"Friendly Fire"

"Friendly Fire"
by Tessa Hadley

Rating: 8.2



Short story about a British woman, Shelley, whose son, Anthony, is fighting in Afghanistan. Shelley was helping out her friend Pam. Pam had her own cleaning business. She’d been hired to clean an industrial warehouse. Shelley had agreed to go along; it was a few weeks before Christmas.

They sat there for a few minutes, too tired to move, giving the car time to recover, talking about their Christmas shopping, who they’d bought for, what they still had to get. More than half the short winter’s day had passed while they were in the warehouse. The sky was a blue so pale that it was almost no color; wooded bluffs loomed above them, beyond the industrial estate, marking the edge of the city. The sun had dropped behind the bluffs already, so that the tops of the bare trees showed up finely spiky, like hair or fur, against a yellow glow of light from somewhere out of sight. While they waited, their breath began to fog up the car windows. ♦