Milkman

by Anna Burns

The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died.

This would be a nineteenth-century book because I did not like twentieth-century books because I did not like the twentieth century.

So with his atypical high regard for all things female, he proved himself popular with the females without any awareness he was popular with them – which made him more popular.

Anyway, what class of bastard goes runnin’?’

but I understood he had to make use of me because he was excited by the car and I was the only one in the room.

There was the fact that you created a political statement everywhere you went, and with everything you did, even if you didn’t want to.

‘Over the road’ was viewed in our community as more ‘over the water’ than actual ‘over the water’, with the flag perceived to be flown there with more proximity and grandiosity than ever could muster – try as it might – the territory it came from in the first place.

Purposely not wanting to know therefore, was exactly what my reading-while-walking was about. It was a vigilance not to be vigilant,

If we wanted figures of speech and rhetorical flourishes, with one thing representing another thing when the represented thing could easily have been itself in the first place, then we’d have gone to English Literature with those weirdos down the hall.’

and again she was bluffing, pretending sorrow about our lack of colour, our hampered horizons, our mental landscapes, when it was obvious she was a person too defined within herself to be long perturbed by anything at all.

Cats are not adoring like dogs. They don’t care. They can never be relied upon to shore up a human ego.

Until that point wee sisters had never looked at these papers, or watched the political news on television, least not watched in any avid way. Instead they’d been going through their Joan of Arc phase. While in it, they let it be known that they were not fond of that country from ‘over the water’, not though, because of the usual legacy of history, and of the power of history that had been built up and passed down and reshaped and elaborated upon over what had taken place involving that country and this country – but because of their very natural support of the French.

Around the walls they put posters of exemplary worldwide issue women obtained from the downtown sister branch which had obtained them from the international women’s headquarters. But before that, our seven women got the husband of the first woman to go into the shed to deal with the spiders and the insects for them, which the husband, under condition they kept silent about his involvement in this matter, agreed in the dead of night to do.

My knowledge of the world consisted of fucking hell, fucking hell, fucking hell, which didn’t lend itself to detail,

‘She’s fine, out and about’ was the communal prognosis upon her, also the communal euphemism for ‘mended though broken’, itself another euphemism for ‘in urgent need of medical care and attention’,

Being loved back by the person he loved to the point where he couldn’t cope anymore with the vulnerable reciprocity of giving and receiving, he ended the relationship to get it over with before he lost it, before it was snatched from him, either by fate or by somebody else. Nobody said anything sensible to him at the time because who would have been that somebody? So it was that brother attempted to evade his great fear of theoretically losing what he wanted more than anything and to make do with a substitute instead.

she admonished, saying, ‘I think I hate you,’ which meant she didn’t because ‘I think I hate you’ is the same as ‘probably I hate you’, which is the same as ‘I don’t know if I hate you’, which is the same as ‘I don’t hate you, oh my God, my love, I love you, still love you, always, always have I loved you and never have I stopped loving you’.

Eventually the state responded by admitting that yes, it had precision-targeted a few accidental people in pursuance of intended people, that mistakes had been made, that that had been regrettable, but that the past should be put behind, that there was no point in dwelling.