Douglas Watson: “The Messenger Who Did Not Become A Hero” from One Story #177, 4/8/13

Art by George Fuentes

There was a messenger who was stuck working for a no-good King. That the king was no good had been proved by numerous studies. His intentions may have been good, but results-wise, he was not good. The delivery of kingly services to subject/consumers had grown markedly less efficient since the death of the old king. Also, the new king was not really handsome enough to be a king. He was duke material at best, according to the studies.
For a distinguished messenger nearing the end of his career, it was embarrassing to be working for so mediocre a king.

If you started out writing a fairy tale that turned into a humorous version of Les Miz, morphed into the Odyssey, and finished off with The Death of Ivan Illyich and tied it all together with social satire, you might end up with something like this story. Of course, you would never do such a thing. But Douglas Watson would.

Watson first came across my radar when I read his flash, “Life On The Moon,” on the Tin House blog, and couldn’t add it to my Online Fiction Sampler page fast enough.

But this is not a love story.
It is a philosophical story with a surprise ending.

Our non-hero messenger (with a passion for good coffee) does, however, fall in love. He also joins a revolution, un-revolves eight days later, heads for Sumatra and doesn’t quite make it. He does discover the benefits of self-employment, and eventually… well, you’ll have to read the story.

I suspect there are many philosophical references here that just go past me; my knowledge of philosophy begins and ends with Sophie’s World. But I’m sure there’s something very deep and analytical here about messaging; your own, vs. someone else’s. I’ve been rather obsessed with messaging over the past week or so, but come on, it’s right there in the title. This was a great story to run into right now.

In his One Story Q&A, Watson describes his approach to narrative distance:

I think it’s a way of trying to fold my own self-consciousness about the act of writing into the product itself—you know, like: Now add three tablespoons of self-consciousness. Beat until almost smooth. Melt the protagonist over medium heat. Add a dash of conflict and just enough sugar to make the reader care about the character. Mix well and bake for a million years in the Oven of Remember, This Whole Thing Is Kind of a Joke! Let cool before serving.

That’s the attitude.

Halimah Marcus: “Running Alone” from One Story #176, 3/14/13

“Outside Yourself” by BiyoArt

In the cafeteria, at a table full of people, Hunter feels as if he is sitting alone. Perhaps this loneliness is a condition he has acquired from being nearly twice as fast as the second-best runner at his school; he is in a class unto himself; he must be comfortable getting out in front. Yet his talents have earned him no notoriety. His classmates do not care about middle distance running.

When I was in high school, I somehow read a lot of fiction about running. I’m not sure why; I never ran unless a gym teacher made me (still don’t, and I’m thankful there are far fewer gym teachers in my life now). As I read this story, I remembered my intrigue. I still don’t know where it comes from, but whereas fly fishing – so popular in fiction – leaves me cold, I can somehow identify with the demands racers put on themselves, and the psychological and emotional factors involved in winning a race. And I just happen to be finishing up a calculus course right now, so I was thrilled to encounter a few terms that were somewhat familiar.

But this story isn’t about running, or about math. They provide the setting for the story, and are expertly used (at least it seems so to me, a non-expert), but it’s a story about a family of isolated people trying to connect. It’s about using talent and motivation to isolate. To protect. Or to connect.

The three members of this family – runner Hunter; father, mathematician, coach Albert; mother Irene – live in isolations of different origins. Hunter is “on the spectrum,” to begin with. His talent, and his drive, have further isolated him. I recall something from an old Educational Theory class: achievement/affiliation conflict. Altering his running style, or his interests, to fit in, is not on Hunter’s radar.

Dad has a similar fixation with mathematics; he’s probably “on the spectrum” himself, but in his case, he parlayed his obsession into academic success and a lucrative high-tech career, until cutbacks convinced him to teach high school. Here he discovered the connection between running and math: if you accelerate correctly, if your curve works right, you win the race. He teaches Hunter to train his body to follow that curve. This is where their curves intersect.

Mom is alone in her normality, perhaps. Hunter was a runner from the time he was very small, and this has served as a source of pain and guilt to Mom: ” She couldn’t help but feel rejected when Hunter didn’t want to read a book in her arms, couldn’t help but wonder what she had done to cause him to run from her.” But that pattern – someone close obsessed to the point of shutting her out – isn’t new to her; she encountered it when she was dating Dad:

The thesis was the product of such profound isolation that Albert was nearly lost entirely. It was an experience not unlike popular depictions of dying, in which a comatose patient must choose between the voices at his bedside and the distant, beckoning light. The truth was, while working on his thesis, he almost lost her. She arrived before he was ready, and Albert could barely look up from his calculations long enough to keep her. Foolishly, he risked making her wait. But along with his foolish actions came a fool’s luck. She remained patient…

And one more isolating factor: Mom’s just found out she has breast cancer.

Now, that’s kind of a deal-breaker for a lot of readers who are tired of cancer stories, but the narrative style of this story saves it. It’s a bit on the cold, clinical side, actually, but it rescues the story from any hints of sentimentalism while letting the reader still experience the loneliness, pain, and fear of the three characters. An excellent match, this particular style and this particular story.

A shining example of this can be found in a scene where Dad, unable to figure out how to help his wife, instead does what he does best: he works out the complex equation that earned him his doctoral thesis. He starts writing on the school chalkboard, and when he runs out of space, he finds a roll of oaktag used for a children’s class, lays that out on the floor, and continues there.

He uncaps a marker and tries to think of a problem, the conventional kind: difficult yet familiar. Something that will fill up the board with squeaks and blue marks, functions of x, limits approaching zero, series that never end, paradoxes with theoretical solutions. He wants a problem that will fill his mind with satisfying frustration, a problem he can attack at a steady pace, an equation he can systematically untangle for hours until he is left with one lonely and self-satisfied integer…
He is kneeling on the floor in what has become the evening dark, discovering the very thing he invented, and entire scroll in front of him, ready to record for as long as it takes.

So many religious references in that sentence: kneeling in the dark, the scroll, eternity. Some people in his situation would pray. He is praying, in his own way. And putting off picking up his wife after her chemo treatment. I truly believe most people, annoying and unreliable as they can be, do the best they can, and for him, this is the best he can do.

The intricate connections between these three characters is multidimensional, difficult to capture in a summary. Mom seems almost incomplete, but she is complete in that incompleteness, I think. She is the plane, the field on which the runner and the mathematician intersect. In that, the possibility of her loss is to them, quite literally, unthinkable.

In her One Story Q&A, Marcus describes the origins of the story and provides more insight into the depth of the running scenes. I still find it fascinating that there’s an entire philosophy behind running – several different philosophies, in fact. And it added to my understanding of the story to realize the shift involved in the story’s ending, the shift from father to mother.

I’ve seen a lot of very positive tweets about this story over the past few weeks, so I was surprised to see no one had commented on the One Story blog. I guess tweets are superseding blogs. I couldn’t do a story like this justice in 140 characters. Then again, I can seldom do anything in 140 characters.

Emma Duffy-Comparone: “The Zen Thing” from One Story #175, 2/17/13

“Family Day ~ At the Beach” by KJ Carr

Each year, like a shifty circus in a truck, the family unpacks itself for a weekend on a beach and pretends to have a good time….Expectations are low.

I didn’t particularly like this story the first time I read it. But since I have faith in One Story, I put it aside, and came back to it after a few weeks. That doesn’t always work, but this time, it did.

Initially it seemed like another dysfunctional family exposé, with one quirky character after another. To some degree, it is that, though who’s dysfunctional and who’s not is debatable, an interesting feature in itself. But more importantly, there’s a reason for these characters; their quirks serve a purpose beyond humor. They’re deliberately constructed, of course, and maybe that’s what put me off at first. But I have to admire what’s accomplished: a young woman in a tough situation looks at all her futures – and all her pasts – embodied by her family on a day at the beach.

Anita’s boyfriend, Luke, seems to have it all – movie-star looks, charm, earnestness, Rumi quotes – and then some. It’s the “then some” that’s the problem. He’s older; he’s married. He was her art professor; they moved in together five months ago following a two-year affair:

Luke has taken to drinking each night before he calls his daughter, Matilda, who is eight and who, because he cannot bear to tell her, and because his wife is certain he will come back, still thinks he is on a business trip.

It’s odd how an earnest guy who’s “gentle and curious and frequently undone by factual tidbits from the BBC” can look different in another light. Say, beach light. It’s quite a trick to make someone look sensitive when he’s being brutal. The scene reminds me of the quip about the guy who murders his parents, then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he’s an orphan.

Anita’s pushed up against her family on this beach trip, each of whom have little tendrils into her situation. Sister Theresa was a wild child, but recently started flying straight and is now married to a rich Libertarian insurance agent and takes parenting her two-year-old very seriously. Through her, Anita sees what it is to grow up, but also what Easy Street costs in human terms. She isn’t sure she likes what she sees:

She has turned into an important, scolding mother. Anita liked her sister better when she wore a Budweiser bikini and made great mix tapes, when they stayed up late watching movies and scratching each other’s back for ten minutes apiece.… Theresa sits down, too, picking grains of sand, one by one, off her arm. She is most likely afraid they will interfere with her tan. Her diamond is a sparkling mouse on her finger.

Anita’s grandmother married Frank five years ago; through them, she discovers her horror of aging, all the while acutely aware that Luke is 25 years her senior. Her mother has her quirks (she still gets hot flashes, “which make her stop whatever she is doing, unhitch her bra, and whip it out of her sleeve like a rabbit from a hat”), but when Frank has a problem, she’s the one who, though her dislike for Frank is well known, steps up. And her mother is also still bitter about her own father, who left the family when she was eleven.

Amidst all this, Anita finds herself thinking about Ben, her former boyfriend.

She has been thinking about this situation more than she would like to admit. She has been trying to remember what was so bad about him in the first place. True, he pronounced supposedly “supposably.” He gave her noogies sometimes. Once, when she asked him if he found her attractive, he said, “I like the buttons on your jacket.” Still, when she is fifty, he will be only fifty-two.

In her One Story Q&A, Duffy-Comparone shows us the process behind this story: it was inspired by her own awkward family beach trip, so she “thought of something Very Awkward and then put everyone in a bathing suit.” It was also written very quickly, in one night – “I couldn’t get precious about every sentence.” Though I’m sure it’s undergone significant editing since then, I think perhaps my initial reaction to the story might have been related to this; some sentences read awkwardly, like the one about Anita’s mother: “She has been talking a lot about death lately, and her own father, who left the family when she was eleven and years later got drunk, drove up an off ramp and was killed before Anita’s mother got around to forgiving him.” I’d assumed this was a stylistic choice for that particular sentiment, since in other places, the prose is positively poetic:

She watches children crouch and slap their hands in the tidepool that is winding across the flats. All the women, breasts heavy and tired in their suits, pull wagons and strollers across the sand and begin to set up shop. Everything is a production. There is sunscreen. There are so many toys.

I had some issues with the story. There’s a lot of character exposition up front (the story is all about character; there’s virtually no plot) and all that quirkiness gets a bit wearing. I found the ever-popular ambiguous ending less than satisfying; it felt more like additional character exposition. Maybe that’s the point: our lives are one long character exposition. Or maybe it goes back to the title. Or maybe it’s an ironic twist, and Anita remains in her rut, because breaking out of it, even with all the evidence around her, is just too damn hard. But I still found myself intrigued and impressed by this parade of complex people – people who are both good and bad, people who are doing the best they can, people who have a lot to teach Anita about the road that lies before her – and was glad I watched them spend a day at the beach.

Kindall Gray: “Break Me In and Out” from One Story #174, 1/23/13

He says he walked forty miles through a black desert full of mysterious cacti and broken glass and empty bottles in order to get here. He says that by the tenth mile there was no water and he thought he would die.…The land ahead of him began to remind him of a sky. Especially at night. He says he yelled words in Spanish, which are hard for him to translate into English. But, they went something like this: “BREAK ME IN AND OUT! He says he stared at the mass of land and sky and yelled “BREAK ME IN AND OUT!” (in Spanish) to God over and over, and that is why he lived and that is why he lights the candles now.

Kids and parents often live in different universes. When I was seven, I desperately wanted a quarter to buy Big Red at the school book fair. My father said no: “Books! You’ve got plenty of books.” I was ashamed of both my want, and my greed. We weren’t anywhere near poor; he was President of Dictograph Electronics, we lived in a rural Connecticut niche upscale of Westport. It wasn’t until much later I realized my father had other things on his mind: my mother’s cancer, and the discovery of embezzlement by the treasurer of his company (and a friend, someone he’d personally placed in the job). We were in different universes.

Toby and her mom are in different universes. In Mom’s universe, she’s cleaning houses all day, and trying to stretch three chicken breasts a week between her and her two kids with a lot of ramen, and worrying about her ten-year-old daughter too-frequently visiting the illegal alien down the hall. But all Toby sees is the upcoming Reptile Show, with its star attraction: the monitor lizard.

Monitors are my favorite animal – enormous, iguana-looking creatures with pointed spikes along their spines and sharp-slithering tongues. They seem slow and lazy, but once they start running nobody can catch them. If attacked, they use their swinging tails as a weapon. They’re also geniuses and can count to six. I’m not sure if they count on their fingers or if they thump their feet like horses. If I had a pet monitor I’d let it stay wild. I’d take it out to the desert. I’d teach it to count higher than six.

Toby makes a deal with her mom: she’ll stay away from Edilio for the month until the Reptile Show, and her mom will take her. At least, Toby thinks that’s the deal. It’s a hard deal, especially when there’s no food in the pantry, but Edilio, for all the suspicion Mom throws his way, surreptitiously feeds Toby leftover Chinese food even though his nasty girlfriend tells him not to.

Toby knows a lot about poverty, though she hasn’t quite figured out truth yet.

Steam from the noodles has fogged the window above the sink. A crack runs sideways between two corners. It has been that way for a while. When it rains, water beads along the crack and then trails down inside the window. My mom called the landlord. She said that’s why we rent. So we don’t have to fix things ourselves. But the landlord hasn’t come. And the crack is still there.

This little girl seems to understand the limitations of her world:

The red carpet is coming up so the cracked tiles show through underneath. I press a foot down over the curled fabric as hard as I can. I release my foot and the fabric pops up. There is no fixing that.

This reminds me of an image from Marc Watkins’s “Two Midnights in a Jug“: “Her bare feet touch cold linoleum beneath her bed, some of the tile edges curl upwards till their ends make a knife of plastic. She walks to the kitchen, avoiding the painful tiles, without looking….” As did Watkins, Gray effectively uses the mundane details of Toby’s life – the curled carpet, the cracked window – to link to the thematic exploration.

In her One Story Q&A, Gray explains that the characters of Toby and Edilio arrived to her “as a pair” and turned the story from a light fun piece to something with more depth. I’m glad they led her where they did.

As for the Reptile Show and the monitor lizard… well, Toby learns more about the limitations of truth, and that justice doesn’t always happen. At least not on an obvious timeline. But somehow, from the way she’s written, I just know she’s going to make it through her desert, and she’ll light a candle on the other side.

Addendum: About the Art –

I started with monitor lizards, of course. But the photos I found were uninspiring, not good enough for this story.

So I started searching for things like “man crossing desert” and this ended up buried deep in the results. I had no idea what it was, but I got the impression of Emilio shouting, “BREAK ME IN AND OUT!” and little Toby standing behind him, listening and learning about how to get through a desert. Turns out, it’s a snow sculpture from 21st International Snow Sculpting Championships in Breckenridge, Colorado, run by, sadly, a real estate developer trying to coax people to move there by providing fun and games. But the accomplishment of Team USA/Vermont still intrigued me. This isn’t the first time I’ve swapped sand and snow; the photo for the Harry Crews essay “We Are All of Us Passing Through” is sand that looks like snow, so I was happy to reverse the process. Then I read the text explanation of the sculpture, titled “Marco!” provided by Team USA/Vermont:

One child is emerging from the water nearby to another in a game of Marco Polo. The entomology of the game has its roots in the Venetian explorer, but the origin of the game is hard to pinpoint. This excerpt from Marco Polo’s diary provides a clue – he writes about crossing an expanse of desert – “When a man is riding by night through this desert and something happens to make him loiter and lose touch with his companions, and afterwards he wants to rejoin them, he then hears spirits talking in such a way that they seem to be his companions. Sometimes they even [hail] him by name.”

This fit so perfectly with Gray’s story, I felt I had been led to it.

Amity Gaige: “The Soul Keeps the Body Up” from One Story #173, 12/25/12

I want to address the first question that many observers are asking about my case:
Did the accused premeditated the abduction?
I’ll tell you the answer. The answer is no.
Or, not really.
Besides, the word “abduction” is all wrong. It was more like an adventure we both embarked upon in varying levels of ignorance.

My experience with this story was altered by my penchant for research. If I’d just read the damn thing, I would’ve been fine: The story read nicely, I enjoyed it, and was buried deep in thought about the father and the possibilities allowed by ambiguous ending. But no, I had to go check out the One Story Q&A and then the blog entry, which took the story I’d just read and turned it into something else. But, I have to admit, I also started thinking about some meta-issues, and that’s never a bad thing, is it.

But first, the story before us. Be forewarned: there will be spoilers. Not that it’s a surprise-dependent story. But I’ve been scolded in the past.

The opening paragraphs establish a divorced father (whose name we never learn) picking up his six-year-old daughter Meadow for weekend visitation, the existence of a contentious custody battle that could limit such activity in the future, and a covertly hostile relationship with the father-in-law. We also learn this is a recollection, that Dad is now involved in a “case,” and that the visitation will become abduction. Or adventure. It was an accident – Holy shades of The Borrower, Batman.

The abduction starts off innocently enough as a day trip, with the possibility of an overnight stay, to Lake George. But when Dad notices his father-in-law is following him, he gets a little stubborn. After all, his wife’s lawyer is better than his lawyer, so he may lose these weekends, be required to conduct visits with Meadow under supervision. No real reason for this is given, no abuse, no reckless behavior. In the past, that is. I suppose the abduction counts as present reckless behavior.

That Dad loves his daughter is pretty clear. But it gets perhaps a little needy:

The only thing I knew for certain was that I couldn’t bear it anymore, not just the suspense but the way the wind went out of the world on those Sunday afternoons when my father-in-law arrived to take Meadow away in his terrifyingly large SUV. When she left, the yards, the parks, the streets of Albany all seemed abandoned. The life went out of things, and I would experience a spasm of grief, a kind of spiritual lockjaw.

I’m not a parent, and my parents never seemed to give a damn about whether I was around or not, so I’m not sure if this is intended to be slightly pathological, but that’s how it reads to me. It could also be that his daughter, and her absence, has become a symbol for the loss of his family, and with it his self-image of The Family Man, which he later acknowledges: “I realized that my situation was irreparable – the loss of my marriage, the loss of custody, the loss of who I thought I was and who I thought Laura and I could be; none of this could be retrieved intact.… I would never be that man, walking to the ice machine in his boxer shorts with a bucket.” Funny, I knew exactly what that image meant. The ice bucket, symbol of so many summer vacation stops in tacky roadside motels, on the way to some exciting destination. It’s a great image. All the losses are telescoped into his daughter leaving on Sunday afternoons.

[Digression: I also compared my reaction to his "neediness" with that of the title character in "Demeter," a mother who compared her six months without the custody of her daughter with the grief of the mythological Demeter that causes winter. I didn't make any notations of pathology there; why not? There are a few differences: first, the separation was for six months rather than a couple of weeks, and second, the character was drawn as a little flaky, with this just one manifestation. That's more than balanced out by Dad's concern in this story that he could lose his daughter forever. So I'm left with wondering if I've just assumed a mother who grieves over an absent daughter is normal, but a father is pathological, which seems pretty sexist to me. It’s something to keep an eye on.]

The overtly pleasant images of the day are all tinged with dark edges. First, in an effort to ditch Pop Pop, he swaps out his Saturn for the Mini Cooper a friend has entrusted to him over the summer. This twangs my coincidence meter, but just a little, and it’s worth it to get a Mini Cooper into the story. Not to mention it introduces the first note of doom:

When he decided to go away for the summer, who else did he call to watch over his property, and occasionally run the engine of his new Mini Cooper and keep the battery from dying, but me? I had already visited this friend’s house once and had sat in the garage with the Mini Cooper running, noticing with dispassion that it wasn’t just a Hollywood plot device: you really couldn’t smell carbon monoxide. And it was this Mini Cooper that came to mind – with wonderfully changed function, as an Escape Car – as I headed west…

That’s pretty effective use of an image, a prop, so I’ll forgive it for just happening to be available when needed. It is a short story, after all, and there’s a limit to how much backstory can be covered.

The dark edges to the other bright and lovely images of the day continue. At the lake, Meadow heads out into the water, first to wade, then to swim. A neighboring beach-goer is concerned; Dad notices she’s going farther and farther into the water, calls her back, but doesn’t seem alarmed. I was alarmed. It was written, I believe, so I’d be alarmed. Even when Dad heads into the water to retrieve her, he describes the water as “heart-stoppingly cold” and reiterates, “I mean, I think my heart just stopped.” It’s artfully done, this blending of pleasure and threat: the subtle hint of danger in an otherwise charming scene, like the music in Jaws during the swimming scene.

This happens again, during a boat ride, when Meadow insists she can fly:

She said, “but I can fly. Watch.”
She climbed a metal bench on the deck. Stretching her arms out for balance, she placed both sneakers on the armrest “careful,” I said though she was well clear of the railing. She wheeled her arms, exposing her belly in front, looking ungainly, the whole sky behind her. She longed out into the air, a blur of tangerine, her hair in streamers.
“I’ll eat my hat,” I said. “You can fly.”

This calls on a host of images from newspaper stories to bad TV dramas – I can’t be the only one who vaguely remembers, not specifically but generally, an entire army of kids draping towels and sheets around their shoulders and declaring themselves Superman, only to crash to earth broken when the fantasy is over; did those kids actually exist, or is that just a cultural memory? This segues to the day as a whole, to the abduction as seen from the safe distance of time and rationality. I’m sure that while this was going on, Dad believed he was Superman, a towel draped over his back, and that he would land safely again, with Meadow in his arms, when it was over.

These incidents set up the appalling final scene:

I carried her out and later in the truck, checking the towels around each limb. She looked comfortable enough. I patted her shoulder. She would sleep through it, I told myself. The journey over the border would be less than fifteen minutes and then we would have all the time in the world, a much or how little of it we wanted – no, we’d be outside of time, we’d be free of it. I returned to the backseat for Meadows backpack and tiptoed through the gravel to place it at her feet, only to find her open eyes staring up at me.
“What are we doing, daddy?” She whispered. “Why am I in the trunk?”…
But tell me, isn’t that what childhood is? An involuntary adventure? Something one never agrees to?…
Tell me, because I want to know what you think – and I’ve got all the time in the world to mull it over now. Tell me, when did you consent to your own life?

Somehow I flashed on the Grinch and Cindy Lou Who here: “Why are you taking our Christmas tree, why?” Gaige has set up three prior scenes with hints of tragedy that never happened, but this, this is different. There’s nothing inherently threatening in the fun-filled images of the Mini Cooper, a swim in the lake, or a boat ride; it was all in the telling. But there’s simply no warm-and-fuzzy charm to putting a child in the trunk. And that phrase “all the time in the world” – which appears several times throughout the piece – in conjunction with Dad’s “case” seem to point to a tragic outcome beyond parental abduction. If there is a tragedy, is it deliberate, in the “if I can’t have you no one can” sense? Accidental – in the “it’ll only take fifteen minutes” but something goes wrong and extends that sense? Is it even possible to suffocate in the trunk of a Mini Cooper? Or even a more metaphysical sense, as in “all the time in the world” actually equals eternity? I couldn’t leave out the possibility that, since in the other scenes where shadow intruded onto light, all was well, that was the implication here as well: that they would cross the border and live happily ever after in Canada, at least until Meadow remembers she misses her mother and her friends and her school and wants to go home, and this loving father (and I believe he is loving) would have no choice but to take her and face the consequences for his actions.

I was mulling over these possibilities, checking for more clues to a single intent, weighing the evidence to decide if one outcome is more likely, and considering the possibility that I’m just twisted to see all these hideous scenarios in the first place (I don’t think so; there’s clearly an intent to lead the reader into darkness, and if I get overanalytical about it, well, that’s what you get for handing me a story with harsh bass notes and an ambiguous ending). I also considered whether the end was annoying or not. I didn’t find it so; I’m getting more and more down with projecting the story beyond the last period.

Then I read the Q&A.

It’s not a story at all. It’s an excerpt. An adapted excerpt, from the forthcoming novel, Schroder.

I was pretty outraged; for the second time in a few months, One Story has snuck a novel excerpt into their lineup of what is supposed to be, ahem, ONE STORY. Maybe I was especially annoyed because I was tricked; it read like a short story, if one with an ambiguous ending. I felt that the material provided allowed enough information for the reader to draw her own conclusions, and resolve the story in a satisfying, if horrifically tragic, way. But all my possible projections are wrong, if one looks at the synopsis of the novel. There’s even an element of Dad’s life that was hinted at, in a vague way, but becomes so specific to the novel, it’s crucial and (probably) changes my evaluation of the character. And I cry foul over that.

Which leaves me wondering: Does it matter whether or not the novel exists? Is it ok to use an excerpt of a story in a way that changes the experience? Should it be viewed as separate aesthetic experiences, or do they have to exist in tandem? Is it a different point of view, or is it a marketing trick?

I don’t think I’ve encountered this before. Most excerpts don’t end up in different places as stories than they do as chapters… do they? Or is that necessarily a function of excerpting, with things missing and an end point that isn’t where the story puts it? If a novel ends badly for a character, must an excerpt end that way, too? Would it be just as much of a lie to have this pair ride off into the sunset – which, in fact, they do in the novel, as they spend a week vacationing before it all hits the fan. Is it possible that this excerpt really worked as a story – it ended where it ended, as a requirement of the story form – and that’s why it feels like deception, because that isn’t where the novel ends? Is it artful to bring in the element of threat, a child in the trunk looking up trustingly, the trunk about to close – or is it just a tacky manipulative gesture designed to get people to read the book to see what happens?

I have to reluctantly give props to this excerpt for raising such questions. Reluctantly, because I was duped (but really, really well). And is that really how you want to treat a reader?

Then again, if the reader is dupable…

E. B. Lyndon: “Goodbye, Bear” from One Story #172, 12/4/12

Josy Hilton: “Word Art”

He was a koan, my boyfriend, a paradox who, when confronted with great heights or large bodies of water, would fall on the floor in fright – yet he had no problem standing in the spotlight on a stage in front of large, skeptical crowds until they laughed out loud; he could lift mankind out of the misery of their own personalities into the white expanse that is everywhere and nowhere at once – if you can picture that, if you can picture the feeling of falling like a stillness like a bridge in the sky held up by nothing but laughter – and this is what Blago was to me, he was the white space between the lines of my life.
I tried not to resent him for it.

This is one of those stories that’s a lot harder to write about than it is to read. It’s full of important details too wonderful to leave out, but too interconnected to explain in a blog post; they amplify plot lines that run straight without them but become more complex in situ. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

We have main character Bam and her boyfriend Blago, PhD students in Linguistics and a long-distance couple. “Bam” and “Blago” are the names they call each other. Bam’s mother calls her “Seed” which may or may not be her given name, and Blago, well, who knows. Bam’s brother, who recently found Jesus on a ski lift, is marrying into a family of born-agains, leaving Bam et al a bit puzzled. The wedding festivities, from engagement party to lingerie shower to the nuptials themselves, form the structure of the plot.

… because their love, declared, would become barbed wire circles no one else could penetrate and it seemed to me the whole room should be standing up to object.

Bam’s surface problem: acrophobic Blago can’t fly to the wedding in the Midwest. Blago’s surface problem: Bam won’t masturbate for him on Skype. The real problems go a lot deeper. She cheats on him with a woman she meets at a meditation retreat between the engagement party and the lingerie shower. And she finds herself in Blago’s shoes: wanting more from someone who isn’t about to give it.

That night, buzzing from excessive meditation, we brushed our teeth side-by-side. The feeling was a loss of limits, which was unsettling, because ordinarily, limits were my thing.
“Is that really us?” I asked.
“No,” she replied. “That is joy. Don’t ruin it.”
In the dorm room she muffled my squeals with a pillow, and the ache that followed became a whirling ride I never wanted to leave. We made a non-verbal agreement of non-attachment, which was fine by me – words rarely did what you wanted them to.

The One Story blog includes this question: “How can someone so initially repellent become so damn charming?” I was glad to see that; I couldn’t agree more. On first read, I wrote in the margin on the first page, “He’s so controlling,” then again, in the next paragraph, “CONTROL!” When I went back for a second read, I got a kick out of those notes, because there is no controlling Bam, none, not at all. There is only surviving her.

And that’s where linguistics comes in. Throughout the story, there’s a subtext of symbols and language and how they reflect, obscure, or twist reality. Skype, the long-distance relationship, travel, Jesus on the ski lift: It all fits together in a way I find difficult to articulate. And when Blago asks Bam how it was after they have sex for the first time following her affair, after he travels from the West Coast to the Midwest by train for her brother’s wedding, she explains it this way: “You know when you’re walking up the stairs carrying something,… a laundry basket or something, and you can’t see your feet, so you miss a step?” Scary part is: I know exactly what she means. And I admire her, and hate her, for saying it out loud, at that moment.

“It has nothing to do with what’s true or not true,” I said. “If the narrative moves through multiple characters’ minds, this is the language of fiction.”
“So, if you tell a bunch of lies, but are speaking in first person, it’s nonfiction?”
“It’s the language of nonfiction,” I corrected.

Of course, I’m a sucker for linguistics. Just mention the word, and I’m all yours.

I’m a little confused by her One Story Q&A, in which she says, “Initially the story was about a girl who’d convinced herself that she was already dead.” I’m assuming that because she used that “initially,” that means it didn’t end up that way. I hope not, because though that’s part of the opening paragraph, and it gets referenced again, it just seems kind of a small point. It isn’t something she says a lot, or thinks a lot. She’s got a lot of angst going on, and the dead thing gets lost. And it’s amazing that something like that –

It was a week before my brother’s engagement party. I was on the phone with my mother. She was grilling me about the guy I was seeing – was he the real deal, or just another fine-for-now? I told her my feelings weren’t reliable at the moment.
“You,” she said. “Always a finger on your emotional pulse.”
“But that’s what I’m trying to tell you,” I said. “No pulse. I think I’m dead.”
“Count yourself lucky, Seed. I’m so exhausted I could do a head-plant in floral samples. She went on about the wedding. “The Born-Agains don’t get it. Toddlers at receptions corrupt the joy. But it’s her wedding,” she sighed, meaning: wedding ruined.

- in the opening paragraph, could get lost. Maybe that’s poor reading on my part. I underlined it; I copied it into the “quotes to include” section of my notes. But I was surprised to see it was the starting point of the story. Maybe it’s great writing on Lyndon’s part – to put so much into a story, you can lose some of it and still come out of it with an intact whole.

I’m also intrigued by Lyndon’s blog. Or, more accurately, what I assume is her blog. There’s none of the usual “writer stuff” on it – no list of stories published, no proclamation of the writing life other than one post about using, guess what, a pseudonym . It’s only a couple of months of posts from last Spring, covering various aspects of Buddhism, writing, meditation: It’s Bam’s blog.

Have you ever put yourself in something, really drowned yourself in it, just to have another place to call home for a little bit? Only to realize the new place was no different than the last place? What I wanted: to find the love who would give me the freedom to evolve – without fearing I’d lose everything if I changed.
Two years later I would be with another man. I would place my heart in the mouth of a lion for him, and he would say, “I just don’t know if you’re well of love runs deep enough,” and there would be my insight. What a coward I’d been!

Wherever you go, there you are. Whatever you call yourself.

Jason Ockert: “Still Life” from One Story #171, 11/9/2009

Self-Portrait by Carol Peace (altered)

Everett Zurn had grown accustomed to his station at Strand High. He wasn’t an athlete or an anarchist. He had never given the counselor any reason to include his name on the “At Risk” list. He came from a modest family: his mother cashiered at the Handi-Mart and his father worked two-week stints in the coal mines of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. The boy was often left alone, but he did not mind it. He was not smart and was not stupid, did not really try or rebel – just another of the vast minority of through-the-crack slippers.
Once he finished high school, he’d become a miner. It’s what Zurn men did. He was mostly fine with this. It didn’t matter that teachers overlooked him; he be underground soon enough. All the same, Everett sometimes felt the future waiting for him pressing down, making it hard to breathe. And the only time this pressure let up was in art class.

I gave up on Glee last week. I’ve hung in there, hoping it’d recapture the absurd irreverent humor I loved when I accidentally stumbled across the “Think of the mail!” scene three years ago while channel surfing towards something more dignified but less entertaining. But no more. It was “Dynamic Duets” that finally did me in – the plot of two arch-enemies, rivals for the same girl, becoming all buddy-buddy in the space of 43 minutes (minus songs, which have gone downhill, too, since someone decided to ban anything from the prior millennium). It was just too pat, too convenient, too easy.

I didn’t care for this story for the same reason. But I feel really bad about it. First, because One Story is my favorite litmag. And second, because Jason Ockart, from his website, seems pretty cool: I’m crazy about his “boxing rabbits” GIF, he’s a featured author at Dzanc Books, and his CV contains some high-rent litmags. But this story, gee, I don’t know. He’s got some terrific elements here. But he’s also got a cardboard cutout of a character, and an ending that’s not only straight out of Hallmark, it’s unearned.

In his One Story Q&A, he says he likes to “take disparate characters, clack them together, and see what sparks. Part of the joy comes in the surprise of discovering undetected similarities.” He did that here, I’ll admit. He did it a little too well, for my taste. I could almost hear “cue the violins” in the stage directions at the end when lonely man and lonely boy find themselves less lonely together.

The lonely boy is Everett Zurn, ignored by parents and teachers alike, including his art teacher, lonely Mr. Ralph. But while I had some sympathy for Everett Zurn – being the sort of kid who got ignored a lot myself – I found Mr. Ralph, failed artist turned disgruntled, unenthusiastic teacher, to be whiney and void of redeeming qualities, yet not particularly interesting in his inadequacies. He’s in a special funk at the time of the story because girlfriend Millie has taken off for Albuquerque to make dreamcatchers with someone named Spirit (a detail I love, though it’s unsupported by the other information we have about her). I say, good for Millie; it’s a step up from Ralph.

Mr. Ralph assigns a self-portrait to the art class, and Everett completes it at home, his parents off somewhere doing something more important than parenting:

Outside, he slumped into a green plastic chair on the front porch in the dwindling evening. He hid inside his brown hoodie. His father’s portable Coleman grill reclined next to Everett, and the distorted image staring back resembled the Grim Reaper. He drew a grinning skull peeping out of the hood. Mr. Ralph had mentioned that the face should come alive. So Everett added flesh to the mouth and flushed the cheeks. Wheat-colored hair cascaded across his forehead. He had always been good at noses. The eyes, though, were difficult. Not the shape, the depth. He tried and tried. Then, fortunately, it was night. Life somehow felt more natural in the absence of light. Without thinking about it, he rummaged through the grill and rubbed charcoal briquette lightly over his portrait. He entitled it, Me, in the Dark.

This portrait is so wonderful I was tempted to give the rest of the story a pass just on the strength of this one paragraph (though I could do without the cascading wheat-colored hair). But I couldn’t; it is good – sketching a self-portrait, then covering it with charcoal? It’s spectacular – and it deserves to be seated in a story that lives up to it.

Mr. Ralph, of course, doesn’t “get” the portrait; he’s too busy mooning over Millie, and gives it a D.

Did you ever imagine your own funeral, maybe when you were a kid, one of those “they’ll be sorry when I’m gone” things? Everett finds a way, during a field trip arranged by Mr. Ralph, to manage that, while also getting back at Mr. Ralph for the dissing of his artwork. He places the carcass of a road-kill deer on the railroad tracks before the train comes through, at first just to see it burst open in a bloody explosion. This is all a little overcomplicated and doesn’t quite ring true, but just when he’s about to lose me, Ockert throws in my other favorite element of the story: Everett starts talking to the dead deer. And the deer talks back.

I could be something more, the dead deer said.
Everett squinted at the carrion in the wavering afternoon balm. “Like what?”
A lesson. An expression. A way out. You adopt me, I adopt you.
At first, this didn’t make sense to Everett – a coy riddle conjured from a dead deer.
And then it did.

As Ockert says, “It’s true; there are not a lot of stories with reanimated and conversant buck carcasses.” And as I said about the self-portrait: it’s a great element, and it deserves to be in a better story.

Everett puts his hoodie with the mangled carcass, and hangs out in a cave while everyone assumes it’s him in the carnage. Then he heads home, keeping up the conversation with the deer: at last, he’s found someone to pay some attention to him.

The narrative switches back to Mr. Ralph, on the hook for the field trip and thus Everett’s supposed death, telling himself it’s Millie’s fault, wondering how he’s going to get out of this mess. A nasty character is one thing, but this guy isn’t even a villain, he’s a sniveling coward; he doesn’t deserve redemption. He heads to Everett’s to deliver the bad news to the (still absent) parents, and finds, instead, Everett. Epiphany: and here’s where the music starts. He’s going to be a better person, a better teacher, (neither of which will be hard since the bar is set so low), blah blah.

The theme of invisibility is so appealing here, and rendered so well in the drawing, it’s a shame what happens to it. There’s an attempt at symmetry by having Ralph see himself in the same grill cover that Everett used to create his art, but for me it fell flat; it’s too obvious. Like his insight, his change of direction, it’s unearned. Ralph’s struggle is too simplistic, his angst too self-centered, to count towards his redemption. A couple of hours of whining is not the same as a tortured night of the soul. It’s cheap grace.

I wonder if it’d be better if, instead of switching narrative points of view, Ralph was described through Everett’s eyes. That way, he could be just as limp a dick, but the reader would assume the view was skewed and might be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. That wasn’t the choice Ockert made, however, and the story is the worse for it.

But, ah, that portrait, and oh, that deer – they give such lovely light!

Erin McGraw: “The Imaging Center” from One Story #170, 10/15/12

Love cracked across Pete Wender two days after his forty-seventh birthday, when the medical center he worked at as a technician held its June picnic, an event Pete liked for its ruthless, middle-aged softball and numberless margaritas. At least one person usually brought a dog, and Pete liked that, too. He and his wife, Katherine, lived in an apartment that prohibited pets, so he looked forward to taking a drag off somebody else’s dog. Katharine’s phrase. No animal lover, Katherine let Pete go to the picnic by himself.

Sometimes, when I’m truly amazed by a story that encompasses a pet theme of mine in a crazily effective and innovative way, I’ll say: “This was a story I wish I’d written.” Like Alathea Black’s “You, On A Good Day” or “Frost Mountain Picnic Massacre” by Seth Fried; that happens fairly often with One Story. And at the other end of the spectrum are the stories, like this one, that read like something I might have written: there’s some possibility there, but it just doesn’t work. I don’t run into many of those in One Story, and when I do, I’m perplexed. What did I miss? Add to that a second story, upcoming later this week, that I didn’t get at all, and I’m worried: am I in some kind of phase?

This story is the examination of a marriage. We have X-ray tech Pete and his wife Katherine, now two uneasy years into the reconciliation from their earlier separation. And out-of-towner Marnie, visiting her cousin. She and Pete have a moment at the Imaging Center picnic, and she decides to stay, to apply for work as a radiologic technician at the same imaging center where her cousin and Pete already work, just in time for Katherine’s annual mammogram at that same imaging center to reveal, on second look, cancer.

Wow. Some reality-tv producer at Bravo is saying: “We need to send a crew to that imaging center!”

It’s all just a little too convenient. There’s nothing wrong with any one of these coincidences (the out-of-town cousin who’s also a rad tech, the attraction, the sudden decision to move, the wife’s diagnosis) but all of them together begins to feel a little put-on. Yes, there’s some symmetry there: the second try at the marriage reveals maybe the reconciliation wasn’t a good idea, just as the second look at the mammogram reveals cancer. Maybe a little too symmetrical?

Then we have the characters, each of whom has at least one characteristic I should appreciate, but none of whom hold any interest for me. Pete is in the throes of a middle-aged crush. This should be an excellent connecting point with this character for me. In her One Story Q&A, McGraw cites the middle-aged crush – how humiliating and destructive they are, as opposed to the teenage kind (“he or she has to be aware of how stupid this whole thing looks….If you’re 15 and you get a crush, about the worst thing that can happen is that you’ll listen to a lot of emo music. If you’re 45, you can wreck some lives”) as the genesis of the story. Great idea: I’ve suffered through such a thing myself, though, thankfully, without the life-wrecking part.

He knew what came next. The sleepless nights, the restlessness that would compel him, at two in the morning, to review old magazines for articles on the importance of smell in physical attraction. If he rode out this night’s insanity, and the next, and the one after that, he could eventually return to his friendly, rubbery life with his mostly pleasant wife.

I was all primed to feel sympathetic to this guy, though I didn’t really have much to go on beyond that paragraph. Then when Pete ends up in a car making out with Marnie the day they meet, without informing her that he’s married, I pretty much cut bait on him. And that’s Page 3. And it’s not that he’s unlikeable; it’s perfectly fair to expect a reader to be interested in a complex flawed character, to believe in the possibility of his redemption or appreciate the genesis of his unlikeablility or even the intricacy of his deviousness. But Pete isn’t even unlikeable enough to be interesting.

Katherine, his wife, should also be sympathetic, seeing as she’s got breast cancer and her husband’s almost-cheating on her. But she’s painted as such a sour, hostile person, it’s hard to see anything to cheer for in her, either.

Katherine lived inside of lifelong, ironclad disappointment – no pleasure was ever grand enough, no stroke of good luck lucky enough. When they were young, he had admired her standards, but now he was just tired.

Marnie isn’t a bimbo by any means, though I wondered mildly what out-of-towner jumps into a clinch at a company picnic with someone she’s just met, having exchanged little but what would pass for witty repartee on any of the current crop of sitcoms. I figured I was just naïve, but then the next day she announces plans to move to town, which seems some combination of presumptuous and foolhardy. Not to mention, in writing parlance, unearned.

At this point – the coincidences, the characters – I think the story lost me, so anything else is probably just an overlay of dissatisfaction. Like the imagery and metaphors. The Imaging Center – x-rays, MRIs, CTs, etc. – generates all manner of moments involving looking, seeing, not seeing, looking again, not wanting to look, dissecting, looking inside, etc, like the symmetry I’ve already noted. There’s also a bit about whether or not of broken vases and cups can be glued back together. This is the sort of thing I usually love, but it seemed heavy-handed and simplistic. That isn’t to say there aren’t some good moments. The broken-vase story Katherine tells has real possibilities, particularly when we find out she’s made it up to squelch someone’s congratulations on their reconciliation. But it’s all alone there, a grain in a wilderness of chaff (see, I know a thing or two about heavy-handed metaphors).

Then there’s the writing itself, which may have a cadence and style I’m simply not picking up on, but just seemed unusually – how should I put this – bad. Unpolished. For example, this scene which takes place early on, the day after the picnic but before cancer becomes an issue:

“How was your day? Anything interesting happen?” he said from the doorway, juggling his car keys.
“Aside from the big vulture that swooped down and plucked Jon away? Nothing much.” Jon was Katherine’s boss at the small fabric store where she worked part-time. Once, when Katherine was lugging a sewing machine from the back of the store for a customer, Jon said that he was the brains behind the brawn. Katherine set down the machine and invited Jon to show them how to thread it, which he did not know how to do. “Brains,” Katherine said to the customer, who laughed and bought enough fabric for an extra jumper. Pete had liked the story when Katherine first told it, but now he imagined how Marnie would have handled things. By the time she was finished, not only would the customer stay, but she would bring friends and Jon would give Marnie a raise.

To me, there’s an awkwardness on a macro- (late introduction of Jon, clumsy transition to a remembrance, and a good one, that doesn’t seem to fit the context of the casual greeting) and micro- (so many clauses, haphazardly strung together as though once written they can’t be changed; events jumping through time on the backs of auxiliary verbs) level. And again with the heavy-handed imagery of the man-eating vulture.

I’m kind of surprised here. Erin McGraw is neither a neophyte (she’s got four well-received books and a smattering of stories in high-end places) nor famous enough for her work to be accepted for the name alone. But is this really a good story? Maybe she’s just not the writer for me. Maybe I’m in a bad mood. Maybe I need to re-read the story in six months or a year and see what I think then.

Susan Straight: “Something Like Sanctified” from One Story #169, 9/20/12

Image via Mnikesaspeaks

They brought her a body. They brought Glorette in and laid her on a Marie-Claire’s couch. Like it was Louisiana, when she was a child and their neighbor Michel got thrown from the mule and kicked in the head and they brought him to Auntie Viola’s house and she told Marie-Claire, Sit here with me, bebe, so I don’t lonely while he don’t left alone.

I was pretty angry with One Story when I read the author Q & A with Susan Straight and found out this is a novel excerpt, not a short story.

But I got over it. I had to; it’s a powerful excerpt. Let’s give it the benefit of the doubt and call it part of a novel-in-stories.

It’s about a tangle of extended family, originally from Louisiana, now in California. I can’t quite figure out when the present of the story is – recent, at any rate – but main character Marie-Claire is an old woman whose job it is to cleanse niece Glorette’s dead body while husband Enrique makes the coffin and hunts down Glorette’s murderer.

The piece is an extraordinary juxtaposition of brutality and tenderness. In one paragraph, we’re learning about the two men Enrique has already killed, and now he will kill a third; then we see Marie-Claire gently, sorrowfully, lovingly taking care of Glorette, remembering her as a child, observing the scars from both picking oranges and from having been burned with cigarettes. In most cultures this work of preparing the dead for burial fell to women; professional morticians and embalmers are a relatively new concept in human history. For Marie-Claire, it’s one more part of life.

I love the title, the tie-in to the song, the metaphor of the love it takes to do what Marie-Claire must now do for Glorette:

1965. The year Glorette was born. Marvin Gaye singing, How sweet it is to be loved by you. And then years later, on Glorette’s visits, they still listened to Marvin Gaye. The man’s voice the same but also different. More sorrowful. Like a girl just before she turns beautiful, like a woman who keeps a body from being alone. Girl you give me good feelin’ – sugar – something like a sanctified.

Based on Straight’s One Story Q&A, the piece is a central point in the novel. I don’t get that from the excerpt itself, since I had no idea from reading it that Glorette’s body had been taken to two other places before reaching Marie-Claire’s couch. In fact, my biggest complaint is that while it serves as a riveting introduction to this cluster of people, their pasts, commonalities, and differences, it’s rather stationary. There’s some momentum in Enrique’s direction via the mention of vengeance, and sure enough, he is where the novel next heads. Am I interested enough to read on? Not really; and so, while the excerpt succeeds in bringing me to Marie-Claire’s house, and while I’m honored to have been permitted there, it doesn’t give me any reason to go further.

Emma Donoghue: “The Widow’s Cruse” from One Story #168, 8/26/12

“The Widow’s Cruse” by J. Adams Acton, After 1875 (Engraving)

The sight of the widow’s weeds made him keep in his bow. Her hoops were so wide that she had to execute a sideways maneuver to get through the door; the skirt was excellent black satin, pulled up through pocket slits to keep it out of the mud. Linen mittens hid her hands, except for the narrow fingertips. Under the hood of her cape, the widow’s face was sharply boned – not an Englishwoman, and no more than twenty-five, Huddlestone reckoned. At the edge of her crisp white cap, the darkness of her hair shone through the blue-grey flour.

One Story seems to be running a lot of historical fiction this year. We had “World’s End” in August, “The History of Living Forever” in June, and “The World to Come” last March. Three stories in nine months isn’t really a lot, of course – four now, with “The Widow’s Cruse” – but you’d have to go all the way back to “Snow Men” in April 2011 the find the last one before this calendar year.

I’m afraid this story didn’t really work for me. That isn’t to say it doesn’t have its good points; I found a great deal of interest to consider, in fact. But it was more fun to analyze than to read. I’ll admit, I’m not the biggest fan of historical fiction, so that has to be taken into account. It’s quite possible that in my ignorance, I’m just overlooking what makes it special.

The setting – pre-Revolutionary New York – is exquisitely detailed and extremely well-researched. To be honest, I’m not sure I’d recognize a poorly-researched piece set in this time, but it reads quite authentically. And it’s always fun to see attitudes from the past in action. For example, look at Donaghue’s explanation, in her One Story Q&A, of her use of the phrasing, “the young widow was going to be a very great fortune indeed.” I hadn’t even noticed that tiny thing when reading, but she’s right, it’s telling of the era. So it’s valid to wonder what else I missed.

I think my main complaint is that I “read” the twist at the end long before it came, so I was expecting a different twist, or a second twist, or something to raise it above my expectations. When that never came, I was disappointed. It reminded me more of something that might be taught in junior high school: a simple story with a clever ending.

I can’t really comment on the story without somewhat spoiling it, so be forewarned.

The point-of-view character is Huddlestone, a young attorney in pre-Revolutionary New York City. Mrs. Gomez is a young widow who comes to him for help claiming her husband’s estate. They both have goals and motives hidden from the other. The story is told from Huddlestone’s point of view; it’s pretty clear that his motive (for marrying the widow; he doesn’t really cheat her at all, the way it turns out) is greed. We never really find out for sure what the widow’s motive is; it could be greed, of course, but she could be escaping what today we’d call an abusive husband. That’s not just me inserting that from a feminist reading; I’m sure Donoghue includes the following paragraph at the very beginning of the story for a reason:

There was a paragraph about some females down in Chester County who’d formed a sort of secret court to arraign a man who’d battered his wife over some trifle. They’d sentenced the fellow to be ducked three times in a pond, and shaved off half his hair and half his beard to make a laughingstock of him. Huddlestone grinned over this story but was not convinced; newsmen today would invent any nonsense to fill an inch of paper.

In her One Story Q&A, Donoghue says the inspiration of this story came from this “one-sentence news item in the New York Weekly Journal (26 May 1735)”:

We hear that the wife of a certain Merchant of the city, while her husband was in the country, broke open his scrutore, and took out his will, of which she was the executrix; and went in widow’s weeds to the Doctor’s Commons, under pretense that he was already dead, and prov’d the same; by virtue whereof she receiv’d all his money in the stocks, and is gone over sea.

In general, I find the story a bit underdeveloped from this starting point, outside of the establishment of the time period, and adequate, though not intricate, creation of the point-of-view character. And it’s clearly his story. If the goal of historical fiction is to create a realistic setting authentic to the time period, it was a success. Maybe that’s my problem: I just wanted a different story.

After Huddlestone discovers the widow’s deception, he spends some time pondering and investigating – but not that much. The aftereffect is: “He would always be puzzling now, always doubting. Never understanding the real story.” The notion that he would always question just what the truth in front of him is, is an interesting one, but it didn’t feel strong enough to me; based on the text, I don’t see this interfering in his life in any significant way in the future. Maybe that’s because of perfectly authentic Colonial-era reticence. Maybe that’s why I don’t like historical fiction. He also decides, as most of us have at one time or another, to remain a bachelor forever. It seems like a weak payoff. I think I’m spoiled by Jim Shepard (whose work is so intense I sometimes can’t finish it; dang, I’m hard to please) and Anthony Doerr; I wanted more. As it is, I found the story straddled humor and drama, never really feeling firmly one or the other. Are we making fun of Huddlestone, or sympathizing with him?

Aha – there’s no better source to learn from than an experienced writer, and Donoghue, having published novels, story collections, literary history, and drama, is definitely that. In the same One Story Q&A, she refers to the point of view as “the Austenian mode of the third-person-with-ironic-distance (i.e., hovering over a character’s shoulder and occasionally delivering a swift kick in the pants).” I have a lot to learn about the fine points of POV. I can see irony in the situation: he thinks he’s manipulating the widow, when actually she is manipulating him. I can see irony as a function of time: to most modern readers, Huddlestone is an almost comically self-important young man out to get what he wants from a woman he perceives as inferior and helpless, simply because she is a woman, albeit one with a lot of money coming to her. And, I can see how the story requires that Huddlestone be the point of view character. But I’m not sure how narrative distance and irony get tied together. Maybe this is that sense of straddling humor and drama? Is the narration poking fun and sympathizing at the same time? As I said, I have a lot to learn.

I wonder how the story would read to someone of that time: where we might chuckle at his buffoonish assumptions and feel satisfaction as he gets his just desserts, would his contemporaries instead be outraged on his behalf?

Two other elements drew my attention. The title “The Widow’s Cruse” is from a biblical story and “refers to that pittance which can be eked out forever, by good management and God’s grace” as the Widow Gomez explains to Huddlestone. But of course it seems like a mistake (Will Allison at the One Story blog thought it was a mistake when he first saw the printed issue) and introduces, from the start, the idea that something can be easily mistaken for what it isn’t. But there’s more: in written form, “cruse” is most easily confused with “curse,” but aurally, it’s closer to “cruise”; the widow herself seems to be something of a curse on Huddlestone, and as part of that curse, she does eventually go on a cruise. That’s pretty cool.

I was more troubled by Donoghue’s choice of Mrs. Gomez’s heritage:

Huddlestone should’ve guessed it; there was a certain tint under her pallor. Of course he’d heard of the Gomez clan: Sephardics from the West Indies, and among the more substantial fortunes in the little Mill Street congregation who’d recently erected the first purpose-built synagogue in the New World.

The history of the Sephardics following the expulsion from Spain in 1492 is complicated, and I’m not going to deal with it here. Though he notes Mrs. Gomez’s ethnicity several times, and comments on differences, Huddlestone shows little if any anti-Semitism; he’s planning on marrying her, after all, if for financial rather than romantic reasons. We really don’t know, at the end of the story, what Mrs. Gomez’s motive was, but we’re very clear about her ethnicity – an unexpected ethnicity for the setting. I was concerned about a very ugly connotation which has appeared in literature from the time of Shakespeare (and probably earlier). When I’m concerned, I e-mail. Happily, Ms. Donoghue was able to completely assuage my fears:

I wanted to invent a woman who would be almost utterly opaque to my lawyer narrator – whose educational level, attitudes to everything and general savvy he would misread through his own fantasizing about her; the cultural blinkers he’s wearing. So I chose Sephardic Jews because of their image as a mysterious, secretive, closed community. The more modern ‘scheming Jew’ cliché would not, I’m pretty sure from my research, have been applied to an eighteenth-century Sephardic lady like Mrs Gomez. I was hoping that this comes across in the story through the way the lawyer thinks about her as a frail prisoner of her husband’s family. And as for how readers assess her, I was also hoping that she comes across as a desperate escapee from a bleak marriage rather than some ha-ha schemer; tragic despite the fact that she gets away with it.

My bad. And my thanks again to Ms. Donoghue for taking the time to answer my stupid questions. And within minutes, at that (don’t you just love the Internet?).

All of which means I feel extra-bad that I’m not more enthusiastic about the story itself. But the only real rules I have for this blog are to complete what I start and to always tell the truth, the matter how embarrassing, and no matter how badly I expose my own ignorance. So we’ll all just have to accept that, in spite of the fun I had playing with this story, historical fiction not really my cup of tea.

I really don’t expect that Ms. Donoghue will lose any sleep over that.

Michael Byers: “His Other Fathers” from One Story #167, 8/1/12

Soon after his father moved out, Paul acquired his first girlfriend, Kimberly Beebe, pronounced bee-bee. She was a soft-faced maidenly sort of sweet girl who wore calico dresses with interesting rick-rack around what would have been her bustline. She was modest and friendly, and in addition, conveniently for Paul, she was one of those rare girls in seventh grade who, due to some weirdness in their social wiring, attached themselves to the Dungeons-and-Dragons crowd, which was where Paul was. Paul had won Kimberly from her previous attachment to Hart McCarthy by writing her long letters in runic code about his cats and his D&D characters. Obviously his wooing away of Kimberly was treachery but Hart McCarthy was too weedy and underpowered to do anything about it. Both Hart& and Paul had ghostly mustaches.

Byers tells the story of a young man’s life by a series of brief interactions with the “other fathers” he encounters, his own father being absent from his life. For that matter, he’s pretty much on his own, as his mother is perpetually distracted by the antics of an acting-out sister.

His first girlfriend, mentioned above in the opening paragraph of the story, provides the usual introduction to love – except when she disappears from school, and, following a tense phone conversation with her father, Paul discovers the family has left town: “had neither the courage nor the wits to find out where she had gone, though her father’s voice would be stuck in his ear forever….” It’s a sad end to a boy’s first encounter with romance, particularly given the father who has also disappeared.

Other girls, with other fathers, follow. The fathers aren’t important figures in the relationships; he recalls them in one-encounter vignettes. But there is a curiosity, I think, in his evaluation of these men, including one who offered bland encouragement when Paul told him he was interested in the film industry: “Which seemed a miraculous kindness even then.” I read this as a sad indication of how starved the teenager was for any kind of affirmation.

While the parade of girlfriends and fathers forms the structure of the piece, there’s a deeper theme there: who we are stems from where we came from:

…only Americans could be truly cool, that only Americans, with their country marked by the sins of slavery and genocide, could manage to be at once materially oriented and still propelled by a divine music, the sin having entered into the soul of every American and so keeping a certain rhythm moving there. Every American heard it though surprisingly few had noticed or could describe such a thing. Whereas the French and Italians were merely stylish and having given up on the divine had nowhere left to go that was beyond nothingness. Americans knew something else existed, there was a ghost in everything that only Americans were haunted by.

It’s interesting that I’m reading another book right now (Rebecca Makkai’s The Borrowers) that works with this theme.

In adulthood, Paul’s father contacts him and the two have a quick reunion that falls under the heading of “too little, too late:”

On the other hand, what do you say to a boy in such a condition? If you are the father who has left that boy, and want to make amends, but nothing you say could possibly matter? As Mr. Lake had remained silent then, he remained silent now, until he finally managed, having crawled as far from Paul as he could get in the front seat of the car – “Maybe – just – just – wait, maybe, try something else…” – shrugging, stammering, not wanting to take this on, not knowing how much of it might be his pain and how much rightly his son’s, not wanting to know. His father, undone by his own weakness, what a subject that would be…and what a vision Paul suddenly had…the story of his own father’s life, of the summer the sad bastard moved away –and that had been the moment Paul started shouting, it was not something he cared to think about much, it had not seemed his voice. Honestly it is still hard for him to admit any of this, how angry he still was, how still like a boy.

We follow Paul to the point of his own fatherhood, and he looks back through a retrospectoscope and realizes a few things about those other fathers, his daughter, and himself.

There’s nothing really surprising here, least of all the epiphanic ending, and I didn’t find it particularly engaging or moving. That concerns me a bit (about my reading ability, that is) since Byers is something of a Big Deal. I do find the structure – the use of fathers as cameos in Paul’s life – interesting, and the choice of filmmaking as his calling effectively emphasizes his viewpoint. Byers discusses how it came about in his One Story Q&A.

Clare Beams: “World’s End” from One Story #166, 7/17/12

Lithograph by Haskell & Allen

By the time the World’s End job came to him, the architect was twenty-six but no longer considered himself young, if he ever had. He felt his professional life had begun. He shaped land, not buildings; he was a builder of landscapes, one of the first of his kind in New York, though this was the 1880′s and Olmsted had already carved out Central Park, strange hole in time and space, in the middle of the skyward-straining city.

These were the days when wealthy people were just coming to realize what their commerce had paved and grimed over, and to miss that green in the pure religious way they missed the childhood of their earliest memories. The architect had a knack for making the lost thing feel less lost…

World’s End is a real place in Hingham, MA; though some details have been fictionalized, it served as the inspiration for this piece. In reality it was designed by Olmstead, not the young architect of this story. At various points in its history, it might have become a housing development, the site of UN headquarters in 1945, or of a nuclear power plant in the 60s if not for the efforts of those who saw value in its gentle drumlins and loping paths – who wanted (and still want) to feel less lost. I think the fiction does honor to the facts. The story isn’t about a piece of land at all, of course: it’s about two men who have more in common than they realize, despite their differences.

The architect remains unnamed throughout. He travels from New York to Boston to meet with one Robert Cale, a wealthy businessman who owns 200 acres of land and would like to build houses for sale. The architect is aware of the gulf between them; he grew up in a crowded NYC tenement where as a child he lost three siblings to measles in one week; he’s very young, and a bit insecure: “He was studying the way money looked up here….he had the feeling now that they were judging him as he went by and finding him lacking.” He’s never done a job of this magnitude before; he got the job through a recommendation of a client pleased with his garden.

The contrast between these two men, detailed at the beginning like this, works very well to set the scene and give an idea of what’s at stake for the architect. But after a brief look, he sees the completed project in his head -

Here his success would be judged by how invisible he could be. The blessing he provided must seem to have come from the hand of nature itself: each hedge, each tree must appear to have grown by its own easy wisdom.

- and can’t wait to get started. He’ll stay at Cale’s house while planning, and later while the work is proceeding.

He meets Cale’s daughter Becca that first night. To me, she was the symbol of shallowness, a spoiled rich girl with little to do but rag on her friends and enjoy her effect on men. At dinner, the architect tries to explain his vision, and when she doesn’t follow, he rephrases: “Find the land’s curves and settle in, bring them out. The way a dress fits a woman.” She seems to view him with a slight increase in respect, but he’s terribly embarrassed; she’s wearing a green dress and it melds in his mind with the green of the land that’s his canvas. It’s a lovely scene.

I was completely drawn in to the architect’s plight: his fear that he’ll fail in his work, his longing for this woman who, though pretty, isn’t able to appreciate him but perhaps represents a certain kind of acceptance, of status. In this, I think he is perhaps as shallow as she, in fact. Other than her attractiveness, he doesn’t see her for what she is at all. Beams plays off this wonderfully at the end.

The climax of the story comes when the architect realizes the roads are laid (an involved process), the landscaping substantially completed, and it’s time to build the houses, but Cale isn’t showing any interest in hiring builders. He finds out Cale has changed his mind, and wants to leave it undeveloped, for a specific reason: Cale was in his Boston office during the Great Fire years earlier (another historical event) and watched the flames jumping across the roofs crowded so close to each other, coming for him.

In spite of himself the architect found that he could see this. The fire sprung up readily in his own mind….
The architect watched the red-orange line of flame flying from roof to roof, so little space between. He had watched in the same way that terrible week when first his youngest brother and then his sister and then finally his older brother had caught the measles; he had seen the sickness leap from one to the next, agile as fire, and flush his siblings with rash and fever….In his mind, he’d flattened that building, the one next to it, the one next to that, and spread a lavish dream-canopy of distance all around himself.

It’s really wonderful what Beams does here with the architect’s ability to visualize, and with colors. For Cale, the green of the land, now become a lovely park necklaced with roads, soothes the red of the fire; just as it (and Becca’s green dress) quenches the architect’s pain. But these two are never totally on the same path; the architect is acutely aware he’s being dismissed: “You didn’t honestly believe any of it could be yours, did you?”

There’s a final scene with Becca that echoes that refrain: he grabs her arm to convince her to look at what he’s created, shocking her.

This was the moment to which the architect would return, again and again, in the years that followed. It would come to seem to him that there were things he might have done next. He might have lifted her and run up the hill. He might have tightened his grip enough to bruise, to show her that he could. While she was right there in front of him, while his hand was on her, he might have found some way of testing his idea that her behavior was only a shell of the truth of her – that if her veins were opened loamy earth might spill out in clumps, that if he sniffed deeply enough at the roots of her hair he might smell the sea.
Instead his grip loosened.

He doesn’t realize that, not only is she not seeing the land, he hasn’t been seeing her at all. It’s lovely symmetry.

I’m always interested in character names, and especially, as here, in unnamed characters. In her One Story Q&A, Beams explains a little about her decision to not name the architect:

Honestly, at first it was just because that was how I started to hear the story when I began work on it. But over time it came to seem to me a fitting way to refer to this character at this point in his life, when he’s trying to paste his new profession over every other aspect of himself. I also liked the way that Becca and Cale are named and the architect isn’t. I think (or hope) that the difference helps show his separation from them—a separation he spends a lot of the story dreaming he can undo.

I also enjoyed the narrative voice: restrained, and a little old fashioned; appropriate for the setting. When the architect blurts things out in the throes of a creative impulse, it echoes against that background field of primness.

I discovered Clare Beams earlier this year via her story “We Show What We Have Learned” reprinted from Hayden’s Ferry Review #45 in The Best American Non-Required Reading 2011; it made its way to my Online Fiction etc. To Read and Love page immediately. I’ve read some of her other online work, and I’m delighted to see her in One Story.

Mia Alvar: “The Kontrabida” from One Story #165, 6/12/12

Joey Vendiola Cobcobo: “Seven Heads And Ten Horns”

In the living room the family had switched from karaoke to a melodramatic Tagalog movie. Even in green it looked familiar, observing the rules of every melodrama I’d grown up watching: a bida (a star, a hero) fought a kontrabida (an anti-star, a dark force, a villain) for the love of a beautiful woman. The oldest films would cast a pale, fair-haired American as the bida and a dusky, slick-mustachioed Spaniard as the kontroabida. Between them the woman spent her time batting her eyelashes or being swept off her feet; peeking from behind lace fans; fainting or weeping; clutching a handkerchief to her heart or dangling it from the window as a signal; being abducted at night or rescued from a tower or carried away on a horse….When the bida won the woman at last, we whooped and whistled, again not out of joy so much as a malicious sort of triumph; the script had succumbed, at last, to our demands.

Another great tale from One Story. A good part of the resolution is predictable, but it’s nicely done anyway, and the emotional resonance works. If you have any chance of reading the story, stop here, as spoilers are ahead.

Steve, a clinical pharmacist in a New York hospital, left the Philippines for college and hasn’t really looked back. His father was abusive towards his family, and while Steve has fondness for his mother, he’s had no wish to visit them in the deteriorating suburb of Manilla where his mom, a nurse before her husband prohibited her from working outside the home, runs a sari-sari – a kind of convenience store located in a cinderblock building in their front yard: “The sari-sari compromised what I imagine was the dream of my parents, who grew up poor: a green buffer between the world and their world.” These front-yard stores aren’t uncommon in the area: “It was a way of shopping I had completely forgotten: egg by egg, cigarette by cigarette, people spending what they earned in a day to buy what they would use in the next.”

Steven has come back to visit at this time for a specific reason: his father is terminally ill with cancer. While he isn’t all that distressed at the notion of his father suffering or dying, he is distressed that Dad’s running Mom ragged. He’s also concerned that neighbors and extended family will talk them into coming to New York for treatment, so he’s been sending them money so they can buy what they need in the way of medical and comfort care. Then a freak opportunity presented itself to Steve:

It wasn’t his face I’d thought of a week earlier, at the hospital, when I took inventory of the narcotics cabinet. I wasn’t thinking of him as I unloaded the most recent shipment of Succorol, or when I found six more boxes than were counted on the packing slip, a surplus as unlikely as it was expensive. It was my mother I imagined, titrating morphine into his mouth by hand, as I recounted the boxes and rechecked my number against the number printed on the invoice. I thought of my mother, running back and forth between the sari-sari and the sickroom, as I typed the lower figure into the inventory log. I thought of her, crying or praying after morphine had ceased to comfort him, as I wheeled the Pyxis in front of the surveillance camera and slipped a month’s supply of Succorol into the pockets of my lab coat.

Of course, Dad wakes up dead a few days after Steve gives the patches to Mom. Though it’s not a surprise to me exactly how that happened, Steve seems flummoxed when he wanders into the sari-sari the evening after his father’s death and discovers his mother, high on Succorol, gleefully celebrating alone. In this instant, this woman he’s been trying to protect goes from innocent victim to murderer, and perhaps neighborhood drug dealer as well.

Through all the melodramas that my family and I had watched, in which the bida and the kontrabida crossed their swords over a woman, I never guessed that she might be the one to watch.

We all have an image of our parents, and sometimes we’re in for a rude shock when reality doesn’t measure up.

I like how the mother’s assurance that she’s stronger than he knows echoes from beginning to end, and how the bida and kontrabida of the movies is used. Still, the story once again sets up a woman as virgin whore and destroyer. After a thirty-year sentence, I’m surprised Steve is as shocked as he is that she could be capable of creating her own freedom; and I wonder if he’s being more than a little willfully blind, since he provided her with the tools himself. In fact, Steve’s motivation throughout – his sending money to keep his father from coming to New York, as well as stealing the drugs and risking serious legal consequences, combined with his supposed surprise at the end – makes an interesting psychological puzzle. Mom’s motivations, on the other hand, are crystal clear to me.

In her One Story interview, Mia Alvar explains she drew on some of her experiences visiting her family in the Philippines thirteen years ago:

It came from my last visit to the Philippines, when my eighty-eight-year-old grandmother was very sick. I had mixed emotions during this trip: joy at reuniting with family, and grief over my grandmother, who died while I was there. It must be common among expats to process these two occasions, coming home and losing a loved one, at the same bittersweet time.

Many particulars around my grandmother’s death in Manila, like the festive atmosphere at her wake and the bustling “funeral district” of Araneta Avenue, made a deep impression on me. But for a long time, I couldn’t write about them. The story didn’t emerge until I separated myself from the details and considered the reverse of my own experiences: what happens when a homecoming is not joyful? Is death, in the case of someone who isn’t so beloved, necessarily a sad thing? And what if a man were telling this story?

Her family also has a sari-sari in the yard, and they too are “hard-core karaokeers.” So here’s a story drawn from life, but modified – mirror-imaged, in fact – in a way to create a dark narrative from a bittersweet but honorable event. I wish I knew more about the decision to make Steve a man; is that because men are more likely to hold their mothers on pedestals, whereas daughters might be less patient with the woman-as-victim posture? A daughter, as well, might not have the same “returning hero” status as a son. It’s an interesting notion, how the story would play if Steve were Stephanie.

There’s a lot more in the story that I haven’t included: a primal scene from Steve’s childhood echoed in the deathbed scene; Steve’s ungainly efforts to help out in the sari-sari, allowing Mom to again assert she is stronger than he thinks; the welcome-home party including the movie scene of the opening quote that gives the piece its central image, theme, and title. It all comes together quite nicely, though I do wish Steve’s possible submerged motivations had been acknowledged a bit more. The bida himself had a streak of kontrabida in him; the lines between good and evil are always less than clear. Then again, maybe this is explored, just more subtly; after all, I got the notion from somewhere, and where else if not the text?

Jake Wolff: “The History of Living Forever” from One Story #164, 5/18/12

Utagawa Kuniyoshi, c.1839-1841 – “The great ships full of boys and girls sent in search of the immortal medicine (Hôraizan) by the Chinese Emperor Shih Huang Ti (Shikôtei), c. 219 BCE”

The wave broke against the boat and plucked the man from the mast. It seemed at first as though it might carry him, as though it were merely helping him down. But then it lost interest in his safety and he was left to plummet toward the ship’s leeward sail. His body struck with a bloody plume that dyed the rain red, and then he took his flags with him into the ocean.

Philosophers have debated the wisdom of immortality. They say that it is unnatural to live forever and to wish for it is hubris. They say it will drive a man mad. His friends and family will grow old and perish, his world will change, and his immortality will become a kind of helplessness. Death, in this logic, is our only defense against suffering. And yet in the years before my father’s death, he wrote his most startling and accomplished verses. It is life’s cruelest trick that just as we begin to master our minds, our bodies begin to fail us.

In the case of the man who fell from the mast, we can argue whether his mistake was trying to appease the water dragons in the middle of a storm or forgetting to appease them in the first place. On this matter, I once would have turned to Confucius. But soon after coming to power, the Emperor had burned all of his books.

Xu Fu, the narrator and protagonist of this piece, was a real person. Details of his life differ, as they usually do for those from the 3rd century BCE. Google his name, and you’ll find many legends. They mostly agree on several points: he was the fangshu, a combination doctor, prophet, sorcerer, and alchemist, to the Chinese Emperor Qin Shihuang, and he sailed from China on two journeys, one in 219 BCE and one in 210 BCE, to search for immortality for his Emperor; he never returned from the second voyage. The Japanese have built statues to him, as it’s believed he ended up there, and possibly became its first Emperor, Jimmu Tenno.

Jake Wolff discusses, in his One Story Q&A, how he borrowed from several versions of these legends to form the story we read here, and of course added his own elements. The plot is somewhat complex, with elements bouncing off each other and echoing in later events. But in the end, the story excels because of the standard arsenal of storytelling tools: conflict, voice, and imagery. The conflict, between self and obligation, has dramatic consequences; the voice is understated and restrained, with just the right “long ago and far away” quality; and the imagery is soaked in meaning.

It starts with a scene between Xu Fu and the Emperor. They were boyhood friends, and the Emperor saved Xu Fu’s life back then by leading him out of the desert. So now that the Emperor has developed a frightening cough, Xu Fu thinks of the stories about Mount Penglai, on an island surrounded by huge fish, where the Eight Immortals dwell and keep the recipe for the elixir of immortality. He decides to find Mount Penglai, and save the Emperor’s life, to “cure him of his mortality.” He’s aware of the pitfalls of immortality; friends and family pass on, and one is left behind alone. But he feels China itself depends on the Emperor, and on his death, rebellion and chaos will break out.

The virgins had been the Emperor’s idea.

Five hundred boys and five hundred girls are to be sacrificed on Mount Penglai to assure the mission’s success. Xu Fu is concerned: “One thousand children would make for a difficult cargo.” But it isn’t until he falls in love with one of the young women, Jing-Wei, that he reconsiders the sacrifice, in spite of the dire warnings made by his servant, Kon Tsen, that there is no other choice if he wishes to live.

There is a phenomenon I have observed in the counting of things. If you have twenty pebbles and subtract five, the difference is immediately evident. In large quantities, however, the individual units cease to make an impression. What, after all, are five stones out of five hundred? Even the keenest eye would struggle to notice a change. Until that day on the island, this principle applied to all things measured – grains of rice, bricks of clay, even soldiers or horses.
And yet as the possibility of losing Jing-Wei grew more real in my mind, I realized I had found the exception. I saw what she had been trying to show me in the belly of the boat. If you have one thousand virgins – taken from their homes, assembled on the decks of Lianyungang – and remove just one, the effect is as if you stole the sun from he sky. The whole world feels the loss of it. Truly, the energy of a thousand virgins is enough to power the sun.

This is the primary conflict, as Xu Fu tries to reconcile saving Jing-Wei and carrying out his mission for the Emperor. It isn’t just his pride that is involved. He knows that to fail – to take her, steal her from the Emperor, will be punished by death, for him, faithful servant Kon Tsen, and the rest of his crew. And it’s pretty clear that Jing-Wei isn’t exactly eager to be saved, if it means life with Xu Fu. Other than a few talks, they have very little contact, and she spends most of her time belowdecks with the other virgins.

He nevertheless returns to China with the virgins – most of them parents themselves now, none of them still virgins – and manages to talk his way into another voyage, with more crossbows and soldiers. A new group of a thousand virgins is gathered. The old group, including Jing-Wei, is executed.

I did not know the name of the last virgin sacrificed, but he waited more than eight hours on this knees on a blood-soaked dock for his sentence to be delivered.

Xu Fu departs on his second journey. But it isn’t the journey everyone was expecting:

I gathered the virgins and crew on the deck. I looked for the faces of my friends in the crowd, but of course I found only strangers. I imagined immortality for Kon Tsen, Jing-Wei, the dead virgins and their children. I wondered if our many virtues and evils could extend infinitely into time, unchanged by the length of it.
I said that we were sailing to the edge of the world, as far as the Earth would allow. Perhaps we would discover a new home. Perhaps we would drift at sea until hunger drove us mad. Perhaps the Emperor would find us again, if he lived long enough.
Penglia was still out there, I told them, but we would never land on its shores. We would have to live as mortals do.

Wolff chose to end here, with that element of immortality – losing all those you love – balanced against the hope of the future, and I think it’s perfect.

Alethea Black: “You, On a Good Day” from One Story #163, 4/23/12

You do not set the story aside simply because the second-person viewpoint usually seems to you self-conscious and contrived. You do not get impatient with the story’s unconventional structure, its refusal to unfold in scenes. You do not, at the story’s turning point, pretend you knew what was coming all along. You do not turn up your nose at the ending because it dares to be hopeful instead of stoic or dark, like the ending of a literary story is supposed to be.

You do not, you do not, you do not.

Not on this day. On this day, by the end of page one, you forget the story is written in the second person because the viewpoint is handled so deftly. On this day, you’re happy to be reading a story that breaks the usual rules, invents its own, and then plays by them fair and square. On this day, the story’s turning point—its insistent shift away from despair—strikes you as inspired, exactly the sort of thing you’d been wanting without even realizing it. And on this day, the story’s hopeful ending makes you wish more stories had hopeful endings. It gives you a nice little shiver, the thrill of emotional connection that, as a reader, you long for.

One Story blog post by Will Allison, April 19, 2012

That’s the story, right there; I don’t need to describe it any further, because One Story editor Will Allison has put is so much better than I ever could.

A lot of people are going to hate this story. It’s second person. It’s repetitious. It’s very short on plot. It’s “inspirational.” It’s everything a short story shouldn’t be. Maybe it’s not even really a “story.”

I love it. It’s the story I wish I’d written.

I’ll grant you, it’s repetitious. Black has gone to some trouble to break up the parade of “You do not…” and “On this day…” sentences by occasionally switching syntax around, varying sentence length, and such, but once she committed to this structure, she had limited options. It’s just on the edge of being too long for the technique. I’m sure there are many people who think the above three paragraphs in this style are too long, let alone a 12-page (albeit teeny-tiny pages) story. For me, it just barely comes in under the wire, to stop before I want to start breaking things.

And, true, it’s short on plot. It’s basically a “person goes through routine day and thinks profound thoughts” story. My favorite kind of story. There is some action of you look hard enough – she’s driving, in church, at the hairdresser, goes home and tries to work, has lunch, goes for a walk, goes to bed, tosses and turns, drives to city, goes to a movie. This isn’t really one day, is it? I mean, how do you go to church and the hairdresser on the same day? But any plot is secondary. The point is, whatever she’s doing, there are all these horrible thoughts that could overtake her. And, on a good day, she doesn’t let them.

Black deals with these complaints in her One Story interview.

On using second person:

Point of view is one of those things that I always feel chooses me more than I choose it. Although since this story started when I was trying to talk myself off a ledge, that may have helped suggest the second-person voice.

I’m a big fan of changing it up from first- or third-person exposition, backstory, development, climax, denoument mold. And I’m very fond of symmetry. I’ve even used it. Hasn’t everyone?
.
On plot:

The danger with a story like this, where mood and tone are so central, is that without sufficient plot, it could become more rant than story. I tried hard to give “You, on a Good Day” enough of an emotional turn to satisfy my appetite for action and change.

I suspect a lot of readers are still hungry. Me, I’m stuffed. But that’s me: I once wrote a story to an “end of the world” prompt that consisted of a guy sitting on a rock smoking a cigarette and pondering. No, you can’t read it; even I was embarrassed to send that one out into the world, though I was stupid enough to send out a story about inner thoughts while grocery shopping.

On happy endings (the literary kind – get your mind out of the gutter):

I think what sets alarm bells off for readers and writers alike is an ending that’s facile or in any way false. A happy ending that’s unearned betrays the trust of the reader, and violates Writing Rule Number One: Do not waste a stranger’s time. That said, I’m not afraid of a little closure or a little hope. For a while, those qualities have seemed unfashionable in contemporary fiction—a friend of mine described a recent award-winning collection as “slices of bummer”—but maybe that’s changing.

As a chronic depressive, I have trouble with happiness in general, but I don’t think that’s the story’s fault. And yes, I’ve written happy-ending stories.

(See why I’m no longer writing?)

I wish I’d learned to do these things better, rather than listening to those telling me they shouldn’t be done, because here is a story that shouldn’t work, but does. Oh, come on, even as you’re sneering, you’re smiling and nodding your head along with passages like:

When you get home, you do not let the fact that your Internet connection has gone out make you want to eat your own hands.

And you sighed and shook your head – maybe even an “ohh…” escaped -over:

As your hairdresser continues to talk about her doctors, you do not think about the doctor who told your friend, the one you did not call, that the lump in her breast was nothing. You do not imagine your friend’s face beaneath the green and yellow scarf where her hair should be.

Come on – that’s damn good.

Steven Millhauser won a Pushcart for a report on a town’s ghosts. Jennifer Egan was practically canonized for including a Powerpoint presentation in her Pulitzer-winning book. Jill McCorkle’s “PS” in BASS 2010 was just as plotless. Seth Fried explained fictitious microorganisms and called it a story (addendum: and, I just learned, won his second Pushcart prize for it, much to my delight; it’s the only piece listed in this paragraph that I thoroughly enjoyed).

There is room for this.

Stephen O’Connor: “Another Nice Mess” from One Story #162, 03/29/12

"Fire in the Hole" - a 3D alphabet by Oliver Munday

My colleagues and I are charged with deciding which soldiers should be killed in the war, as well as where, when, and how they will die. At first I thought it strange that we should be orchestrating casualties for a war that ended before my grandparents were born, but the human resources executive who hired me explained that the war was not, in fact, over, that wars never actually end, and must be continually refought, at least for as long as they are remembered.

The narrator – (Oh, the woes of the unnamed first person narrator story. To be honest, I don’t even notice it when I’m reading. In fact, I’m a big fan of first person fiction, both as a reader and as a [sometimes] writer. It’s only when I talk about the story that it gets awkward to keep referring to “him,” especially if/when there are other “him”‘s who must be differentiated from the main character. In most cases, as in this case, the unnaming seems to me to be deliberate. No one in this story has a name, other than Stan Laurel. Oh, and a person who the narrator makes up, but that hardly counts. I just think it’s worth noting that the author makes up a nameless character who makes up a named character, and the named character is far less real than the nameless one) – is telling his story from the ballroom of an old mansion, where, as described above, he determines the fate of soldiers in The Great War. Unsurprisingly, his supervisor has provided guidelines for this. Dying while marching in rank formation, instantaneous death, and, when large numbers of deaths are called for, a single event such as a bomb killing many soldiers at once, are preferred. But not always possible.

In the next room, separated by a mirrored door which keeps swinging open due to a faulty latch, our narrator can hear the sounds of a movie production, probably Babes in Toyland, starring a very elderly Stan Laurel.

As a consequence, even when we are preparing for our most important battles – Verdun, for example, or Cambrai – we are constantly serenaded by the tinkling of toy pianos and the clattery crescendos of wind-up monkey cymbal bands.

Now, devotees of The West Wing will jump up and down at this point. In delight, perhaps (“Hey, this is just like the Season 4 episode The Inauguration, Part 2 – Over There), or annoyance (“Hey, this is a knockoff of when President Bartlet was deciding whether or not to send troops to Kundu to end the genocide and watched the Laurel & Hardy Babes in Toyland because it just happened to be what his visiting grandchildren left in the VCR and it inspired him to change American foreign policy”). We might even work in the faulty latch on the door in the Oval Office during the storm scene of the Two Cathedrals episode. West Wing fanatics never forget, and they still gather at TWoP because everything reminds us of TWW.

But what we have here is a very different story, even if it does use the juxtaposition of war and a goofy play-war movie.

Our narrator consults with a soldier whose mission, as it were, is about to conclude, as the supervisor puts it (reminding me a bit of A Taste of Armageddon from Star Trek, S1E23) and some difficulty arises. The soldier, quite reasonably, doesn’t want to die. He’s fine with someone else dying in his place. The narrator tells him to go find James P. Hall, who can help him, and the soldier leaves to find Mr. Hall.

The truth is James P. Hall is an entirely fictitious name that I conjured out of thin air. But I have every confidence that once the soldier gets down to the precinct where I directed him, and asks where Mr. Hall might be found, none of my colleagues will trouble to determine whether Mr. Hall actually exists. They will simply dispatch the soldier to yet another precinct, or to yet another authority. And every time he asks for Mr. Hall, this process will be repeated and repeated, until, finally, the soldier will either succumb to bewilderment and exhaustion, or develop the fortitude to accept his fate and go to his death with the dignity and resignation of a true hero – the encouragement of such fortitude being, of course, the primary reason we give soldiers the opportunity to come to terms with their fate in advance.

At this point I flashed to Catch-22. It also sounds like something a local city hall clerk might pull on someone trying to escape a parking ticket, or perhaps like an experience with customer service at Time Warner Cable (don’t get me started…)

It certainly occurs to me that this idea of personally facing people who are to die before you decide a cause is worth fighting for isn’t a bad one. In fact, I now recall the trailer for Rachel Maddow’s new book Drift which, though I’ve been hearing about the book for some time now on Rachel’s nightly show, I just viewed today, oddly enough, and heard her talk about the widening gap between the nation and the military – and how that separation is perhaps making it easier for “us” to decide when to send “them” to war. It might be harder if we had skin – ours or a loved ones – in the game ourselves.

Somehow I insist on jumping outside this story into others. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It doesn’t necessarily mean the ideas are derivative or well-trod, especially in this case, where a fresh twist is provided at every intersection with other material; it’s just that certain facets bring to mind something else. In fact, I like it when a story becomes a nexus for several other works. I just hope the author wouldn’t be too upset that television features so prominently. But I go where I’m led. And I will further say, the matter-of-fact approach to the surrealism of this story, complete with scrambled timeline references, strongly reminded me from the first paragraph of Seth Fried, a recently acquired literary crush. Not to mention the dream-like aspects, which are indeed in Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled as well as the story he wrote to practice for that novel, A Village After Dark. That’s quite a compliment. In fact, all the touchpoints, for me, have been complimentary.

In his One Story Q&A, O’Connor recounted his inspiration for the story:

One evening last summer, I was walking in the woods, idly thinking about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when suddenly I was struck by a bolt of guilt. Specifically, I thought that since I hadn’t worked hard enough to oppose those wars, I was to some extent responsible for them. The thought passed. The guilt receded—as my political guilt has a tendency to do—and two or three days later it was time to begin a new story.

Whenever I start something new, I try to keep my mind blank, and get out a first phrase or sentence without even thinking about it. In this case, what came out was my narrator’s statement about devoting every waking thought to the Great War. I had no idea why he was thinking about the war, or even that he was a “he,” but I did remember that bolt of guilt, and worried that I was in danger of producing an overly schematic political fable. So I decided to mix things up a bit and give myself a little more imaginative freedom, first of all by having my narrator working in the ballroom of an old mansion, and then by having that movie being shot in the next room—a movie which, to my surprise, turned out to star Stan Laurel.

So while there may be familiar elements – and there always are, in every story – this was an original and personal journey, and I’m thrilled to have been allowed to come along.

I see O’Connor has a couple of collections out, and I think I’m going to need to take a look at them. Anyone who takes me through Seth Fried, The West Wing, Ishiguro, Catch-22, Rachel Maddow, and Star Trek in 15 pages is definitely worth investigating.

Jim Shepard: “The World To Come” from One Story #161, 3/4/12

"Yes or No" by Charles Dana Gibson, 1905

Sunday 6 May
My mother told me once in a fury when I was just a girl that my father asked nothing of her except that she work the garden, harvest the vegetables, pick and preserve the fruit, supervise the poultry, milk the cows, do the dairy work, manage the cooking and cleaning and mending and doctoring, and help out in the fields where needed. She said she’d appeared in his ledger only when she’d purchased a dress. And how have things changed? Daughters are married off so young that everywhere you look a slender and unwilling girl is being forced to stem a sea of tribulations before she’s even full grown in height.

We think we’ve invented everything. No one has ever known the hardships we’ve had in this time of economic woe; we’ve learned it all about love and relationships and sex and psychology and poetry and letters; when we have it bad, no one has ever had it as bad as us, and when we have it good, it’s a kind of good never before experienced.

Jim Shepard is here to tell us: Not so fast.

I’m not a big fan of diary format for stories, but he uses them frequently, and effectively, on his expeditionary stories. And this story can be seen as an expedition of sorts, into uncharted territories for the unnamed diarist, working with her husband Dyer on their upstate NY farm. We’re privileged to see her weekly writing at least of this period from January through June of 1856. It’s interesting this is the period chosen.

Sunday 1 January
With little pride and less hope, and only occasional and uncertain intervals of happiness, we begin the new year. Let me at least learn to be uncomplaining and unselfish. Let me feel gratitude for what I have : some strength, some sense of purpose, some capacity for progress. Some esteem, some respect, and some affection.
Yet I cannot say I am improved in any manner, unless it be preferable to be wider in sensation and experience.
…
After the calamity of Nellie’s loss, what calm I enjoy does not derive from the notion of a better world to come.

So we see her recovering from the death of her little daughter. I find it wonderful that this period is more interesting than what has already passed. Then again, given the parade of deaths and other tragedies in this little corner of the world during the six months we read of, death is not an unusual event. I’ve always wondered if parents who expected to lose a child grieved any less than we do today, in a time and place where a child’s death is fairly rare. It seems not.

The diarist and husband Dyer are rather distant, though kindly so. She is resistant to the idea of having another child, so has refused sexual relations. Dyer is rather solicitous: “My heart to him is like a pond to a crane: he wades round it, going in as far as he dares, and then attempts to snatch up what little fish come shoreward from the center.” He brings up plans to make a sleigh, a perennial project that apparently holds some delight for her, though she is less than interested. Theirs is not a marriage of love and compatibility, but of possibility. And if she is overworked and not content, he too has lost some dreams along the way:

As a suitor he was generous but not just, and affectionate but not constant. I was appreciative of his virtues and unconvinced of his suitability, but reminded by my family that more improvement might be in the offing. Because, as they say, it’s a long lane that never turns. And so our hands were joined if our hearts not knitted together.
…
As a boy he made his own steam engines… I have no doubt he would have been happier if allowed to follow the natural bent of his mind, but forces of circumstance compelled him to take up a business for which he had not the least love.

Tallie, the wife on a neighboring farm, comes to visit in January, and our diarist feels… something: “There seems to be something going on between us that I cannot unravel.” The evolution of their relationship is told masterfully, in slow motion with great detail, beginning in February with a cold, wet foot, after Tallie has broken through the ice into a brook on her way over:

I made her remove her boot and stocking and warmed her toes and ankle in my hands. For some few minutes we sat, just like that. The warmth of the stove and the smell of the applesauce filled our little room, and she closed her eyes and murmured as though speaking to herself how pleasant it was.

The diarist looks forward to her weekly visits (“When she arrived my heart was like a leaf borne over rock by rapidly moving water”) and is distressed when they don’t happen. Eventually, they kiss: “Astonishment and joy. Astonishment and joy. Astonishment and joy.”

That’s about as far as things go, really; there’s no steamy sex scene. But Shepard does a lot with just a couple of episodes of kissing, let me tell you. Especially with the dog keeping watch for Dyer or other intruders. Because this must, of course, remain a secret. Which is why she’s writing it down. I suppose reading someone’s diary was considered unthinkable in that time. Or perhaps Dyer has read the diary. He does seem to have a pretty good idea of what’s going on:

Opened the mudroom door this afternoon to Dyer having returned from the fields, and he said with some asperity that it was pleasant to be greeted by the smile one values above all others only to see that smile vanish because it’s been met by one’s own presence, instead of someone else’s.

Aside from the tortured syntax (it is a diary, after all), this is to me where the real story lies, where the real love is. Is that shocking, for a woman to read a story about an overburdened, artistically imprisoned woman (more on this in a moment) and feel for the man in her life? Or is that part of the design? Because we are introduced shortly to Tallie’s husband, when she invites them over to dinner:

Finney said that no matter what misfortunes arrived at his doorstep, he would seek improvement of his lot with his own industry: he would study his options closely and attend to everything to which he’d believed he had already adequately attended, but with more venehymence….Finney said as an example that when he’d first begun farming he’d been so vexed by his inability to stop his dogs barking one January that during a storm he’d held the animal round the corner of his barn in a gale until it had frozen to death.

In his fiction, Shepard frequently relishes all manner of harshness and brutality while keeping love, passion, and light center stage, and he has done so again. If it wasn’t evident before, in comparison with Finney, Dyer is a prince. Both men seem to know what is going on between the women, and they have very different reactions.

In fact, Finney’s reaction, foreshadowed at that dinner, becomes even more extreme. He and Tallie move away suddenly; she isn’t allowed to say goodbye or even notify her friend of the move. All that’s left behind are a few pieces of furniture and a bloody handprint. The sheriff declines to investigate. Our diarist pines. Dyer waits patiently by. At last, a letter arrives…

Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s the diarist’s story. And there’s no denying the hardship women faced in this era. It was handed down to them:

My mother told me more than once that when she prayed, her first object wa to thank God that we’d been spared from harm throughout the day; her second was to ask forgiveness for all of her sins of omission and commission, and her third was to thank Him for not having dealt with her in a manner commensurate to all of the offenses for which she was responsible.

And there’s always the question, what would the diarist, who is quite a writer (including the poem she wrote for her dead child), have been if she’d been able to continue in a setting more conducive to artistic ventures? But also, I can’t help but wonder, what might Dyer have invented had he become a builder, inventor, engineer? Two lives, two talents wasted. It’s also interesting that at one point Tallie shows the diarist her own poetry; it’s bad, really bad, and the diarist “could not support the rhyme,” which is a moment I love.

While on one level it’s the story of a woman awakening one spring, it’s a lot more than that. And when I read Shepard’s One Story Q&A on why he chose to use diary format, I was surprised by this:

I wanted to catch if I could the moment-to-moment and day-to-day nature of 19th century farming lives, as well as how seasonally based those lives were: the importance of the weather, and their meals, and of course the drudgery. But the journal nature of the story also seemed crucial when it came to capturing all of the little ways in which the narrator has let her Tallie down.

I don’t understand at all how she has let Tallie down. I’ve been thinking about it for several days now, and I’ve re-read the story several times, and I still don’t understand. Is he being facetious – that the woman is so used to taking the blame for everything, she will find herself to blame for this as well? I think this will require re-reading at a future point, to see what I have missed. My favorite kind of story, one that evolves over time.

Stephen Ornes: “Hilarious, In The Wrong Way” from One Story #160, 2/8/12

Claudio Alfaro Malebrán: "Un lago de mármol blanco" (A Lake of White Marble)

At the end of school, the intercom crackled and hissed before going quiet. Then the principal Mr. Weathers got on and said that Theodore was dead, and asked if we could have a moment of silence? The intercom was mounted over the door, concealed in a weathered wooden box that tilted so far from the cinder block wall it looked ready to fall down on someone’s head. I wondered if it had always been that way. I looked down and saw that my pencil still hovered over my paper because I hadn’t finished writing everything down from the board before Mr. Weathers said Theodore is dead.

That’s an interesting paragraph. Not just the content, but the details of form. For instance, the second sentence ends in a question mark, though it shouldn’t. If it was, “Mr. Weathers asked, Can we have a moment of silence?” that would be different, but it isn’t. That must mean something. Turning declarations into questions? Uncertainty? A barb at someone asking when really they’re telling? Not sure.

It becomes even more interesting when Ornes’ discusses, in his One Story Q&A, that the editors advised against his use of questions in the narrative:

…the generous editors at One Story pointed out to me that “questions from a narrator, however true they are to the character’s thoughts, leave the reader in doubt. Concrete details create confidence.” That’s also useful. After they pointed that out, I realized that I follow the same guideline in my science writing and avoid questions within copy as much as possible. Perhaps there’s no faster way to undermine your own authority than to pose a question to your reader.

Considering this advice, it’s incredibly interesting he chose to include a question, one that isn’t really a question, in the second sentence of the story.

I’m also intrigued by the switch of tense in the last sentence, though I think I understand that better. In the second sentence, he uses past tense: “…Theodore was dead…” and in the last, present: “…Theodore is dead.” It doesn’t take Ben long to take this journey, which somehow makes it more personal to him, going from what Mr. Weathers said to what is.

And of course there’s the content of Ben focusing on the angle of the intercom when he’s just heard of the death of a classmate, who, we’ll discover almost immediately, was a friend. We’ll further discover Theodore committed suicide by shooting himself with a shotgun.

Given how much I’ve found in this first paragraph, and the subject matter, I’m surprised to say that the rest of the story didn’t do much for me. It’s a fine story, but not at the level I’ve come to expect from One Story. Then again, that’s the problem with being my favorite literary magazine: you get held to very high standards.

We follow pubescent Ben through his process of adjusting to the idea that his friend is dead. Some great details come into play. Theodore had embarrassed Ben in front of Bethy a few days before, so he’d planned to put salt in his iced tea at the pot-luck dinner the night before. But Ben didn’t show. Ben remembers a look he saw on Theodore’s face at some point: “I’d seen this look before, when he seemed to have gone so far away that he wasn’t just lost, he also wasn’t coming back.” He remembers how Theodore had shown him a dead rat and offered to gut it in front of him: “…when Theodore went to the extreme, like he did with the rat, I valued him the most. It was thrilling and calming at the same time; I didn’t know anyone else who could do things like that.” Ben introduced him to ZZ Top; he doesn’t even like the music but listens to it anyway. He dabbles with hanging himself, just to see what it’s like, to have that kind of control.

Ben comes to a moment when he realizes something: “With every person I’ve ever met, and every person I’ll ever meet, either I’m going to die first or they are….” Saying goodbye is the price of living. And he realizes how precarious everything is:

…I stumbled, standing only on the ball of one foot at the edge of the dock for a moment, hovering over the water, like the split-second when a juggled ball hangs in the air, not rising or falling. Nothing had happened yet, everything remained.
Then gravity took me. The water smacked the back of my head like a shotgun. It blasted away Mr. Weather’s voice, Miss Ruckles’ hand, Justin’s bloody nose, ZZ Top, Theodore in an empty room, alone, with his finger flailing away from the trigger. The images appeared and vanished, water filled my open mouth, my eyes, my ears, my pockets. I flailed beneath the surface. I took water in every opening.
…
The doors between this world and its shadows were everywhere, always open and waiting.

Ornes is primarily a science writer, and used unstable equilibrium (“like a marble balanced on top of an overturned bowl: it can stay in place, as long as you don’t nudge bowl or the marble”) as the inspiration for this story: “I arrived at thinking about a character who, like an ignorant marble, suddenly realizes he—or anyone else—can slide down the bowl at any time.” He was successful in this, to a point.

But I find I liked the ideas, the tiny details like the first paragraph, and the inspirations and explanations, more than I liked the story. I had trouble getting through it. In fact, I put it down for a few days, then when Issue #161 arrived – Jim Shephard! – I knew I had to get going so I picked it up again and started over. Still, there are high points, and it’s worth reading, if only for those details and explanations and inspirations.

Paul Griner: “Open Season” from One Story #159, 1/14/12

The morning headline said that the season had just opened, which of course we knew; I’d paid for my permit and stored my clothes overnight in a dry-cleaning bag filled with sweaty t-shirts, a box of doughnuts and some bus exhaust, not easy to come by but absolutely crucial if I didn’t want to spook my prey.

Hello, I am Zin! And I get to talk about this story because it is the Zinnest story ever! Here is my advice: buy this issue of One Story. It costs $2.50. Because this story is so wonderful to experience! You should not have to be spoiled by my clumsy comments, which can not do it justice unless I copied the whole story here (and I thought about it… but that would be wrong).

I took my copy of One Story with me on the bus to the supermarket; the first paragraphs set the scene as a hunting story, and I thought, ok, that is fine, some hunting stories are good. Truth is, I do not understand the whole thing about hunting, but I have read stories where it is turned into a religious experience, and there is a great respect for wildlife and the “rules” and traditions and it becomes a struggle against nature which turns into a metaphor for life itself and often becomes a pretty good story, so I trusted One Story and read the first page, and the beginning of the second. The narrator and his friend Juan are having breakfast at Hopping John’s Diner on the first day of hunting season, before they get started.

And then something strange happens!

Yankees, [Juan] said, though he said it with the wrong accent – Yahn-keys rather than Yank-ease – so he didn’t get the word.
Pretty cheap way to bag your first one of the season, but he’d started it, drawing out the word and failing to capture it, so I said Yankees the correct way and when the word floated free, expanding to full size in midair, I grabbed it. What a word, I thought, balancing its heavy weight in my palm, sniffing it, finding it as fragrant as a ripe melon. Automatically I began field-dressing the little bugger, slitting it from anus to breastbone while taking care not to pierce the stomach – not wanting to lose my own breakfast from the smell – and finally reaching two fingers up into the chest cavity to grab hold of the windpipe and yank it loose. My game bag was in the car so I asked the waitress for some wax paper and foil….
I made a neat packet of the foil around both, careful not to bend the Y or get pricked by the pointed ends of the K. Captured, and without its entrails, the word made a nice small package.

Do you see what I mean, that this is the Zinnest story ever? I am so jealous that I did not write it! Or at least try; I do not think I could do it as well as this. But I remember the flash I wrote about Max and the Amazing Notes and I think I need to pull that out and start working on it, now that I see where I need to go with it!

But back to this story (I am not a narcissist, I just sound like one sometimes, and after all I started writing about stories to improve my own writing way back when I was still writing).

Look at how this is done, just the short paragraph quoted above. It is the perfect hunting story. It reads exactly like a scene in a story about he-men hunting! A hunter might treat a game bird this way; I am drawing on my limited experience with hunting stories, but it is very much like when Danny got a snowshoe rabbit or a partridge in Big Red. Except… the game is a word! And it reads with a straight face, the smell, the feel, the procedure of dressing it, we could be reading about rabbits and birds again, until it swings back to bring in the Y and the K again! It is amazing!

The story is like that. I thought, oh, that is nice, but he can not keep this up. I mean, how many words can gut? But this is a story by someone who knows what he is doing! It is not just a list of words he eviscerates! We learn about a field of lavender (when his wife divorced him because he was only interested in hunting words – “If I was a word, maybe you’d pay half as much attention to me. I didn’t think it would be good form to tell her she was right.” – she got the house and he got the field), and the bet he has with Juan is that whoever bags the most words on this opening day will win the field! A field of lavender! “After all, what color word could be better than lavender? Three syllables, even.” Aha, a new element – the number of syllables is something like the weight of a fish or the points on a buck or whatever hunters use to measure how valuable their catch is. And the field of lavender is like a wheat field, it is a crop. A crop of words.

See? This is not just a silly metaphor. This is carefully thought out!

The story continues with new elements, like the rumored shortage of words, which might lead to a shorter season or fewer licenses. There is a wonderful scene where Juan pulls ahead in their competition: he takes them to the Rotary Lodge where a Kentucky Wildcat flag flies proudly in the flag, and he coaxes blue, Wildcat, and Kentucky from the flag in a matter of moments:

Three words all at once, and a rare one, two, three-syllable trifecta at that; it was so good I couldn’t even feel jealous…. He let me have the first dibs smelling Kentucky. Is fawn a scent? It seemed so. Next came tobacco, rich and ruddy, followed by mint and fresh-cut grass and something swampy…

The detail is so precise and specific! But there is more to this story than accounts of each word bagged. After all, that would get tired fast. No, this is a better story than that! Someone who thinks of a way to bring hunters and word nerds together has more than a few smarts, so we discover more elements to morph the reverence most hunters feel for their sport into that which most writers feel for words:

Years ago, [Juan] replaced four molars with type keys from the city’s afternoon papers after they shut down. We’d gone to check out the press’s former site, son to be a sponge factory, the buildings long since demolished….
His hands shook as he handed me three letters, H, T, R. Think of it, he said, and closed my fingers around them. Each of these help stamp out thousands of words. He was so intense that his reverence was catching, and I keep the type keys now in my bedside table, fingering them blindly nights I can’t sleep.

I want some typewriter keys for my bedside table! I want to make shirt buttons out of them! Or jewelry!

In a further plot twist (or else it would be just toying with a metaphor instead of a story), our narrator (it is a first person story and his name is never given) has a problem this season. He has trouble speaking words. And this problem comes to the fore when, on the bus, he sees a prime word:

Yet the truth was I was stalling, because I’d frozen. It doesn’t happen often, maybe once every three or four years, but I’m staring at a word and can’t say it. Some kind of mechanical breakdown, I think….
The word was right there in front of me, tucked into a woman’s cleavage, trying to blend in with a crescent of tiny freckles and the sheen of sweat. Natural habitat, and all that; very smart, as multis usually are. When I glanced away to read some advertising placards about elocution lessons it came to me. Silicone, I said, and it was mine.

Again, I am awed at how good this is, how he talks about natural habitat and slips in the slang “multis” and attributes will and mind to the words, just like hunters do with their prey! And of course at the same time it is funny as hell! The word silicone hiding between the breasts of a woman? How could anyone not love this?

The story reaches its climax when they find a couple of agents clearing out a mailbox. This is why words are in short supply, of course; Special Ops agents take the words from mailboxes and telephone booths under cover of darkness. They catch a pair in the act, and the narrator knows what to do: he says, “Special Operations!” and just like that, words come spilling out of the mailbox, tumbling all over, like a slot machine paying off big time. And what does he see there? A special word – if you have been following closely you probably know what it is! And it leads to a change in him, because this is not just a goofy metaphor, it is a complete story.

Now you have to read it, yes, to find out what happens? You do!

I was so impressed by this story, I went looking for his website and found several other stories scattered all over the Web on cool online litmags like Dogzplot and Right Hand Pointing! Stay tuned, one of those will turn up on my Online Fiction etc. to Read and Love page the next time I update! He also talks about his story on the One-Story Q&A, and he has published two novels and a story collection. I think I will be reading more of this writer!

Pushcart 2012: L. Annette Binder, “Nephilim” from One Story #141, 10/15/10

"Water Rights" by Marcia Petty

God was a blacksmith and her bones were the iron. He was drawing them out with a hammer. God was a spinner working the wheel and she was his silken thread. Seven feet even by the time she was sixteen and she knew all the names they called her. Tripod and eel and swizzle stick. Stork and bones and Merkel, like the triple-jointed Ragdoll who fought against the Flash. Red for the redwoods out in California. Socket like a wrench and Malibu like the car, and she took those names. She held her book bag against her chest and she took them as her own.

I read this in One Story before I started blogging the stories I’d read. I was glad to see it in the Pushcart volume, though surprised: while I enjoyed it and thought it was different and moving and nicely written, I didn’t realize it was Pushcart good. I’m glad to see it is.

Freda is a giant (due to a pituitary tumor; the medical aspects are explained briefly, as if only to assure the reader this is not anything supernatural), and the story recounts her life as it intersects with that of Teddy Fitz, a little boy who moves in down the block. Legends of nephilim are interwoven throughout the story. They were the giants of the Old Testament, the offspring of fallen angels and women. Their bones became the mountains. We can almost imagine they were called whatever the 1000 BCE equivalent of Ragdoll or tripod, maybe Cedars instead of Red. They ate all the food, and the Lord ordered archangels Michael and Rafael to exterminate them so people wouldn’t be hungry. “Hunger is a terrible thing, Freda’s mother had told her more than once….But hunger was their burden, and they should have carried it.” Freda knows burdens, after all.

Teddy is her main contact with humanity now that her mother is gone, it seems. He does chores for her: shoveling snow, mowing the lawn, planting flower bulbs. She sees him through his parents’ arguments and his mother’s departure as he grows up. We see her mobility decrease (cane, walker) and his increase (skateboard, bike, car). When he leaves for college, there is a moment of connection, and then she’s alone.

He returns years later, his wife (three inches taller than him) and child in tow, and Freda is in a wheelchair. In a heartbreaking decision, she won’t open the door when he comes to visit. Her health has deteriorated, and she’s wheelchair-bound.

He wouldn’t have said anything about her jawbone or her bent fingers or how her back was shaped like an S. He would have taken her hand and knelt down to greet her, but she stayed in her spot by the windows. His face was like a mirror, and it was better not to look.

Binder discusses her process in the One Story Q&A. She has a story collection, Rise, coming out in August.