Eventually she goes back inside, buys some liver and limps back the way she came. For a moment he considers ‘swinging it against the girl’s head but knew the timing was not right’. He leads her to a dirt yard and picks up an iron skillet he has cast himself. Exploiting her indecision, the butcher offers to show her something out back.
When she gets there, she can’t remember what cut her mother wanted. ‘Reduction, compression, silence and absence in a text might,’ she reasons, ‘enable a largeness to expand in the mind of the reader.’Ī child is sent to the butcher’s to buy some meat. This is just the effect Scanlan is after. We might begin to wonder what the writer has suppressed in paring things back. Scanlan seems like a woman you can trust.
There’s nothing sentimental in her work, no superfluous scene setting or filler. She writes about ordinary things: eating and defecating, bad sex and heatstroke, running errands and men who won’t admit they’ve gained weight. Her sentences are spare, her syntax is plain, and she restricts herself, for the most part, to everyday diction. Her stories are short – often no more than a couple of paragraphs long.
