Chivalry

Each week, we pick a short fiction piece from our Fairlight Shorts archives to feature as our story of the week. This week, we’ve chosen a story about young love by Matthew Twigg.

Matthew Twigg lives with his wife and two children near Oxford, where he works as an editor for an academic publisher. He completed a PhD in 2015 on the topic of ancient Gnostic literature. His thesis was adapted and published as The Valentinian Temple: Visions, Revelations, and the Nag Hammadi Apocalypse of Paul (2022) and is available from obscure specialist libraries everywhere. He enjoys reading, spending time with his young family, sleeping in past 6am, and staring at walls of books. His favourite TV show is Breaking Bad. His favourite novel is The Secret History by Donna Tartt. His favourite short story collection is Tenth of December by George Saunders.

‘Chivalry’ follows a boy deciding whether to listen to his father or his conscience.

Enjoy!

Kennedy sniffed himself.

‘Hot dang, I stink like dog meat.’

Where the stink had come from, Kennedy couldn’t say. Nor could he say how he knew what dog meat smelled like, exactly. Did he mean that he smelled like dog food? As if he was confusing the thing doing the eating with the thing being eaten? Like that riddle about what cows drink and how everyone always said ‘milk’, just, like, on instinct?

Were those the same? A dog eating dog meat and a cow drinking cow milk? Something in Kennedy’s head made him think they totally were, even if he couldn’t make sense of it right in that moment. Probably on account of the dog meat stink that was clouding up his senses and his ability to think, even. Which was probably why dogs were such dopey thinkers in the first place, Kennedy figured. Except those dogs that walked tightropes in talent shows. Those dogs probably got all the treatment. The ones that could think and not be put off by the stink of their own meat.

Which settled it. When Kennedy said ‘dog meat’, he meant the meat that made up a dog. Not that he usually thought of the meat that made up a dog as meat at all. Because meat was something to be eaten. And who would eat a dog? Maybe a desperate person who was starving and the dog was a stray or belonged to an asshole neighbour. Kennedy had heard about dogs being eaten in Korea, but that was probably politics and invention with no basis in reality or fairness. There was a Korean kid at Kennedy’s school and he liked Kentucky Fried Chicken just the same as everybody.

None of which solved the problem of Kennedy stinking of dog meat, but did go a long way to clarifying his thinking regarding ‘Does dog meat equal dog food in this context?’ and also the Korean question, which, while never occurring to him up until now, struck him as important in terms of the sort of world he wanted to live in.

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