Literary Imagination Advance Access originally published online on November 28, 2007
Literary Imagination 2008 10(1):36-46; doi:10.1093/litimag/imm110
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Sweetchat
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
We are trying to describe the colour of the shirt worn by the man our mother invited to dinner. Our father is leaning forward in his chair, elbows resting on his knees, one hand holding the other captive. I hear the crick of a knuckle giving way to pressure; my sister frowns at the sound, and takes up the story. "It was a kind of gold colour. But pissy gold, wasn't it?" She looks at me for corroboration. "Yah. That's a good way to describe it." She's not quite satisfied, though, and distils it once more. "Cat's-piss-gold, I would call it."
Our father is looking past us now, out the window. His eyes have taken on the colour of the rainy day, like the way a lake always copies the sky. The chair he sits on is burst at the side, and yellow foam escapes from the leatherette seat. He