Famished Lover by Alan Cumyn

distance a ghoulish gang of prisoners forming on the other side of a barbed wire fence. Ragged as we may be, they are in tatters, the skin shrunken around their skulls, eyes dull as caves, shoulder blades propping up the worn fabric of their uniforms.
    â€œWho are they?”I whisper to Cuddihey beside me.
    â€œThe Russians,” he whispers back. “They’ve been here the longest. They only have what the Germans give them.”
    What the Germans give them is the same as what the Germans give us. At dinner I line up with the others for another round of anemic soup and half-slice of petrified bread. The water comes from a pump in the compound and smells of sewage.
    â€œEasy on the champagne, there, fannigan,” Collins says to me. We are sitting with our backs to the hut, faces in sunshine, as if the heat of the afternoon might make up for the paltry and disgusting food.
    â€œYou can call me Fannigan if you want, but I’m not Irish.”
    â€œEveryone’s fannigan here,” he says, smiling. “
Kriegsgefangene!
Prisoners of war.” He dips his bread in his soup then rolls it around in his mouth to soften it. “Don’t eat too much of this swill — not that you’ll ever get a chance — but never skip a meal, either. If it’s horrific just have a little. You have to keep something in your stomach.” He has brought some forms for me to fill out. “They want to know what you are in real life. Be careful what you answer. They’re looking forminers, machinists, farmers — anyone who might be useful to their war effort.”
    â€œI’m a lion tamer,” Witherspoon says. “And Milne is a magician, and Findlay —” he searches among the group of lounging men till he catches Findlay’s eye. “What are you, Findlay?”
    â€œA dance instructor!”
    Others begin calling out their professions.
    â€œButler!”
    â€œBullfighter!”
    â€œBellhop!”
    â€œSausage fitter!”
    â€œA what, McGuire?” Collins calls back.
    â€œI fit the sausage into the skin,” McGuire answers. “And if you don’t believe me, give me a whopping big helping of sausage and I’ll fit it into my skin before you know what’s happened.”
    Good-natured laughter. Great God, I think, we are almost men again. A band of fannigans.
    â€œSo what are you, Crome?” Collins asks.
    â€œI’m an artist,”I say with pride, and write in the word, then look at it in the hard sun of this dismal place.

Four
    Justin Frame kept his offices in a tired little building off Dorchester, about a forty-minute walk from our cold and crummy flat. In the slush and ice of that winter, in an old pair of shoes with rubber galoshes, my hat pulled down, coat collar scarfed and buttoned, I made the trip a perfectly round twelve times per week. I could have taken the trolley car, but I was saving to move us up in the world. When I was single I used to buy lunch quite often with the other fellows from the office — with Gil Jenkins and Howard Lineman and old Bruce Bannerman, who’d been working for Frame for twenty-two years. Bannerman could sketch a woman’s face, hat, dress and gloves for a quarter-page advert in the
Gazette
in eight minutes while carrying on a loud conversation about last night’s boxing matches. Almost all Bannerman’s women had the same face — those imperial eyebrows, the hard lines of their cheeks and lips — so they became known as “Bannerman girls.” Clients asked for them specifically.
    Yet he was the first one old Frame let go. In the winter of 1930 all kinds of businesses were throwing out the engine coal to keep from sinking further. Bannerman had a soft,pillowy face red from drink, a nose that looked punched-in ages ago. Everything for his retirement had been in northern Ontario gold stocks that had evaporated the season before. But his daughter had married a