Children's Children E-Book

Jan Carson

• Herausgeber: Liberties Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

"Everything leaves marks, even water…" Two children watching their parents argue inside a greenhouse, an armoured boy and his troubled sister, a human statue who's lost the ability to move and a floating six year old tethered to the backyard fence: the characters in Jan Carson's debut story collection are all falling apart in their own peculiar way. Absurdist, allegorical and disturbingly convincing, these characters are both wrongdoers and victims of another's wrongdoing. They are people marked by life yet struggling to forge some kind of future. Mixing Carson's distinctive magic realist voice with a more traditional brand of Irish literary fiction, Children's Children explores the concept of legacy and the influence of one generation upon the next. These are darkly humorous and brilliantly illuminative stories which are both heartbreaking and hopeful and gently critical of post-conflict Northern Ireland. Stories from this collection have appeared in Banshee, The Honest Ulsterman, Storm Cellar and other journals and have been longlisted for the Sean O'Faolain Short Story Prize and nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Leseprobe

Children’s Children

Short Stories

Jan Carson

For the Ulster Hall, and all those who’ve called her home

On the floor at the great divide with my shirt tucked in and my shoes untied.

—Sufjan Stevens, ‘Casimir Pulaski Day’

Contents

Title PageDedicationEpigraph1. Larger Ladies2. People in Glasshouses3. Still4. Den and Estie Do Not Remember the Good Times5. In Feet and Gradual Inches6. We’ve Got Each Other and That’s a Lot7. More of a Handstand Girl8. Contemporary Uses for a Belfast Box Room9. Swept10. Floater11. How They Were Sitting When Their Wings Fell Off12. Shopping13. Alternative Units14. Dinosaur Act15. Children’s ChildrenNotesAlso by Jan CarsonCopyright

1.

Larger Ladies

They were not as fat as she’d expected.

Of the ten in Sonja’s care, only one was too big to stand. An extra-large bed had been borrowed from the bariatrics department at the Royal. Bariatrics, she’d learnt, was the type of medicine which specialised in making fat people thinner. When it arrived, the bed was almost as wide as it was long. It did not fit through the ward doors, so they were unscrewed and afterwards screwed back wonky. Now they made a noise like sliced cheese every time they opened. The special bed ate into the space between the beds on either side, so Sonja could only approach these patients sideways. Like a crab, she thought, which was a good comparison, for wasn’t she always pinching at them with needles and the device used for measuring flab?

The other women were just a little overweight, what Sonja’s mother would have called plump: size sixteens and eighteens sheathed in pale, satin pyjamas. The damp, green glow from their monitors reflected off them so that they seemed to float on their beds like luminous squid, or jellyfish suspended in a tank. Her father, who had been more comfortable with livestock, would have called them hefty, would have seen no such romance swelling between the folds of their childbearing hips.

But they were beautiful to Sonja in their every-day-different pyjamas: peach, lemon, lilac and baby’s-breath pink, all the colours of the ice-cream spectrum. They smelt clean while they slept, like the inside of Boots, the chemist. In the morning, Sonja went home smelling of them, sometimes talc and sometimes lavender. No one on the bus noticed or, perhaps, because this was East Belfast, they noticed and said nothing. Sonja did not mind their fat, or the way it wobbled when the machines went off. Neither did she allow herself to laugh.