"The Bell Ringer"

"The Bell Ringer"
by John Burnside

Rating: 8.2



Short story about a woman who realizes that her marriage is unfulfilling and decides to take up bell ringing. Eva Lowe turns off the main coastal road and takes the back way through Kinaldy woods, a magical route she associates with her childhood and her father’s love of folk tales.

As soon as he was in, the car pulled away, heading out of the village and west, toward the lower woods, where the snow would be thick all night, thick and heavy and, even on the road that ran up to Kinaldy and Lathockar, completely unmarked, except for a line of tire tracks that would soon vanish into whiteness. ♦

"The Cold Outside"

Happy Halloween!
"The Cold Outside"
by John Burnside

Rating: 8.3


Short story, written in the first person, about Bill Harley, a truck driver in Scotland, who is dying of cancer. The narrator was not surprised by the return of his cancer. He was upset for his daughter Caroline, and bothered about how his wife, Sall would take it.

I nodded, but I didn’t move. The door was still open, just enough that I could smell the cold outside, and I heard the dog barking—farther away now, it seemed, at the darker end of the road that ran past our house and into the hills, past the golden lights of farms and dairies and narrow sheep runs through the gorse, where snow was probably beginning to form—real snow this time, not the cold sleet I’d driven through in the woods where I met the boy. For a split second—no more—I wanted to get back in the rig and drive on, up into the darkness, into the origin of the approaching blizzard, just to be alone out there, the way that boy had been alone in the woods. Then, with Sall watching me curiously, and perhaps fearfully, I let go of that thought and went through to the living room, where the curtains were already drawn and the night was nothing more than a story to be told by a warm fire, with the radio humming quietly in the background, so that the world felt familiar and more or less happy, like the future that seemed possible when you didn’t think about dying, or the pastel-colored maps in a childhood atlas that you couldn’t help but go on trusting, even when you knew that they no longer meant what they said. ♦