August 2018
A new version of my short story Moose-head, Doe-eyes, Shrew was published in Sleet Magazine Summer 2018.
"Sleet hails from the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. We love language and the written word, and we welcome both the beautiful and anti-beautiful." - Sleet Magazine
MOOSE-HEAD, DOE-EYES, SHREW
Clive Montague never liked me particularly. I certainly never liked him. Loud, boorish, with floppy fair hair, there was — there is — nothing to like about him. This gives rise to two questions:
First. Why, some twenty years ago, did I receive an invitation to the house-party he was hosting at his parents’ country residence in Dorset? Second. Why did I go?
The second question isn’t difficult to answer. Curiosity. Plain and simple. Clive and his public school ‘chums’ inhabited a universe I’d read about in Edwardian novels but thought had long since ceased to exist. It was a world I neither envied nor despised but one which I felt I should witness before its final expiry.
The first question will be answered in due course and I will add a third. I still dislike Clive. Meanwhile, in the years that have passed since that first invitation, Clive’s indifference to me has mutated into loathing. Why, then, are there several occasions every year when we find ourselves in each other’s company?
♦ Please read on ...