Telephone, by John Fuller

Telephone is a funny little story by English writer John Fuller. Fuller is Fellow Emeritus at Magdalen College, Oxford, which I had to look up. Emeritus means he’s retired. He writes primarily poetry, but also short stories and novels. After reading Telephone it makes me interested in reading more of his work. What I found most interesting about him was that he started a small press, the Sycamore Press, which he ran out of his garage. It was in operation from 1968 to 1992. He helped establish authors like W.H. Auden.

In Telephone, the unnamed narrator has made himself at home in a friend’s apartment. He is sitting on the sofa drinking a substantial vodka tonic. His friend Dickie, is away, so the narrator is alone. He is left to his own imagination. You get the feeling that more than his day was boring. The narrator seems to need more fun in his whole life. John Fuller gets a lot into just two pages; you get a sense of the character as a whole. I enjoyed every bit of this very short work.