In the Shadows, Some Light Shines Through
The final story, “One Night Stand” is a winner. When we meet Rafe, the protagonist, he comes off as arrogant and self-centred. He has, much to his chagrin, allowed a woman to spend the night and as she messes up his immaculate home, scrounging some breakfast for them, setting her (gasp) bare buttocks on his pristine white cushions, he quietly fumes. He is, of course, a business development executive, and she, it turns out works at the rape crisis centre. Oil and water, save for the wild sex, but it should have ended there. As he is driving her home, his mother calls to remind him of an upcoming family dinner, asking, with faint hope if he might be bringing someone. Understanding the subtext, his female companion suggest she could come along, just to get his mother off his back.
Joseph Schreiber reviews Breanne McIvor‘s Where There Are Monsters.
A Few Unanswerable Questions Regarding Moses Mendelssohn
As the tram rattles up a slight elevation, a group of young Indian men make their way from one end of the car and huddle up near to where I’m standing. They joke loudly in Hindi about how cold Berlin is and what it’s doing to their chances of getting laid. I try to distance myself. I don’t want to be seen with them. Not because they’re raucous or laddish, but because they’re Indian. Indian Indian. Not like me, not British Indian. What if the conductor asks for tickets, and these guys don’t have tickets, and he lumps me in with them? What if the fact that I know more about Shakespeare than I do about Shah Rukh Khan doesn’t immediately show? We have the same colour skin, similar features, the same kind of solid, dark hair. What if the other passengers, the white passengers, on the tram already hate me because of the noise these guys are making?
By Gurmeet Singh.
The Past is a Foreign City
David Collard‘s “The Past is a Foreign City” appears on p. 191 of We’ll Never Have Paris.