Do What the Boss Says: Stories of Family and Childhood

By Michael Loveday

Do What the Boss Says: Stories of Family and Childhood is a collection of short-short stories exploring the adult-child dynamic. A daughter nervously visits her father who has now become a stranger; a young Irish girl substitutes a cardboard cut-out for her presence within her own family; a naive schoolboy is tricked by a more streetwise passer-by; a child tries to impress her village by breaking the world record for stepping in and out of a doorway. This chapbook offers you a kaleidoscopic view of the pressures, conflicts and joys of childhood and family life: from surreal fables to memoir, to idiosyncratic realism, to ghost stories about weird encounters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bamboo Dart Press
• Release date: Nov 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781947240605

Book preview

Anxiety of Influence

She was hanging onto the yellow plastic stirrups suspended from the carriage ceiling when the thought struck her: she could do whatever she wanted here. It was nearly midnight. There were no other passengers. An idea wound through her mind: the poem above the window. For the whole journey towards her father’s house, as she’d steadied herself to meet him again and watched a ghost version of herself reflected in the glass, its code had been riddling in her subconscious. The red god rock / watches all that passes. Words stared down at her as if to admonish. What lesson did they prescribe?

She stepped closer to the window, dared to reach up. Wobbling on her feet, stretching and putting out a hand for balance, she slid the advert precisely to the right, dragged it from position. With a flourish she pulled the cardboard through the air to her side. Revealed behind, in the empty slot, were row upon row of the same icon: a hissing snake, a placeholder print, as if a computer key had got stuck.

The poem slipped under her jumper, wrapping its curve around her belly, the ends almost touching at the small of her back. A shock on her skin, cold and unwelcome as a stethoscope. But—as the corners of the cardboard jutted out from her clothes—she needed this transgression. Middle finger to the system. Or to something.

She paused; the train slowed. The next station took longer than usual to arrive. Doors opened—a giddy leap to a platform drenched with moonlight. She started the walk to the barrier. Beyond, the dark road twisted away towards her former home.

At the exit gates, a man readied his challenge: russet hair, freckles, bristled beard—the spit of her father, sentry-stiff and evaluating all.

Red god. Rock. She brazened herself, holding his gaze at every step. All she had were words, words, words, the poetry itching within her.

My Double

I made a cardboard cutout of me. Clodagh, I called her, and my family took to her well. That first evening at dinner, they barely registered any difference, as they slurped, and gnawed, and licked their lips, and gorged on lavish meats. At last I didn’t have to be disgusted by the