accuracy, took his breath away. He was already thickest in the middle, the way his father had been, to judge from photographs. And his hairline was starting to recede in much the same way. His father had lost his life in the war at the age of twenty-two—Don’t say he was killed, Owen, say he lost his life.—so Owen had no idea how much hair he himself was likely to lose. Whether it would stop at some point, leaving him tonsured, or whether he would end up bald as an—

“Ovoid!”

“Tell you what,” he said early on to his tormentor, trying to be reasonable, “If you want to call me something, why don’t you just call me O?”

“As in, The Story Of?” the roommate snickered.

Owen endured till the end of the semester, then moved off-campus on his own. Best to be on one’s own.

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