Goings by Gordon Lish

Author:Gordon Lish
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Bisac Code 1: FIC019000
ISBN: 9781939293343
Publisher: OR Books
Published: 2014-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

END OF THE WORLD

SO THE EDITOR of this publication, the man phones me and he says to me, “Give me something. Can you give me something?” I says, “Sure, I can give you something. You want writing, right? I mean, what you want for me to give you, it’s writing you want, right?” “Right,” the fellow says. “Got any writing you can give me?” the fellow says. “How much of it do you want?” I says to the fellow. “Oh,” says he to me, “whatever you have handy.”

Handy, I sit here and say to you, person reading with fleeting attention.

Handy?

Let me tell you something, person solicited for a striving for perfect—here comes that word again—attention. What I have handy for you, not to mention for that editor fellow and his vicious congregation—is, to wit, the—in a word—boot.

To wit, in a phrase, the superb terror in it for me of the, uh, of the word boot.

No, not the word denoting the thing which might contain, if in use, a foot. No, no, not that sort of boot, by Christ—but a boot of another sort. A boot that can restrain, constrain, detain—scare the life out of six-year-old now seventy-nine and just as insanely still counting an account of the years upon years, the child, the man, terrified, you know, uncontainably, okay?

Ah, do I, your voluble coward, then, continue to enjoy your incomparable (here she is again!) attention?

Fine.

Listen.

My mother (the woman then alive, does it not go without saying?) had collected me to her side and taken me along with her on an errand to be effected in another place. Well, let us acknowledge it was another place only in the sense that its kind of place was a kind of place thitherto unseen by me—what I, therefore, took to be a rough kind of place for the very reason above-stated, get it?—our automobile aligned, one took it, in happy accord with the manner of the other automobiles assembled there, in that great space for the purpose of—their being parked prefatory to their owners being set free for shopping and the, you know, the like.

Now then, our commerce attended to (the errand, remember?), the pair of us are making our way back to the automobile. To be sure, one could see it from where we had thus far come (or gone) in achieving our return to it, the weary machine heaving in the bleak alien light, an immense thing, a grayish thing, our, you know, Lish family automobile.

Still listening?

The two of us, mother and child, nearing it, getting near to it, the gray breathless machine, that is, my hand in hers, my hand pressing into hers, hers squeezing a little back into mine a little by way of her imparting to it (to my hand, you fool!) what little reassurance the woman must have judged, we may suppose, to prove a sufficiency for me, the other hand busy managing the reticule she carries with her for the keeping of her business—in this instance,

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