Murder by David Adams Richards

Author:David Adams Richards
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2019-10-21T16:00:00+00:00

AUGUST 1955

LACE CURTAINS BLEW FORWARD IN THE HEAT OF THE SMALL bedroom, and I remember a kind of midsummer ennui—a word I did not know then, or for years after, but there it was nonetheless. Outside at the yard’s edge a fury of small hot dust storms blew up near the cracked, chalked sideway; where the girl next door, wearing her white ankle socks, had practised her hopscotch with a piece of heavy, blood-coloured glass, telling us of the great circus up the street and across the back fields and beyond the warehouses at the top of town. And so hearing this we went back into the house, to ask our mother’s permission.

It would be a giant coup if permission was granted, being this was a circus, and being my brother was five and I was four. Not that at this age we had not done things that would make parents wilt, but this was a circus, a carnie, a place where outsiders came and worked, and moreover took money from children, and our mother did not trust them. Also, it was in direct competition with our family theatre, which always ceased to run matinees during circus week because our seats would never be occupied. It seemed like a betrayal. That is, our theatre closed, the cement steps keeping time to blank glass doors, the heated bricks redundant and lost and stilled, while customers dressed for the evening, came and went on sidewalks, drifting along toward a foreign threat to our livelihood. Stillness, I suppose, was the word, our sheets proclaiming the place was now closed.

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