The curtain is pulled back.
Yes? says the assistant.
I've come ... to see. To see the painter.
And you are ...?
I ... I'm the physicist.
One moment, says the assistant and the curtain falls back again.
If you would like to read the rest of this story, please check out Lovers' Lies, the Arachne Press anthology in which it, and many other sexy and lovable stories from the League archives, appears.
Continue reading "The Painter and the Physicist by Tania Hershman" »
Monday
To Do:
8.45am
I never can find a matching pair of socks.
My friend Bob, Justbob, has a spaceship in his pocket.
He got his name the day he wandered onto the building site. He stood watching one of the YTS kids slapping bricks and mortar together, and then, in earshot of the foreman, Mr O’Reilly – he doesn’t much like it if you call him Malcolm, and he doesn’t much like it if you omit the Mr – he said, “I can build walls.”
The Patels had given up the lease on The Kandy Kottage sweetshop in June. In July it was taken over by Alfred Cole and his son Kevin. At first glance it was possible to think they were twins, so alike were they in their battered jackets and corduroy trousers. Even their hair was of a similar length but whilst the father's was a steely grey, the son's was a light brown, the colour of mouse fur. Although Kevin was thin and stooped like his father, customers who bothered to look could see he was still in his teens.
They had been there for two months when Greta first walked in and Kevin Cole fell in love with her. Quite what it was about her was difficult to say. Two more dissimilar people would have been hard to imagine, but he fell in love with a bang and the noise echoed through the jungle of sweet jars and bounced off the sherbet lemons.
It was on the afternoon of October 17, 1923, that a large Ford motor car passed through the village of Madderdown. Its passengers were men of distinction: a scientist and an artist. They could afford to smile at one another, as such men often do, though neither understood what the other one really did; both enjoyed a full measure of society's approbation and confidence in the value of their own proceedings, without needing to interest themselves in those of other men’.