The Wig My Father Wore by Anne Enright

Author:Anne Enright
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

Pairings

THAT NIGHT I make a pass at Stephen, just for the sadness of it, and because he has started to smell like someone I might know. He has cut his finger nails and left the bits in the ashtray by the bed. I count them, because there is something about nail-parings that makes you check they are all there. And as I count, nine in all, I find that my problem is how to tell him that I love him.

I could tell him to put my body in a boat when I am dead and burn it on the water.

I touch his face in the dark and listen to his breathing tighten and lose its beat. I touch his chest and my hand seems changed by it. I float my palm along the air that clings to his thigh, afraid to touch, and the hairs on his skin rise to meet me.

Slowly, he lifts the duvet and slowly finds the floor with his foot. He swings around and sits up on the edge of the bed.

He bends down to the floor and comes back up looking at the ends of his fingers. He has found the last nail-paring and now he drops it in the ashtray. I don’t know now which disturb me more, the bits he cut off, or the bits still left on his fingers. His nails are thick, white and clean, the kind you see in films, when you know someone is going to do something unpleasant with his hands.

He looks down at the floor again, pushes himself away from the bed and walks in the dark to a chair in the corner of the room. He starts to talk.

He talks to me about his wife, about how little he understood. He says when he came home one day there were some playing cards in the snow of the yard and britches frozen so hard on the line, they near snapped in his hand.

He expected her to be gone, but she was there when he walked in through the door. He expected her to be gone and when he found her sitting there he knew that she was pregnant instead.

‘It is a difficult thing for a man to understand,’ he says.

The snow kept her warm. Like a drunk, the snow kept her white skin glowing even whiter as she grew, and the veins in her breasts and the veins in her belly spread like blue flames, licking her inside. She grew all winter, so white, and the hair between her legs grew in the spring, like corn. But it was the winter that frightened him, the white heat in the bed beside him, her belly drifting against the swell of her breasts like snow against a wall. Her blood sang in the bed beside him and the child, because it was a child, made her blood hot. The child was a stove in her belly keeping her warm and all he could do was put his hands

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.