Dylan Thomas - Selected Stories

Who do you wish was with us?
A young man and an old man are walking through the countryside. They want to leave the dirt and the stress of the noisy city behind and enjoy the pure nature of the countryside. After a few hours of walking and enjoying nature, they get on an bus that passes by, because you can’t always do everything the way you’d like to. Soon they arrive at the cliffs. Behind the rocks, there’s the sea. The old man starts talking about his family; about how his father, mother and brother died. The young man tries to switch his mind to something else, because he has heard these stories over a hundred times. As the old man walks into the sea, he remembers the joy of paddling he felt when he was a boy. They agree to forget their thoughts of death and paddle each day from now on.

After the fair
On a deserted fair late at night a young girl is looking for a place to sleep. While she is raising the canvas that covers the little coconut stalls and the fairy boats, she suddenly finds a baby lying all alone in one of the stalls. Annie knocks at the window of a shabby caravan and has a meal with the fat man who lives there. As he carries the baby into the caravan, it starts crying. To stop the crying, they take the baby on the roundabouts. And so the girl falls asleep, on a roundabout, with a baby in her arms.

Extraordinary little cough
Four boys are going camping for a fortnight. They feel free and elated and can’t wait to build their tents on a nice spot and make their own food and talk in their sleeping bags till dawn. Their peace can’t even be disturbed by the two biggest and most dangerous boys of their school, who challenge George -nicknamed ‘little cough’- to run down the whole of the beach and then take the only three girls that are around.

Just like little dogs
A young man stands under a bridge at night. He looks at the people who are coming home from the beach and listens to the trains that pass above his head. Two strangers join him. They stand together without speaking, one wondering who the other is. Then a foreign-looking man starts telling about the two girls he and his mate met years ago. For some reason they don’t know, they swapped their dates and eventually married them. Because they didn’t want to break their promise, they now love each others’ wife. Three men, who don’t want to go home because of the infiniteness of time that is waiting for them, find each other in a short talk at night under a railway bridge.

The visitor
An old man is lying in his bed, waiting for death to come. He feels like he is already dead. He thinks he is already dead. Without the loving care and the sweet stories of his wife Rhianon he would surely be dead. But there’s another person who attends him, who sits next to him and talks to him. Peter is the only one who can see his visitor Callaghan. This night Callaghan takes him on a dreaming trip to a valley that is overwhelmed by the smell of death and where blood flows over the ground. This view fills Peter with joy. In the early morning he is lying again in his room. When Rhianon comes in, he speaks to her, but she doesn’t hear him. She takes a long look at him and puts the sheet over his face.

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