Blue Snow by Joseph Mills - A Little Taster

The park was more beautiful than I had ever seen it before.This is not an observation I make in retrospect: I remember thinking it at the time: it's beautiful. Glasgow Green is beautiful today. I had never thought of it as beautiful before. It was always just somewhere else to play, the only place within miles of where I lived with more than ten square feet of grass. We thought of it as slightly exotic. It wasn't ours the way the ghost of Templetons carpet factory was ours.

I had only ever been to the Green before with two or three friends. I would never go alone for fear of the vicious and unpredictable Glasgow gangs, or the alcoholic women (who I feared more than the men) who would terrify me with their purple veined hands, their smell, and their pale, dirty faces: faces which were either bitter and theatening or (worse) delirious with their anaesthetized world. Today they couldn't harm me. I was with my mother. I was protected.

(Copyright 1998 Joseph Mills.)

This is an extract from Blue Snow a short story from Joseph Mills book Obsessions. To read further, follow the link on my main blog and BUY IT!

All My Best Shane... x