Death in the afternoon

A short story by Tobin Dalrymple

Chapter 1: Meeting Jane

I said goodnight to Alissón at the Abbesses metro. She turned her head to force my kiss onto her cheek, and I was sure I would never see her again. I started the walk home, half smiling with a quiet mind, half buried in my thoughts, only partially able to look up, to enjoy, to see…

Chapter 4: M.K.R.

The girl in the brown pyjamas shuffled through the closet, flinging aside hangers, plucking out pants, blouses and belts, biting her lip the whole time. It was as if she were a mad composer, intensely focused, with her arms gliding through the air. It was as if she played a giant, stringed…

Chapter 3: Shaking Hands

There was never any doubt. No hand dragged across a cold mattress to discover an empty hole. No panic it was all a dream. When I woke, only a few hours after closing my eyes, and with the sun only gently coming in, Jane was still there.

Chapter 5: The Girl in the White Castle

I saw the diamonds in Jane’s ears as she opened the door to her apartment, an old chambre bonne — where the maids used to live— squeezed into the attic level of the building on Boursault, four or five others just like it down the hall.

Chapter 2: Jane’s Pyjamas

I heard her high heels clicking behind me on the walk up the stairs to the apartment.

“I hope to god you’re not some fucking creep.”

She held her fist up again and I saw her smile in the dark hallway.

Chapter 7: Diamond Girls

The gypsy played an accordion while her daughter, a toddler wearing multi-coloured rags and a face full of dirt, walked the length of the metro, outstretching a McDonald’s paper cup for change. The girl was so tiny, at every stop I was certain she’d be launched through the air. But…

Chapter 8: Black Snake

The child skipped a stone out into the aquamarine inlet. The stone hopped five times, one point to the next, until eventually submerging beneath the surface, never to be seen again. The kid thought nothing of it — the life he gave that inanimate object, beginning with its selection from…

Chapter 6: Predictable

She was no longer Jane. She was no longer the girl in the green hat. She was the one I held in my arms, whose body I studied for the next two hours, whose lips I could recognize blindly by touch, whose smile, the one where her cheeks reached for her eyes, made me sigh, whose face was like…