Milkman

by Anna Burns

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.

I was too buzzy to read, thinking of teacher, of her manner of saying there were sunsets every day, that we weren’t meant to be coffined and buried whilst all the time still living, that nothing of the dark was so enormous that never could we surmount it, that always there were new chapters, that we must let go the old, open ourselves to symbolism, to the most unexpected of interpretations, that we must too, uncover what we’ve kept hidden, what we think we might have lost.

The fact I myself was in it, talking to a sinister man while holding the head of a cat that had been bombed to death by Nazis was proof, if anything, that the ten-minute area was not for normal things.

Ma told me that he told her that at first while lying in hospital, some aberrant insurrectionary sense had come upon him, wanting deeds of goodness to be done unto him instead of him always having to be the deeder of the goodnesses.