SOUNDTRACK:
[READ: December 10, 2022] “Masculine”
This year, S. ordered me The Short Story Advent Calendar. This is my fifth time reading the Calendar. I didn’t know about the first one until it was long out of print (sigh), but each year since has been very enjoyable. Here’s what they say this year
Like we always do at this time: the Short Story Advent Calendar is back for 2022. We had such a great time last year working with our first-ever guest editor, the one and only Alberto Manguel. This year, however, we’re bringing things back to basics. No overarching theme or format, just 25 top-class short stories, selected in-house, by some of the best writers in North America and beyond. It’s December 10. Mathilde Merouani, a writer and translator in Paris, never splits infinitives.
This is a very sad story about a girl who has moved to France with her mother.
The girl was told to play with the other kids. The kids don’t speak English, only French and the girl’s French is not that good yet. They called her mother a whore, but she didn’t know the word.
One of the kids told her it meant a lady who is very very nice. But the other girl told her that it was a woman who makes love for money because she’s dirty.
But when she started to cry the girls said that one of the other girls’ mothers was a whore too.
They also seemed to actually like the narrator as well. Because they invited her to come back with them. They made fun of Americans together “English peoples are stupid. Americans especially with their big guns and their big cars.”
They invite her to the river with them the next day. There were boys there and the boys took the girls’ bikini bottoms off.
She started stealing money from her mother to buy sweets and ice cream for her new friends.
The next few days it rained and she couldn’t hand out with her new friends. This gave her time to figure out if her mother was actually a whore–based on everything her new friends had told her.
Didn’t care for this one.
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