The Dialogue of Two Snails

The Dialogue of Two Snails

White Snail.- (Silence.) (A young lady with a lace parasol comes along counting her steps. Upon reaching a little brook, she hesitates. Then she jumps.) Black Snail.- (Silence.) (The rat has crossed the river. The bad rat. The rat that devours the tender rootlets.)...
Lanny

Lanny

At that time I was into finding and cleaning the skeletons of dead things. Mostly birds. I would pull them apart, coat them in gold leaf, reassemble them wrongly and suspend them from wire frames. Little mobiles of badly made birds. I’d done a dozen or so. The gallery...
Congo Journey

Congo Journey

In a stretch of comparative quiet, by a shore of white sand, a bird I recognized at once was wading carefully in the shallows: rook-size, it was brown all over, but its head was remarkable: a big broad bill balanced by a triangle of crest projecting from the back gave...
Landmarks

Landmarks

Although I knew Gaelic to be richly responsive to the sites in which it was spoken, it was my guess that other tongues in these islands also possessed wealths of words for features of place – words that together constituted a vast vanished, or vanishing, language for...