The Whole Story and Other Stories by Ali Smith

Author:Ali Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307429612
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

erosive

What do you need to know about me for this story? How old I am? how much I earn a year? what kind of car I drive? Look at me now, here I am at the beginning, the middle and the end all at once, in love with someone I can’t have. The waking thought of her, sunlit and new, then the all-day hopeful lightheadedness, and behind it all, dull as a blown-out lightbulb, the fact of the word never.

I see someone in the mirror in the hall. I look again. It is me. It is the first time I have seen myself for days and I look as if I have been sleeping in my clothes. I go into the kitchen and I see how the piled-up dishes are coated in rot. I can’t remember eating off any of them. I come through to the living room; the books are all over the floor.

I go out into the garden and I look at the apple tree. It is a new apple tree, I planted it three years ago. It is the same height as me. In its first year it gave one apple, edible, sharp-tasting and good. In its second it gave three. This year it is covered in small coming apples; there are more than ten. But its new leaves seem to be dying. When I look closer I see that the shoots on the branches are crowded with green and mauve aphids. The larger new leaves, the fronts of which look clear and clean, have insects packed like bricks on their undersides and the edges of several leaves have been rolled firmly in on themselves, which is killing them. When I uncurl them I find scenes of tiny grime, as if each rolled leaf holds inside it its own abandoned factory yard.

All around its base, going up and down the trunk of the young tree, balanced at the very ends of the branches, picking at the crammed-in aphids and the sweet tight newest possibilities of leaf: ants.

middle

Though I can’t talk for long, my friend says, it’s near London now and the tunnels start soon.

No, listen, I’m fine, I say. Really I am. Really good. Except that I wanted to ask you, there are these ants all over the apple tree and hundreds of greenfly on the leaves.

Don’t put poison down, she says. You’ll ruin the apples and the ground and the tree, never mind killing the ants. It’s an ant farm. They’ll be farming the greenfly. You’ll have to ask them to leave. Be polite. Listen, I’m going into a

Monastery? Coma? Sulk? Whichever, her voice is gone. I hang up the phone and step over the books on the floor in the living room and go back out into the garden. I go straight to the tree and I find a branch with an ant probing its end. I lift the branch to my face until the ant is so close it has gone out of focus.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.