Critical Mick

First Line

Last Line

The local paper was waiting for me when I got in from work. I don’t mean the freebie rag that passes for a paper where we live, I mean the local paper from back home. The real paper.

He ran faster, his feet cutting into the flint between the sleepers, running and running. But there was no escape.

Isn’t it strange, my dear wife, how you, who accused me of allowing my fascination with the past to become an obsession, are now my obsession.

He wanted to lean across and touch her hand but he hadn’t done that in years.

It’s over. I know that.

We have very little to regret.

She is walking through the woods with the children.

Do we?

The May sun had shrivelled and blistered the street all day.

The only thing I have faith in is the afternoon when we sat in your office and I watched the trees and the leaves and the darkness coming down and I thought if we can just hold on to this we can hold on to everything.

It wasn’t my idea to come back here on our honeymoon.

The red light and his heart pumping as though the pump would never stop, even though there was no blood left to pump.

I could come in anywhere on this story, now, couldn’t I?

And thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory.

"Does this fella know where he’s going at all?…

I’m in a train and I have this letter, waiting, by way of explanation.

The snow is gone.

May he find peace. May all of us. And love.

Where to begin and how to begin without sending you into a paroxysm of fear that the past has come back like a disease.

Begin again. Begin. Again. I like that thought. Begin again.

How often have I listened to this song?

…Let him go.”

How do you choose the place in which to die?

I was free and I was happy.

This is the morning after my forty-first birthday but that has nothing to do with it, that is coincidental.

That was all that mattered then, and is all that matters now.

Graham Boylan always had a red face and as he’s got older it’s got redder.

Oh, and just one other thing. It won’t get better. I just thought I’d warn you.

I gave birth to a child.

“We have to talk this through,” you said when you telephoned last week. We do.

I detest that old lie about memory playing tricks. Insanity plays tricks. Disease plays tricks. Not memory.

As the day caves in…

I remember this clearly, the way the day peeled strips from the dark eastern sky.

His sallow face. His green eyes. His shirt blotched red after we had fired.