The Secret Goldfish. David Means. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: David Means
Издательство: HarperCollins
Серия:
Жанр произведения: Сказки
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9780007405336
Скачать книгу
id="u6bb0c6d1-d253-56f9-b1f9-5872a90447d1">

      DAVID MEANS

      The Secret Goldfish

       Copyright

      These short stories are entirely works of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in them are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      

      Fourth Estate

      A division of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      This edition published by Fourth Estate 2012

      

      First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate 2005

      

      Copyright © David Means 2004

      

      David Means asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      

      Some of the stories in this book appeared in the following publications:

      ‘The Secret Goldfish’ in the New Yorker; ‘Lightning Man’ in Esquire; ‘It Counts as Seeing’ in Harper’s; ‘Sault Ste. Marie’ in Harper’s; ‘Blown from the Bridge’ and ‘A Visit from Jesus’ (as ‘Two Folktales from Michigan’) in Witness; ‘Elyria Man’ in McSweeney’s; ‘The Project’ in the Alaska Quarterly Review and Harper’s; ‘Carnie’ in Witness and The Best American Mystery Stories, 2001

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

      

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

      Source ISBN: 9780007164875

      EBook Edition © JULY 2016 ISBN: 9780007405336 Version: 2016-07-25

       Dedication

       To Genève

       Epigraph

      The pure products of America go crazy—

      

      WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       A Visit from Jesus

       Petrouchka [With Omissions]

       Elyria Man

       The Project

       Hunger

       Counterparts

       Dustman Appearances to Date

       Carnie

       The Nest

       Michigan Death Trip

       The Secret Goldfish

       About the Author

       Praise

       By the Same Author

       About the Publisher

       LIGHTNING MAN

      The first time, he was fishing with Danny. Fishing was a sacrament, and therefore, after the strike, when his head was clear, there was the blurry aftertaste of ritual: the casting of the spoon in lazy repetitions, the slow cranking, the utterance of the clicking reel, the baiting of the clean hook, and the cosmic intuitive troll for the deep pools of cool water beneath the gloss of a wind-dead afternoon. Each fish seemed to arrive as a miracle out of the silence: a largemouth bass gasping for air, gulping the sky, gyrating, twisting, turning against the leader’s force. But then he was struck by lightning and afterward felt like a fish on the end of the line. There was a paradigm shift: he identified purely—at least for a few months—with the fish, dangling, held by an invisible line tossed down from the heavens.

      Lucy had languid arms and pearly-white skin—as smooth as the inside of a seashell, he liked to say—and he smelled, upon returning to the house on the Morrison farm one night, her peaty moistness on his fingers. He’d touched her—just swept his fingers into