Old Wounds by Edna O´Brien

Photograph By Simon Burch

Old Wounds 

by Edna O'Brien

BIOGRAPHY

1 June 2009

We didn’t have a flower garden. There were a few clumps of devil’s pokers—spears of smoldering crimson when in bloom, and milky yellow when not. But my mother’s sister and her family, who lived closer to the mountain, had a ravishing garden: tall festoons of pinkish-white roses, a long low border of glorious golden tulips, and red dahlias that, even in hot sun, exuded the coolness of velvet. When the wind blew in a certain direction, the perfume of the roses vanquished the smell of dung from the yard, where the sow and her young pigs spent their days foraging and snortling. My aunt was so fond of the piglets that she gave each litter pet names, sometimes the same pet names, which she appropriated from the romance novels she borrowed from the library and read by the light of a paraffin lamp, well into the night.

The Love Object by Edna O’Brien

 

Photograph by Christopher Anderson

The Love Object

by Edna O’Brien

BIOGRAPHY

Edna O’Brien / El objeto del amor

He simply said my name. He said “Martha,” and once again I could feel it happening. My legs trembled under the big white tablecloth and my head became fuzzy, though I was not drunk. It’s how I fall in love. He sat opposite—the love object. Elderly. Gray eyes. Dull blond hair. The hair was graying on the outside and he had spread the outer gray ribs across the width of his head as if to disguise the blond, the way some men disguise a patch of baldness. He had what I call a religious smile—an inner smile that came on and off, governed, as it were, by his private joy in what he heard or saw: a remark I made, the waiter removing the cold dinner plates that served as ornament and bringing warmed ones of a different design, the nylon curtain blowing inward and brushing my bare, summer-ripened arm. It was the end of a warm London summer.