Argosy: The Short Story Magazine — page 58: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

shiek” 2 ote RS ; . x . r J a « 4 - * " cf te ek tats : fe . myer ft : Pag ite sera ee 3 =e "= thy BRIAN CLEEVE bia “Jamie the Book,” she said, and laughed, but there “was” Bee nothing kind in it. She didn’t even walk off and leave me. She just stood waiting until I picked myself-out of the hedge, as if _ | "a she despised me too much even to be angry with me. And we walked all the way back to Ballysaggart without another word between us. , _ If I’d been a man at all I suppose I’d have left it at that. There were other girls I could have gone round with—indeed, I shouldn’t have been worrying about girls at all, with the final = exams at the Teachers’ Training College over in Kilshannon coming off at the end of the summer. [ should have been studying. “ee But my bedroom window looked down the length of the main street, and beyond it to the mountainside. If I looked up from the table where I was “supposed to be working, I could see Bear everything that happened in Ballysaggart. I could see old Mr. Clooney taking the shutters down from the bar windows — just before ten o’clock. I could see Sheila Ryan shaking the _ mats outside the hotel door, and the car outside Mrs. Slattery’s General Store, where a commercial traveller was inside selling __ her something. And if I waited long enough I’d see Fran. Bie She used to help in Mrs. Slattery’s shop, and sooner or later she’d come outside and stand in the sunlight for a minute, as if she was being stifled inside, among the rolls of calico and the oy i trays of cotton reels, and the huge daisy-chains of saucepans and as y frying-pans and working-boots hanging from the ceiling. She'd stand there, with her hands on her hips and her red hair warmer than the sunlight, and until I saw her I couldn’t work. I didn’t dare look down at my book in case I missed that one minute in the morning. Just to see her meant something. Even when she was angry. Even when she didn’t know I was there. Just to see her standing, or moving. The shape of her breast __ under her dress and the way it lifted when she yawned and stretched, basking in the sunlight like a cat, a panther. If the other girls in the village yawned, they put their fingers over their mouths and said, “ Excuse me,” and giggled, because __ they thought that that was manners. And they’d no more have stretched in public than they’d have stripped. A lot of them even walked with a bit of a stoop, so that they wouldn’t show _ their figures too much. But when Fran moved you could see that she enjoyed her body. And that was another reason that they didn’t like her and were half afraid of her. They thought she was sinful. Just to look the way she did was sinful in a place like Ballysaggart. Bs’: comclookss com a