Normal Rules Don’t Apply by Kate Atkinson EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Kate Atkinson
- Language: English
- Genre: Literary Short Stories
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
The Void
And in that day they shall roar against them like the roaring of the sea: and if one look
unto the land, behold darkness and sorrow, and the light is darkened in the heavens
thereof.
5:30
In the beginning was the Void. Then came the Word, and with the Word the
World began.
Then one day, to everyone’s surprise, the Void returned, and darkness
rolled over the land. At 09:12 GMT on Thursday, 4 May 2028, to be
precise.
The old man usually beat the sun to rising, but not today. He had been
drinking in the Green Dragon the previous evening and woke a little after
seven, feeling grouchy. He was not a drinker and remembered with regret
the beer of the previous evening. A locally brewed real ale called Old
Sheep’s Hooves, or something equally daft. His daughter would chastise
him—too old to be drinking, she would say if she knew. His daughter
refused to believe he was going to die one day, whereas the old man was
surprised every time he woke up in the morning. She was his only child,
and she was called Barbara.
Meg, the old man’s sheepdog, was asleep on the rug in front of the
ancient Rayburn. The dog was old herself and he prodded her gently with
his toe and said fondly, “Get up, lazybones.” She lifted her head and looked
at him with tired, rheumy eyes. The old man’s wife had died last year, so
now it was just him and the dog. They made a good couple, in the dog’s
opinion anyway.
The old man blundered through to the kitchen and reached for the coffee
pot and the handle came off in his hand. “Oh, damn and buggery,” he said,
and the dog cocked her head to one side and looked at him.
He went in search of a screwdriver. Whatever you went looking for in
the house, you could find it—rubber bands, string, stamps, fuses, light
bulbs, nails. His wife had equipped the place with every single thing you
might ever need. In idle moments (he had many nowadays), he racked his
brains for something that she might have overlooked. It was like a game—
tent pegs, a mallet, a jam pan—but he hadn’t caught her out yet.
His wife was gone, but she had left something of herself behind in every
last candle, tea-strainer and chopstick. The chopsticks had been a real test,
but the old man had found them eventually, nestling, appropriately, inside a
Chinese lacquered box on the dressing table in the back bedroom. He had
needed something to poke out a blockage in the plughole in the bathroom.
They had never eaten Chinese food (Not once! Why not?), and he wondered
when and why his wife had acquired the chopsticks. Every object was a
small revelation.
Sometimes he suspected that these things were only
brought into existence when he went looking for them. How else to explain
the chopsticks? He had always been a practical man, but he found himself
having many fanciful thoughts these days.
Grassholm, the farmhouse was called, and it had stood at the top of the
village of Hutton le Mervaux for as long as anyone could remember.
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