您好!欢迎访问每日学习网! 字典 词典 诗词
首页 英语 英语短篇小说欣赏-A Tray of Ice Cubes

英语短篇小说欣赏-A Tray of Ice Cubes

时间:2024-07-20 00:29:29 来源:网络 作者:mrcsb 人气:
【导读】:Daphne and Colin were spending Friday evening as they spent most Friday evenings – in front of the telly with a microwaved dinner and a bottle of sweet German...

Daphne and Colin were spending Friday evening as they spent most Friday evenings – in front of the telly with a microwaved dinner and a bottle of sweet German wine, watching their favourite programme; a camcorder compilation of matrimonial mishaps and wedding-day disasters called ‘The World’s Worst Weddings’.

Each programme treated its viewers to a parade of doomed brides tumbling down church steps, or skidding backwards and landing legs-in-the-air on dance floors. Beautifully crafted, four-tiered wedding cakes toppled slowly sideways like Pisan towers and then collapsed into rubbly heaps of icing. Horses bolted with their empty landaus from the church gates. The weather outside the churches was always turbulent, lifting the brides’ dresses up over their heads to reveal saucy bridal lingerie, or whipping the top hats off the heads of the men who chased them through churchyards like farmers after troupes of grey hens.

This anthology of crookedly shot, poorly focused visions of minor catastrophes had Daphne and Colin in stitches. They laughed until they hurt. They winced at painful bits (drunken sword-dancing, marquees bulging with stored rain), drew in their breath, gave each other mock-horrified looks, groaned, giggled, shook their heads pityingly and put their hands over their mouths.

By the end of the programme, as the credits rolled quickly over a reprise of the choicest clips, Colin and Daphne felt exhausted. Their jaws ached and their voices were hoarse. But at the same time they felt refreshed and reassured by the sense they had that other people’s lives were a train of small calamities, and that while their own lives might not be everything they’d wished for, at least they were ordered havens of static objects and common sense people. The World’s Worst Weddings renewed for them each week their sense of their own worth as people while fortifying them for the routine struggles of the week ahead.

Daphne was manager of the Erith branch of BurgerWorld where she supervised a crew of twenty surly teenagers and two shift managers. She could handle (though rarely needed to) one hundred and fifty customers an hour. She was a good branch manager. She had, in the words of Dale, her area executive, ‘ketchup in her blood’. She was blonde, wide, buxom and clever. She was forty-seven.

Colin her coeval, childhood sweetheart and husband of thirty years was a bus driver. He had power-steered red double-deckers from Trafalgar Square through the suburbs of South East London for almost as long as they’d been married. In the early days he had sat alone in the forward cab of a Routemaster, obeying the bells, buzzers and knocks of his conductor. Then, at the beginning of the Seventies, he was asked to merge two people into his one body and become both driver and conductor of the new pay-as-you-enter buses. It had been difficult at first, and he felt bad about the conductors who lost their jobs, but he managed the transition with some panache. He has twice been a finalist in the South East Bus Driver of the Year Awards. He genuinely cared about his human cargo. He took corners carefully. When he stopped he stopped gently and his passengers all nodded in unison. His sedentary life and fondness for the odd pint had given him a roly-poly figure and a thickening of fat around the neck. His hair was dark but thinning on top, combed back and out of the way behind his ears, half an inch short of unkempt. His teeth were sharp, symmetrical, stained with cigar tobacco.

He was stretched out on the couch, still in his bus drivers” uniform which, with its wine-coloured blazer and striped tie, made him look like a ridiculous schoolboy. This added to the shock Daphne felt when he turned his brick-red face, still damp with laughing, towards her and said, in a voice quiet with excitement,

“Love, I think I’m pregnant.”

文章标签:
    英语阅读,英语美文,英语学习
相关推荐
  • 2024国民音乐教育大会 音乐教育迎来“ai时光”
    2024国民音乐教育大会 音乐教育迎来“ai时光”

    2024国民音乐教育大会昨天在华东师范大学开幕,大会以“音乐教育‘ai’时光”为主题,围绕音乐教育核心议题,整合各界资源,直面当今音乐教育全产业链面临的形势与问题,深入研究、交流音乐教育的理念、内容、方法与途径。...

  • 出国留学咨询什么?
    出国留学咨询什么?

    出国留学咨询包括:留学费用、留学签证、留学申请、语言能力、文化差异等多个方面的留学咨询问题,只有了解了出国留学流程以后,我们才能够清楚的如何申请留学。以下具体介绍下出国留学咨询什么?...

  • 北京关于调整自学考试相关课程考试安排及教材信息的通知
    北京关于调整自学考试相关课程考试安排及教材信息的通知

    根据教育部教育考试院《关于调整高等教育自学考试“设计概论”等4门课程2024年10月考试安排的通知》(教考函字〔2024〕43号)精神及相关主考学校意见,决定对相关课程考试安排及推荐教材做如下调整:...

  • 北京2024年高考招生录取政策
    北京2024年高考招生录取政策

    为做好我市2024年普通高等学校(以下简称高校)招生工作,根据《教育部关于做好2024年普通高校招生工作的通知》(教学〔2024〕2号)等有关文件精神,结合本市情况,作如下规定。...

版权声明:

1、本文系会员投稿或转载自网络,版权归原作者所有,旨在传递信息,不代表看本站的观点和立场;

2、本站仅提供信息展示,不承担相关法律责任;

3、若侵犯您的版权或隐私,请联系本站管理员删除。

高考 自考 留学 英语 字典 词典 成语 古诗 造句 作文 地图