YOUR STORIES 1 - English Reading Club - Bookworms

FAY WELDON’S WEEKEND, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fay_Weldon, http://www.redmood.com/weldon/interviews.html

Talking of Fay Weldon´s weekend and inspired by the title of her short story, it occurred to us that we could dwell on daily objects as titles for our personal stories. These are some of the results:

YOUR STORIES (1)

José Domingo Fernández Lariño bespeaks of an object intimately linked to our life stories, the bed, but in this case, the bed turns out to be the axe for other story telling. Sailing through the seven seas, as one would say, José Domingo treasures thousands of stories about the sea and its people.


STORY ABOUT A BED

It was on the bed of my cabin where I spent most of the time talking to Hassan: teaching him mechanics, the running of machines on board the ship we shared plus a little of French as I used to do with cadets or as they say “stagiaires”. This was Hassan’s second ship as a cadet, he had already been on board of another ship for three months. On board of that ship, a vast wall of silence had actually separated him from the rest of the crew members because he could not speak Spanish, and the Spanish crewmembers didn’t understand French.

Hassan would lie on top of the sheets but I taught him how to use them properly. As I tried to convince him of the prosaic use of things, he would rather fathom in other direction, he would intently preach me so I could righteously swerve in the direction of Islam. As he was enormously grateful to me, he believed it his duty to make me change my mind in order not to be consumed eternally by the lapping fires of hell.

Hassan would also complained about his not-very-thrifty-wife. He said “elle mange boucoup d’argent” and explained to me his careful surveillance upon her, namely, he gave her what he considered enough so she and her baby could be properly fed.
As a shipmate I had to disregard his growing disrespect towards my person and rank because like the other cadets he took for granted that education and culture were a synonym of numbed dumbness.
As he finished his training period, he went back home. I finish my story, back in that bed, in that cabin, where he last said goodbye to me.

by José Domingo Fernández Lariño (Advanced 2 student of English, Vigo EOI)




Luis Rodríguez chant is on books, and the landscape of books his eye rests upon:


BOOKS


Someone has been putting them on the shelves one by one, according to size. Some books are about trees or bushes and they live between a biography collection and a book on cats. Next to them there is a dictionary of art and a collection of books on many subjects, like photography or birds. None of them is larger than the others and the top of the books form a straight line or a gentle curve in every shelf.
There are books everywhere you look at in the room, two doors and a window curdle the landscape of books.
Apart from that, there is an iron on the table which is standing up proudly among this large amount of paper, sewn or glued together with words in between, among, up and down.

By Luis Rodríguez (Advanced 2 student of English, Vigo EOI)



MORE STORIES TO COME IN SHORT ........