The Pitch (Black Angel)

“Honestly,” she said with a sigh, “I never could bring myself to meet any of those people… but they were always on the edge of my nightmares.” In a hotel room in the West End, between promotional duties for a project that he had come to dislike with a young up and coming actress who …

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The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and

“Nothing but dream, shadow,”declared the boxer. Up by the pagoda, the thief came across a scene involving an old drunk and whore who reminded him perversely of his wife, even if she was never a harridan, or shrew. There was a certain way about the whore, perhaps common to all women in the middle of …

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Scatological Scratch

Over the obdurate face of a woman dressed in the black robes of a widow flowed a sequence of images involving: ground launch missiles, Stalinist propaganda posters, a convoy of tanks rolling through the desert. A mummified figure passed above a massed crowd of flaying and beating breasts; the bandages seemed to come loose over …

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Companions of the Bench

Wandering, lost among the crowds where I caught the strains of Luck, which was all it took to remind me of my good fortune… They had found a nice shaded spot on a park bench between a beech tree and the flowerbeds, the bees and hover flies, and the odd bobbing pigeon. His companion had …

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Two Friends

O Texan Fyodor, you have plagiarised my heart! There was a hole in his shoe and his toes were sticking out of the sock. He pulled the blanket round him and put his hands down by his balls to keep warm. The blanket was soon wet, and he could not feel his toes. A passer-by …

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