Sunday's Child by Edward O. Phillips

Author:Edward O. Phillips [Phillips, Edward O.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Humour, Gay Men, Montreal (Que.)
Publisher: ReQueered Tales
Published: 2019-07-15T23:00:00+00:00

BY NOW I WAS TIRED ENOUGH that turning out lights and locking Winnifred’s front door seemed a huge effort. I hauled myself up the stairs, unbuttoning my shirt as I went. Dropping my clothes over a chair I fell into bed and prayed for sleep.

7.

AT 5:00 A M. I ROLLED MY LEGS over the side of the bed and levered myself into a sitting position. My back gave a couple of creaks, but I guess I can’t really complain. Most people my age seem to have back problems, anything from lumbago to spinal fusions. They form a club whose dues are measured in pain and inconvenience. You can tell them by the way they head for the straight-backed chairs at parties. They never volunteer when the hostess suggests moving the sofa to make more room, nor do they push stuck cars out of snow drifts. We pay our price for being upright primates; animals seldom if ever have bad backs.

I put coffee on to perc in an electric percolator I’m sure the Smithsonian would kill for. The appliance was old when Winnifred bought it years ago at a garage sale. Then I went reluctantly down to the basement and opened the freezer to give one of the packages containing a leg an experimental poke. It felt hard to the touch. My plan was to drive the package somewhere out of the way and dump it. Then I hesitated. Supposing I had an accident? I am a careful driver, so defensive, in fact, I often leave the car in the garage and take cabs. My insurance record lies unblemished in some computer or other. But I still did not want to risk being rammed or side-swiped by some driver less defensive than myself while I had bits and pieces of Dale in my trunk, my car being towed away to a centrally-heated garage while the package slowly thawed.

I wasn’t thinking clearly. The likelihood of an accident remained slight and I would put the package into a suitcase. Thus resolved, I settled down with a day-old newspaper. I flipped to the business section, which I always read because I feel I ought to. Some stocks were up; some down; the dollar was poorly; we were going to run out of oil in about three weeks. Same old shit. The editorial page reported a speech by a prominent American windbag who assured to whom it may concern that with the world in crisis at this point in time the United States of America was not going to stand idly by watching tensions escalate without making interventions, peaceful or otherwise. I turned to the entertainment section which I always save until last and best. The Institute for Twentieth Century Music had given a concert and one of the composers, piqued by the negative reaction of the press, had published a rebuttal. I began to read: “The composition of Percussive Trio was essentially a matter of rendering an image of motion-not yet definable through any of the sensory manifestations-into sound, by a process of increasingly specific ramifications.

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