Inveresk Street Ingrate
A BLOG OUT OF STEP, OUT OF TIME AND OUT OF BREATH.
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Friday, January 13, 2012
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Monday, January 09, 2012
Sunday, January 08, 2012
Blackburn, a Novel by Bradley Denton (Picador USA 1993)
Blackburn was surprised that it was so easy. He hadn't thought he would be able to shoot another man. But here was Number Two trying to pull on his pants. The man was big, and his footfalls shook the telephone on the nightstand. A hole in his stomach pumped dark blood. The blood glistened on the man's skin, on the bedsheets, on the floor.
The woman on the bed was screaming. She scooted back against the headboard and stuffed part of the top sheet into her mouth. She screamed louder.
"Don't do that," Blackburn said. His ears were buzzing from the gunshot.
Number Two pulled his pants up as far as his knees, then fell. The telephone jumped. The man grunted. He lay on his side, and the blood ran down his belly to the floor. The woman continued to scream. Her screams were why Blackburn had come into the room. But there was no need for them now.
"It's all right," Blackburn said.
The woman screamed and screamed.
"What else could I do?" Blackburn asked.
Saturday, January 07, 2012
Gone Fishin' by Walter Mosley (Tandem Library 1997)
A lot of people might not like how I acted with that white woman. They might ask: Why didn’t he get mad? or Why would Mouse be breaking his butt to get money out of a poor farmer when this rich white lady would be so much of a better target?
Mouse was just doing what came natural to him. But there’s a reason I wasn’t angry then, why I’m still not angry and why the people of Pariah didn’t rise up and kill that woman: It’s what I call the ‘Sacred Cow Thinking.’
Miss Dixon lived alone out in a colored community that hated her because she owned everything, even the roads they walked on. But Miss Dixon, and every other white person, was, to that colored community, like the cow is to those Hindus over in India. They’d all starve to death, let their children starve, before they’d slaughter a sacred cow. Miss Dixon was our sacred cow. She had money and land and she could read and go to fine events at the governor’s house. But most of all she was white and being white was like another step to heaven...
Killing her would have been worse than killing our own children; killing her, or even thinking of it, would be like killing the only dream we had.