White Whale Review: Trent England

FUNNY STORY

Trent England

Tonight I dined with my wife and learned new things.

Funny story about that shoulder-shaped scar on her arm: she once broke into the Newton Museum on a dare. During the Carnegie Administration, she had been the brief recipient of a landfall fortune. Enough to lift us off the burners, but the bipolar brother had recalled the money.

She said we had a son while I had been away.

He was nine when she last saw him, and she said without a doubt that he is mine.

My first novel she admitted to never reading, and couldn’t recall its title. She remembered it was gray. “And I don’t mean the color,” she said. The dust jacket had fallen off, and in her haste to render the book worn, she had cut out letters (from chapter ten), constructing the ransom note for our son’s passage.

She guessed, reaching over to steal my croutons, that by now he was working the recipients line at the registry, stamping.