Aimee Bender: “Bad Return” from One Story #158, 12/20/11

"Memory" by Bin Xu

“Plastic doesn’t recycle.” She shrugged off her coat. “Right? We can re-cycle it, but it can’t do anything on its own, and all it can ever do is be itself again. It is the worst kind of reincarnation. Lame! That is so lame! And it’s everywhere!” she cried, going to the bathroom to wash marigold dirt off her fingers.

This story is unrooted in time, and I think that’s deliberate. Look at the opening sentence:

I met Arlene in college, in the freshman dorm.

This implies that Claire, the first-person narrator, is telling the story from a time after college, yet after the exposition covering Freshman year, it’s specifically set “March of our senior year, just about two months before graduation” in an apartment Claire and Arlene share, with a brief flash-forward to the following year. But given what happens on that night, I can understand why the voice sounds memoir-ish. Time-travel via recycling. Or reincarnation.

Claire and Arlene, who ended up as Freshmen roommates and then friends by sheer chance, are very different, and the description of their differences provides an entertaining exposition. Arlene goes for “brute jocks” and favors a perm to give “a look of energy” to her hair. Claire prefers poets, and approaches her appearance differently.

…[P]art of trying to attract those poet-men was to look a little like I had wandered onto campus by accident after having spent ten years with the wolves behind some farmhouse living off scraps and reveling in the pure air like a half-girl Mogli, half-woman Thoreau.

Most of the poets Arlene meets don’t actually write poetry. Instead, they have

….books partially filled with the same poem, over and over, called “Life” and/or “Life II” and/or “Why Love Is An Illusion” – these men didn’t always want to touch a woman, or a man, but rather mostly themselves. It took me until senior year to find a poet who actually wrote poetry, and he took off my clothes very gently and spent nearly an hour on my neck and back, and when were were done and I felt all my waiting had been worth it, he explained that part of his education as a poet was to meet as many women as possible, and so this was now to be goodbye. He suggested I pretend he was going off to war on a boat. “What boat?” I said, clutching the blanket. “We live in Ohio.”

He leaves her with a bad poem (“Your breasts are fortune cookies, full of small wisdoms”) and she wants to show it to Arlene, but “although she had never been anything but sympathetic about my history with men, I couldn’t bear the thought that she might laugh at me and not him.”

I know that feeling. It’s very lonely. It’s also very familiar. No, not me, I went for nerds, not poets. I’ve always been skeptical of poets, for exactly the reasons given here. But it sounds just like Gail Parent’s Sheila Levine in Sheila Levine is Dead and Living In New York (which, by the way, is a favorite, though dated, book of mine).

The story moves on to senior year. Arlene’s been a bit tense, perhaps because of Hank. Their neighbor Hank was a voracious recycler, not even trusting the trucks that pick up curbside recycling bins, so he drives to the recycling center with his bins, except he accidentally hit and killed a doctor one day, a doctor who operated on children with cancer. It goes from there to an anti-war rally/orgy/mass-robbery, and a strange old man who needs help with a light bulb and has a ring Claire threw in the river back in California five years before; he advises her to stay friends with Arlene. As usual, Aimee Bender manages to tell this story so it flows completely naturally. At all times I was caught up in reading. It wasn’t until I finished the story that I wondered, hey, what was that? So I read it again, expecting to see new things that connected the elements. And again, I was in the moment throughout. This sounds like a good thing. And it is, of course. But it leaves me wondering about the overall story: How do the pieces fit together?

I have no doubt there are layers of symbolism here. Hank (who was the idea that started the story, according to Bender’s One Story Q&A), recycling, the old man, the rally, Arlene. But to be honest, I’m not really interested enough to bother. And that’s the problem with this story, for me. I like Aimee Bender. I loved “The Third Elevator.” I didn’t really explore the levels of symbolism there, either, but I enjoyed the story tremendously without the effort; this one doesn’t work for me the same way. There’s the same evolution, as the story turns into different stories. I like that effect. And I like the individual elements of this story. But as a whole, it loses me. Maybe I’m just impatient with reincarnation in all forms; I have a friend who sort of forces the issue on me once in a while, and I’m a bit weary of defending myself for not being interested. Aimee shouldn’t have to suffer for that, nor should her story. Nevertheless, she does, and while I like the exposition and denouement, I find the middle of the story, the primary plot, less than compelling.

We end up with the two roommates again (and, by the way, the last One Story #157 was also a college roommate story, which is neither here nor there but is too interesting to ignore). And here’s where I catch up with the story again.

I didn’t know what to ask her. How to be a person?… In the fall, she would be doing the Peace Corps or Teach for America, depending on which program took her first. Arlene, who made sure every used item went into the right bin because she wanted all things, everything, to find its way back into the world, new.

In spite of my misgivings about parts of the middle, and my lack of interest in figuring it out, I loved the beginning and end. And maybe that’s a place to start, especially for a story about recycling. Or reincarnation. Or both.

Karen Shepard, “Girls Only” One Story #157, 12/1/11

"Bridesmaids" by Julie-ann Bowen

They’d met freshman year of college, thrown together by default when it turned out they were the only people in their dorm not in an a capella group. Some of them could sing, and they loved getting on stage as a group on karaoke night and belting out songs., but really, who could stand all that constant harmonizing? They’d always walked the line between teasing and cruelty. It gave their relationship energy and power, as if they’d been told to hold hands and make their way over a cable across a canyon. Holding on was hard but letting go worse.

It’s so exquisitely written, it needs to be read, not summarized and excerpted. This, I’m learning, is the mark of a really good story: when to leave out one paragraph, one line, is to diminish the impact of the whole.

This is the second Karen Shepard story I’ve read, and in some ways, I’m recognizing the character Zizi from “Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When” in all the girls here. I think it’s a more complex story, though. There are more relationships, and they interweave in a more subtle way, bringing together several themes: frenemies. How women treat each other. Group dynamics. Group inaction, diffusion of responsibility until there is none. Truth that follows you no matter how far and how fast you run, “like something heavy and uneven had been rolled down a flight of stairs” when it’s finally revealed.

It’s written in third person plural – “they” – and I have to say I’m pretty pleased with myself that I recognized that before reading Shepard’s One Story Q&A. Overall it’s about a group of five girls who met in college, spending a week together as bridesmaids for the first wedding amongst them.

There’s Cleo, who’s “spacey, tone-deaf” and “made her living as an escort.” And Anna, “legal aid lawyer and former President’s great-great-granddaughter”; “she’d spent her life with these girls feeling like the one Catholic schoolgirl at the party.” Gwen is “the Asian, the smart one with a tendency toward the self-righteous and the cruel.” Tician is a performance artist who somehow makes a living using drugs; “her parents had named her after the painter, and misspelled the name.”

And then there’s the bride, Daphne, who is marrying Jack, an ad exec thirty years older, with two kids older than she is. When she told her parents about her engagement, “her father sent her an ad Jack had written for Metamucil.” This is Shepard’s gift, these little touches, like the misspelled artist, that reveal parents and backgrounds in a sentence. Daphne was in college what in my era was called “loose.” She slept with the lacrosse team one weekend. And she’s low girl on the totem pole in her little clique. “They were never more in harmony than when talking about her. She was the one who made them feel better about themselves.” This in particular struck me: I’ve been that person. A couple of times. I never realized it until I read these sentences.

There are hints scattered through the first half of the story of something that happened in college. It starts with a great metaphor: Daphne was ok with marrying a stable older man, because “she wanted to ride shotgun the rest of her life.” The others are a little dubious. “They all knew what could happen if you got into the wrong car.” As the story progresses, we hear about Charlie: “He’d been the worst of the cars she’d gotten into.” This slow tease is really artful, since it’s woven in very skillfully, with subtlety. It could almost be overlooked.

We find out about Charlie and what happened in a two-page flashback so perfectly tuned I really want to quote the whole thing. It’s not even clear what exactly happened. Charlie in the dorm suite with Daphne while the others are trying not to listen. Other boys, maybe three, come in. Belt buckles hit the floor. “All the sounds they heard might not have been sounds of distress. Some of them still told themselves that.” The roommates do nothing but try not to listen. Bystander syndrome, it’s called, or Genovese Syndrome after Kitty Genovese, raped and stabbed to death while her neighbors listened and no one called the police. It’s also based on a real incident Shepard heard about, she says in her Q&A. Later, Daphne is frantically blasé about it; Charlie “got a little weird.” They try to forget the sounds of the belt buckles. They try to forget how Daphne went quiet.

And now the night before the wedding, Cleo claims to have slept with the groom-to-be (and gotten paid for it). She’s lying – she came onto him but he declined – but she’s the only one who knows that. They debate telling Daphne just who she’s marrying. But they decide not to:

They imagined telling her everything. They imagined how far back they would have to go…And they understood that they wouldn’t be gathering again any time soon. Life, they’d tell themselves, had gotten away from them. Because it was one thing to have a secret shame and it was another to have to confess to yourself that you were never going to face it.

They do get together again, a year later for their ten-year reunion. Charlie shows up at an after-party in a local watering hole, and it leads to a confrontation between Daphne (now getting divorced) and the rest of the crowd that’s, again, too exquisite and complex to summarize. It prods Cleo to talk to Jack and explain what happened back in college, during Dead Week. This might be the one false note in the story. I understand it provides some symmetry, some redemption for Cleo, and it separates her from the group thus giving her the opportunity to act decently for a change – but it just doesn’t sound like something someone would actually do. Mostly it provides the opportunity for some remarkable explanation, including:

Why did girls do these things to each other?
And Cleo, surprising herself, offered what she knew: Because, she said, that’s what girls do. They do stupid hurtful things until they figure out not to.

Then there’s a return to the wedding, to the bridesmaids singing karaoke at the reception. In retrospect, this denouement seems a bit incongruous to me, this additional jump in time, but while I was reading, provided some breathing room for all that’s gone before, a kind of levelling-out phase, and it returns to the harmony metaphor from the beginning. So it was effective. It just doesn’t sound like it was when summarized.

That’s why the story has to be read: because the telling, the little details, the tone, the nuance, is why it works.

C. Joseph Jordan: “The Quiet” from One Story #156, 11/10/11

"PTSD" by Alex Lasher

He wore his new glasses and his service uniform….He couldn’t get used to the pressure of the temples against his skull, and though he could see clearly for the first time in years, the hugeness of things overwhelmed him and plunged him into fits of nausea…. The other passengers were in sharper focus than he desired: he could see the wax in their ears, the cracked capillaries on their noses; indeed he felt he could see their intentions and dark purposes.

Staff Sergeant Malick is on his way home from his tours in Vietnam, and he’s not doing so well. In addition to the new glasses, he’s adjusting to the idea that the plane he’s on is almost certain to not crash, that the car he’s in will not hit a booby trap – “That no one in this world truly meant him harm.” And he’s worried that his mother will have some kind of party for his homecoming. He’s not in the mood for a party. He’s a man with secrets, “secrets that he never intended to share, though for his sake or that of the people he loved he could never be absolutely sure.” We’ve learned to call that PTSD now. Back then, it didn’t really have a name.

During the course of his welcome home party, we’re given a look at how he’s lived the past several years. He fell in love for the first time in Australia, and got his heart broken. He killed someone in Vietnam. He visited home after his first tour, while his father was still alive but was gaunt with cancer, and immediately signed up for a second tour. The story moves around in time, keeping us informed by use of his titles (a technique I like, though I still find the zigzagging timeline to be a bit convoluted): he’s Adlai Malick first, then Private, then Corporal, and Sergeant, and then, now, Adlai again as he finds an empty room in the basement of a house full of friends he no longer knows, a house where is dead father’s memory still haunts.

This was the story that convinced me to take a few days off. I have such high expectations of One Story, after all. It isn’t that the story is bad. It’s fine. It’s a bit of a workshop story, except for the awkward timeline, which would never get past a workshop (and I love it when editors of One Story calibre allow for some coloring outside the lines). And considering how many terrific stories One Story has sent me lately, they’re allowed a dud now and then. That sounds bitchier than I intended. It’s not a dud. It’s a fine story. I don’t particularly like war stories. Especially Vietnam war stories.

I love that One Story publishes work of MFA candidates like Jordan. I love his bio: “When he was a boy, he once dug a neck-deep hole in his mother’s garden and filled it with water. He then stood in it until all the water had seeped into the earth. This experience prepared him in untold ways for life as a fiction writer.”
I love how he explains, in his Q&A with One Story, how difficult the research for this story was. Not the details of the war, but the little things: “what would a Marine have called his rations? His time away from his unit? What was the name of the local high school in that part of Oregon in 1965? Where might a working class guy from Edinburgh have worked in the 1950s?” I remember doing some lighter-weight research like that for a story I wrote: what’s a working class town and a low-key ski resort near Denver? What kind of root beer would’ve come in glass bottles in 1985 New England or Denver? (I never found the answer to that question, in spite of locating a self-proclaimed root beer historian).

He also explains the origins of the story, in the experiences of present-day soldiers returning from current wars, and in a character in another piece who needed a backstory. I can appreciate what went into this story.

So I feel like I’m kicking a puppy when I say it didn’t do much for me, but I felt it didn’t really deliver much substance beyond a boilerplate homecoming story, flavored with a son’s yearning for paternal approval that never comes. The girlfriend is a slight twist, but that felt like something out of a WWII movie. Again, YMMV. Someone without my biases might enjoy it a lot. I hope so, because it’s well written, and obviously grown with love and care. I regret it just isn’t my particular cup of tea.

Pushcart 2011: Joe Meno – “Children Are the Only Ones Who Blush” from One Story

Art school is where I’d meet my sister each Wednesday, and then, the two of us would travel, by cab, to couple’s counseling. Although Jane and I were twins, by the age of nineteen, she was already two years ahead of me in school, and because both of our parents were psychiatrists and because I had been diagnosed with a rare social disorder, a disorder of my parent’s own invention, Jane and I were forced to undergo couple’s therapy every Wednesday afternoon. The counseling sessions were ninety minutes long and held in a dentist’s office. As both of my parents were well-known in their field, they had a difficult time finding a colleague to analyze their children, and so they were forced to settle on a dentist named Dr. Dank, a former psychiatrist who had turned his talents to dentistry. He was an incredibly hairy man who smoked while my sister and I reclined in twin gray dental chairs. Dr. Dank did all he could to convince me that I was angry at my twin sister for being smarter and also that I was gay.

Let’s start with weird.

I’m a big fan of weird. But there are different kinds of weird. There’s weird as in surrealism, magic realism, fantasy/sf, and the other ways of altering reality. Then there’s the weird of everyday life. I get the impression that what we have here is the everyday weird (granted, really really weird, and creepy as well, but obeying the laws of physics) perceived by the narrator as surreal. Siblings in couple’s counseling. A psychiatrist-turned-dentist conducting said counseling in dental chairs. And that’s just the first paragraph – we haven’t even got to the balloons yet.

Fact is, to a kid whose parents are manipulating reality the way this kid’s parents are, life must seem very surreal, and reality is a, well, fluid concept.

Jack, the narrator, has a fear of bodily fluids, and as a result he’s flunked gym class so is still in high school at 19. His gym teacher will give him a pass in exchange for valium. In spite of his parents’ and sister’s insistence that he’s gay, Jack seems to have very few sexual leanings at all, though given his aversion to bodily fluids, it’s hard to tell. And, by the way, the fact that he’s still standing while subjected to his family is a testament to the tenacity of his mental health. Then he meets Jill Thirby, an art student trying to make things fly with balloons.

A little bit of Up there. A little bit of Jack and Jill. A little bit of “Sweet Jane” by The Velvet Underground, whose lyrics supply the title (I’m not familiar with the song but I’m sure it’s important). A lot of subliminal incest – I don’t think it’s an accident he meets Jill at art school, where he usually meets the sister he’s in couple’s counseling with.

Yep, weird.

I’m favorably disposed toward Joe Meno because of his “An Apple Could Make You Laugh” from Zin’s Second Person Study. And I’ve been panting over One Story about as much as a non-canine can (I’ve encountered so many wonderful stories from there recently, both in the mag itself and in these “best” collections). But this story just seemed pointedly weird, with no real reason for it to be. It’s enjoyable, sure. I can get behind weird. But for me, it’s weirdness that doesn’t go anywhere, and it’s not on the level of the other stories I’ve read in this Pushcart volume.

Of course, I’m sure I’m overlooking something very important. Or several things.

For one something, it was written for live reading at an AWP conference session with Dorothy Allison and ZZ Packer, which Meno describes in his One Story Q&A as influencing the story in some general ways. Then there’s the song. And in his comments on the Akashic Books website review of Demons in the Spring, the collection containing this story, he says, “The problem in the story is a simple one: the unending conflict between imagination and intellect, the wisdom of art versus the wisdom of intelligence.” I completely missed that. I feel pretty stupid. I thought it was about how shrinks have their heads up their asses most of the time, and how parents with enough letters after their names can be as abusive as they want and get away with it. And about how some kids blossom in their own time, when they’re lucky enough to run into someone on the same wavelength.

I love what Meno says about short stories in that same One Story Q&A: “The biggest advantage and disadvantage in working with short stories has to do with the size of the audience reading them: it seems that the short story is going the way of poetry, or jazz music, enjoyed by a highly informed, smaller audience. I think in some ways it’s incredibly liberating and allows for much more experimentation. The era of being able to live off the money you make writing a short story is all but over, which means any story you write is more an expression of your art than it is a way to pay the bills. There’s also something ridiculously archaic about short stories, which I really love.”

Now there’s something I get about the difference between the wisdom of art vs. the wisdom of intelligence.

David James Poissant: “Refund” from One Story #155, 10/7/11

A man shouldn’t marry someone smarter than him. He does, and he’ll spend the rest of his life feeling like something less than a man.

I’ve mentioned several instances in the past when reading in public places became embarrassing as stories made me cry. Little did I know, that was nothing compared to the embarrassment of a story that made me giggle uncontrollably yet insisted I read the hilarious passage again and again, going into fresh spasms of laughter each time. While at a bus stop. After a visit to the neurologist for a skin biopsy which was still oozing bright red into the bandage on my leg.

No wonder people moved away from me.

But this story was worth it. And it’s about being out of place, in so many ways. A house out of place in a neighborhood. A man out of place in his family. A kid out of place in his class.

One important scene, on the second page of the story, reveals everything we need to know about this family’s dynamics, stemming from that most common of problems: six-year-old Josh won’t get Oreos until he eats his broccoli:

In the pantry, the Oreos waited, their torn cellophane and the stale ones I always skipped on my way down the row to the cookies that still snapped when halved. I said nothing. A limp stalk hung from Josh’s fork, wet and terrible, and all I could think was how I hadn’t eaten mine.
Josh didn’t whimper. He didn’t whine or cry. He was a quiet kid. If he had complaints, he kept them mostly to himself. His fork rose, pushed the pale, little tree past his lips and into his mouth. He chewed, eyes closed, hating it.
“Let the kid have an Oreo,” I said.
Joy’s look let me know that, once again, I’d fucked up. We were supposed to be a team, be a unified front. But we both knew who was Abbott in their marriage and who was Costello, who looked like the idiot and who called the shots. And, even if I got the boy’s laughs, it was Joy who got the last goodnight kiss, the first hug home from school.
Josh shoveled what was left on his plate into his mouth, chewed, and chased the broccoli down with milk from a coffee cup, the blue one with the steam engine circling the mug.
“Very good,” Joy said. She pulled the Oreos from the pantry. Our rule was two, but, because he’d been such a good boy, Joy gave him three. Josh beamed, squeezed her arm. That I had been his Oreo advocate had, it seemed, slipped his mind.
Joy was always doing this, stealing the moment. Just that morning, I’d surprised the family with breakfast, only for Joy to cry – when Josh came stumbling, sleepy, into the kitchen – “Look, sweetie, pancakes. We made you pancakes!”

Well, I lied. It doesn’t tell you everything you need to know. There’s one more thing. They’re called to a teacher-parent conference, at which they learn Josh is gifted. “So, he’s not in trouble?” Joy asks.

On the floor, Josh brought two trains together in a head-on collision. He pulled an engineer from the cab of one and pantomimed a spine-crushing dive to the tracks below.
“I’m on fire!” he yelled. “Help! The pain! The pain!”
The other engineer joined him, screaming, “Stop, drop, and roll! For the love of God, stop, drop, and roll!”
The plastic men were spun up and dow the tracks. They muttered in fiery agony.
“Look, Joy,” I said. “Our boy’s a genius.”

That, by the way, was the passage that had me in giggles at the bus stop. In his One Story Q&A, the author says his biggest challenge was dialing back the funny. It’s a good thing he dialed it back; otherwise the police might have been called on me.

He does hit that sweet spot, where humor and poignancy mesh and the laughter prepares way for the tears. He’s also accomplished the other thing he says he set out to do: “I never could get the story just right, until it hit me that Sam and Joy were unhappy in their marriage. For a while, I felt like I was writing two stories, one about Sam and Joy, and one about Sam and his son.” But he got what he calls the “double helix” to come together, and it works beautifully.

Sam worries about Joy’s embrace of Josh’s genius as she buys a carload of educational toys. When Josh says goodnight in Japanese, Sam sees him “for the first time not as a father does but as another first grader might.” The scene is as heartbreaking as the fire scene is funny. I think that’s what works in this story – nothing is by accident. Trains. Lipstick. “The power of a single word to make you suddenly, unaccountably sad.”

All of this above is preparation for the main event of the story, a neighborhood “gifted and talented play group” at which Josh encounters his nemesis, a bully-girl named Marcy. There’s a walk up the stairs that had me aching. In fact, the rest of the story had me aching for them all, the oblivious mother, the befuddled father, the little boy who only knows he loves trains more than chemistry sets and hates broccoli and is afraid of Marcy and he’s been shoved at these things one by one.

In the same Q&A, Poissant is asked his view on the future for these people, and says, “That’s probably what will happen: As the two men discover that they have less and less in common, they’ll grow apart.” He wrote the story, he should know. But I have a very different take. I picture a young man in the future remembering the afternoon of the play group, and how his father stepped up, and at what cost. I don’t think Josh will realize this for some time, but he will. He’s smart enough.

Benjamin Solomon: “Who Cycles Into Our Valley” from One Story #154, 9/10/11

Art by Coco de Paris, "Vintage Men on Vintage Bicycle"

So momentarily connected are the father and son that both instinctively know the other is just about to speak, and yet neither produces an utterance, patiently awaiting the words of the other, and then like strangers on a sidewalk attempting to pass one another but veering in the same direction, both father and son find themselves a little jarred by the unexpected silence, and each thereafter feels suddenly bereft of what he was planning to say, though just now it had been on the tip of his tongue. And like that the moment passes, the road inclines, and they begin to pedal hard against the steepness.

It’s funny how my reading seems to run into clusters. A couple of weeks ago, I ran into two pieces from very different sources that involved Huntington’s Disease within a matter of days. And now, in the space of a few days, I’ve encountered two explorations of the multi-generational parent-child relationship through a road trip. And, they are both from One Story, though I discovered “Housewifely Arts” through BASS 2011.

This story is about fathers and sons. It’s a meditative story. The “action” is merely the pair riding through a road in Spain on a tandem bicycle. A very prominent narrator tells the story, switching between father and son POVs. It’s made up of the memories and feelings the sparse action evokes. Father (the characters are not named) is divorced, his wife having declined to come to Spain: “She had arranged it so that, physically at least, he had been the one to leave her.” Son is involved in his own troubled relationship: the dog his girlfriend brought home died, and “his very first feeling, before sadness, had been relief because there was now one less thing that tied him to her.” But he has other worries: “…he is pretty sure she only pretended to swallow the morning-after pill they agreed she would take three weeks ago.…”

The climactic scene, if such a story can be said to have a climax, comes when father and son trade places on the bicycle; son moves to the front seat, and they move forward, with Son “realizing that all along the father’s job was harder than his own…..” This scene culminates in a beautiful final paragraph:

….for the second time today our cyclists arrive in a place of remarkable unity, an alignment so close that for the briefest moment neither man remains himself, but seeps free from his skull into a thoughtless will that hovers just above their bodies as they hurdle down the hill. Both feel it, the single-minded disembodied stillness in the relentless rushing, a sensation so delicate it vanishes at the moment of perception, and when it leaves both experience the same unsettling feeling of having somehow returned to the wrong body, our son within the father and our father in the son…. It is a feeling that will trouble them for years to come….

In his Q&A interview with One Story, the author describes writing 55 “distinct drafts” of the story over six years. He describes his biggest challenge: “Figuring out that nothing needed to happen. I wrote drafts and drafts of this story in which different things happened—everything from flat tires, to long and tense conversations, to a major crash that kills both bikers. All of that had to go when I finally realized that a central feature of long-distance cycling is silence and the opportunity for memory and rumination that it provides. Once I made the choice to sacrifice surface plot for memory and introspection, the current story began to take shape.”

It’s a lovely story, full of richness as we trace the relationship of father and son through their memories, and see how much alike they are, and how different. The elements of connect and disconnect are wonderful. Again, from the author’s interview: “I think that in the same way that the tandem bicycle gave me a physical vehicle to express the characters’ interdependence, the expatriate identities helped me express something about their shared loneliness and sense of disconnectedness from their loved ones.”

I’m a little worried, though. Much of my reading is in service of my writing. I’ve been trained over the past few years to avoid the whole “man sits on a rock and thinks about the end of the world” thing (I actually wrote that story. ICBMs are headed his way, and the military general sits on a rock smoking a cigarette thinking about his family and the world. I took a lot of grief for that one. Little did I know, I should’ve put him on a bicycle). Is this a new trend? Was I ahead of my time? Is my grasping for plot – a task I’ve abandoned recently as I’m not very good at it – a waste of time? Do I need to learn how to do the internal piece better, rather than to stop doing internal stories?

Not sure. But I know I’m fiercely jealous of Benjamin Solomon for writing a story I wish I’d written.

BASS 2011: Megan Mayhew Bergman, “Housewifely Arts” from One Story

Fernand Leger, "Study for Women and Parrot" (Etude pour Femmes au Perroquet)

What maniacs we are – sick with love, all of us.

In his review of the Ron Howard film Parenthood quite some time ago, Roger Ebert felt it succeeded because the main characters, who were simultaneously parents and children themselves, struggled to reconcile their criticism of their parents’ parenting skills with their own parenthood. This story does much the same: the main character is both a parent raising a son, and a child dealing with the loss of her mother.

I read this in One Story last year, and for some reason didn’t write about it then. Maybe it was before I’d started blogging notes about stories I was reading. Or maybe the tiny booklet got buried in the mess on my desk or bookshelves. In any event, I didn’t recognize the title or the author until I read the Contributor’s Note before starting the stories, and remembered the parrot.

The story is structured around an interesting premise:

I lost my mother last spring and am driving nine hours south on I-95 with a seven-year-old so that I might hear her voice again….We’re driving to a small roadside zoo outside of Myrtle Beach so that I can hear my mother’s voice ring though the beak of a thirty-six-year-old African gray parrot, a bird I hated, a bird that could beep like a microwave, ring like a phone, and sneeze just like me.

The rest needs to be read, not summarized. The language is beautiful, the feelings true. It’s told in zig-zag fashion, going from present to various places in the past over and over again, and while it isn’t confusing, it’s a little unsettling. It’s not terribly subtle, since everything that happens in the present brings up a memory or association to the past. But there’s such depth of feeling and wonderful imagery, I think it earns the right to be what it is. It’s very honest, and what else can you hope for in a story. In her One Story blog entry, Karen Friedman comments:

As the story unfolds we learn their relationship had been full of the little fault lines that develop between mother and daughter over a lifetime.
Precisely because of their size, those little fault lines are what grabbed my attention. There’s no physical abuse, no drunken betrayals – nothing that screams, “pay attention, for now we’re in the realm of dramatic truth”. It’s a deceptively simple story about people trying their best, and sometimes falling short.

I read somewhere that children are our punishment for what we did to our parents when we ourselves were young. The narrator is just beginning to realize this, as she remembers her mom and watches her son grow up: “Will you love me forever? I think to myself. Will you love me when I’m old? If I go crazy? Will you be embarrassed of me? Avoid my calls? Wash dishes when you talk to me on the phone, roll your eyes, lay the receiver down next to the cat?”

But it’s not all grim; there’s a great deal of humor here. The narrator is trying to sell her house to move to Connecticut for a promotion, but that’s not going so well thanks to a humpback cricket infestation in the basement (in her One Story Q&A, Bergman admits this was based on her own experience). Ike, the son, is “a forty-three pound drama queen, a mercurial shrimp of a boy who knows many of the words to Andrew Lloyd Webbers’ oeuvre.”

And the parrot, Carnie, is a riot. He bites, he fusses, he repeats all the wrong phrases, and Mom’s house becomes smellier and smellier. But he serves as a prism, bringing Mom into focus, and he provides a telling moment, in one of the last scenes between mother and daughter:

The man of the house is not here, Carnie said. He’s dead.
You really take it easy on those telemarketers, I said, looking at Mom.

The two houses – the narrator’s cricket-infested house, and Mom’s house – provide additional foci for the emotion of the story, as well as structure for the plot to wrap around. The title adds another element.

I’m not certain it’s a great story, technically; the alternating now-and-then, the straddling the edge of sentimentality, are elements that make me a little nervous, and I’m not 100% sure it’s a strong enough story for so many theme elements – the parrot and the houses and the housewifely arts and Ike and Mom and single motherhood. But I am sure it’s a beautiful read, and I’m glad it’s in this volume and I got another shot at it.

Pushcart 2011: Seth Fried, “Frost Mountain Picnic Massacre” originally published in One Story

Art created for the story by Brandi Strickland

Last year, the people in charge of the picnic blew us up. Every year it gets worse. That is, more people die. The Frost Mountain Picnic has always been a matter of uncertainty in our town and the massacre is the worst part.

This is how the story starts. I was befuddled. I moved along anyway. I’m not befuddled any more – I’m awed. I between, I was amused, angry, and heartbroken. Oh, this is good stuff.

It’s so good, you should spend $2.50 plus postage and order it from One Story if you don’t have either the Pushcart volume or his just-out collection The Great Frustration (Soft Skull Press 2011) which includes it, or don’t want to check either of them out of the library. Seriously. It’s that good. It’s so good, I’m willing to become a marketing tool for an anti-consumerist work. The irony just sings, doesn’t it?

I’ve spent several days trying to come up with a way to comment on this story, and I still don’t know how to do it. I got all analytical about first person plural – the “we” voice. Rarely used, and something I consistently confuse with a sort of omniscient first person (which, I guess, is what the “we” voice really is; I’ll have to go see what Brian Richardson has to say about it in Unnatural Voices, and who knows, maybe I can get Zin to start a First Person Plural study). I copied large chunks of text, tried to break them down into sections. For example, the peculiar ways the massacres happened each year – not just bombings, but hot-air balloons that sail away never to return, port-a-potties containing venomous snakes, a radioactive Bouncy Castle. Methods so bizarre and yet real they maintain an air of fantasy and a grounding in reality at the same time.

There’s little Louise Morris, one of the victims the year of the silver-backed gorillas (not just gorillas; that would be buffoonery, but to specify silver-backed gorillas, that is a fine touch there) who is remembered and honored and so generates many changes – impeachment of the mayor, deportation of four Kenyan exchange students, and a three-day holiday in Louise’s honor – so many changes, that “the only thing that seemed at all the same was the Frost Mountain Picnic.”

But I can’t seem to get a summary that captures it. How do you capture this – parents who bring their children to this picnic every year, children who insist on going, because “all children are born with searing and trivial images hidden in their faces, the absence of which causes them a great deal of discomfort. It is a pain only the brush of a face painter can alleviate… ” – and when an alternative is considered:

It has been suggested that perhaps it would give our children more character if we were to let them suffer under the burden of the hidden images in their faces, forcing them to bring those images out gradually through the development of personal interests and pleasant dispositions, rather than having them crudely painted on….
None of us has the confidence in our children to endure that type of thing.

Oh, there’s so much more, the “difficulties we face in attempting to extricate ourselves from the Frost Mountain Picnic” because “most of us are involved with the picnic on many different levels, some of which might not even be completely known to us.” Are you getting the drift of this? Because while so much of this is giggle material, the story also makes a powerful point about the society we live in and allow to continue, how economics and war and politics and everyday life are tied together. And how we have, under the guise of making sure our children have it better than we had it, maybe done them a great disservice in perpetuating this intertwined network.

In his One Story Q&A with Pei-Ling Lue, Fried says he started out writing a story version of Dylan’s “Talkin’ Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues,” though it evolved into its own thing. He gives a hilarious account of how he came up with so many strange methods of massacre:

I was still finishing my undergrad when I wrote this story. While generating ideas for the story, I had a page in one of my course notebooks that I titled, without realizing how creepy I was being, Ideas for Massacres. I filled it up with as many ideas for ridiculous massacres as I could think of while pretending to take notes in class. I then proceeded to lose said notebook. As a result, I spent the rest of that semester terrified of the possibility that someone would find that notebook and that I would be arrested for plotting to kill people by means of strategically set-loose gorillas.

When I was an angst-ridden adolescent, my father often told me to stop listening to “depressing” music and do something fun for a change. He never understood how alienated I felt by forced happiness, and how comforted I was to hear the lyrics of Don McLean’s “Vincent” or the words of Herman Hesse – somebody else out there got it, I wasn’t alone! And Fried makes a similar point: “If any of the anxieties expressed in this story are familiar to readers, I hope that readers will take comfort in seeing those anxieties on the page. I always feel relieved when I read a story and the author is expressing some concern about the world that I share. It’s cathartic.”

Maybe if enough people can see that what we have been thinking is normal is not-so-normal, the picnic will eventually change.

James Zwerneman: “Horse and Rider Thrown Into the Sea” from One Story, 8/1/2011

"Struggling Woman" by Roland Benjamin

I was afraid in those days, afraid of my island, afraid of my own crooked heart inside me.

This wonderful story – a story-teller’s story – is set on the island of Grenada, but it took a while for me to pick up on that. Initially I was thinking somewhere in India (mangos, mongoose), then Jamaica (ganja and Rastas), then Indonesia (monsoons); finally a lightbulb went off. But oddly, I wasn’t disconcerted by the lack of exact placement, because it could’ve been anywhere a single mother worries about her boy, anywhere women find strength in each other and face what must be faced to raise their children, anywhere people in poverty struggle against overwhelming forces and learn forgiveness via much practice.

James Zwerneman lived in Grenada for six years, and explains in his One Story Q&A: “I had written a few stories in a row that felt hollow to me, so I kind of leaned on my Grenada years, which are some of my favorite years. I wrote about 40 pages of sketches. When Wini emerged I liked her and felt happy to orbit the sketches around her.” This is his first published story. It’s a remarkable beginning.

The title comes from a victory hymn, often used at Passover but also in Christian churches, based on the parting of the Red Sea in Exodus:

I will sing unto the Lord,
For he has triumphed gloriously,
The Horse and Rider thrown into the sea.

The Lord my God,
My strength and song
Is now become my victory.

The Lord is God
And I will praise Him,
My father’s God, and I will exalt him.

The story is told in 13 very tiny numbered chapters. I wonder if the “13″ is a coincidence.

The story is told from the first-person POV of Winifred, single mother to Jeremiah. They live next to Miz K, an older woman who’s raised her children already (“You raised some right and wrong before,” Wini tells her. “But this is my only one. If I raise him wrong, I will not be able to bear it.”) yet takes in a “stray” boy named Lester. Elroy, sweet on Wini, lives along their path in the jungle as well. Wini isn’t interested in Elroy unless he gets a job, a truck, and quits drinking. Elroy isn’t a bad guy, just weak, I guess you could call it, and she has him over for juice and dinner on occasion. She finds out he’s got a job as part of the Mongoose Gang, thugs who act on behest of the corrupt government, and he’s spying on Dr. Jake, a white American doctor with the Church.

The boys, fast friends, steal eggs from one Mr. Sylvester, a man of some means. The two women send him to work for Mr. Sylvester to pay for their crime, and in time they decide, with his help, to build their own chicken coop and sell the eggs at the Tuesday market. It’s a lovely sequence, and of course eventually heartbreaking in multiple ways. It just isn’t safe to be capitalists, even just to sell a few eggs, in this place and time.

Many wonderful scenes are woven into the story – some humorous, some wistful, some tragic – all of which do exactly what they should do: they engage me in Wini’s life, and lead me to care about her and her son, and Miz K and her acquired son.

In the final scene, Wini has Dr. Jake and his very white, very clean family over for dinner. And of course, whenever you have a special event, something unforeseen happens: a swarm of wood ants (similar to moths; he describes his personal experience with them in his Q&A linked above) invade the house, something that happens sometimes just before a storm. This last “unlucky chapter 13″ sums up the story, the people, the island, the world in some ways. Wini thinks: “And in a younger time it might have flustered me. It might have set me to thinking I was cursed in somehow….It may all keep happening, all of it, but you will keep praying and hoping anyway, and that is how you will do until the end.”

This attitude had me a bit frustrated – for a spark of anger can be a good thing, bringing with it a commitment to bring about change. Then again, for a lot of people, it’s all they can do to raise their kids on goodness and hope instead of despair and vengeance. Maybe that’s the point.

An interesting aside: I was looking for art to go with this post and ended up on FineArtAmerica, where there’s a whole “Grenada” category. And what did I find there, but a painting by one Mary Zwerneman (addendum: she has since moved to her own website). Since I already knew the author lived on Grenada, and since I assumed Zwerneman is not a common name, I emailed the artist and discovered she is indeed the author’s sister. I didn’t use her painting (it featured an American flag, and was an expression of her life as part of two cultures) because I’d found one that better fit the story – I found a wealth of images, including hers – but I was very happy to meet her and her art may show up in these pages at some future date.

Elissa Schappell: “The Joy of Cooking” from One Story

“I have an announcement to make.” Emily cleared her throat dramatically. “Today, I became a woman,” she said. “I bought a chicken. I did. With legs and everything.”

This line becomes more and more ironic as the story continues. But let’s back up a little. I very much enjoyed reading this story. It’s a little close to movie-of-the-week material, to being “an anorexia story.” I don’t think it goes there – it’s a mother story – because of the wonderful artistry of the telling of the tale.

It’s part of a brand-new collection of linked stories, Blueprints for Building Better Girls. In her Q&A at One Story, Schappell says she had to tell the story: “You can’t write a book that deals intimately and truthfully with the experiences that shape American women’s lives without writing about our tortured relationship to food.” She chose the mother’s POV because: “In the typical narrative, the daughter is a victim, her mother a controlling monster. The thing you don’t know, can’t say, is sometimes it’s the daughter who is the monster.” I don’t think this is the case at all – but I would guess I’ve seen more Movies-of-the-Week than she has (which, in case you’re wondering, is not a good thing). I think she was extremely successful in capturing Mom’s measured response, in the face of incipient panic, to Emily’s immaturity, attention-seeking, and neediness. But you know, sometimes, nobody’s a monster, everyone’s just doing the best they can within all their limitations.

The story opens with Mom getting ready to go to yoga before going to the department store to buy a new shade of lipstick – “My mother always said that a woman should have a signature lipstick the way a man had a signature cocktail. I’d married and divorced Emily’s father, Terry, in Cherries in the Snow.” Then she is going to meet co-worker Hugo for coffee. “…let’s just say it had been a long time between cups of coffee. 1,825 days to be exact. Five years. Not that I was counting.”

But daughter Emily calls to announce her womanhood via poultry purchase. Mom (who has no other name in the story) is surprised, as Emily doesn’t cook and doesn’t really eat. “At 24, Emily has been anorexic for almost half her life.” At this point I’m not sure if that description is casual – in the joking way people who know nothing about anorexia describe someone who eats carefully – or for real. The behavior described – eating salads, ordering restaurant food steamed with no sauce and not eating a lot of it – isn’t that far off what a lot of extremely figure-conscious women do. It also isn’t that far off what a lot of anorexics do.

But Mom’s serious when she says Emily is anorexic. And now Emily is in love, and wanting to cook is a symptom. She met him at the Social Security office. This is serious anorexia, to qualify for SSDI. The man, who gets no name, is an actor and mimes picking roses and handing her a bouquet while she waits her turn in the waiting room. He is funny and brilliant. His reason for being in the Social Security office – he’s driven his grandmother there, he’s got his own SSDI qualification – is not disclosed. It’s something that worries me, but Mom doesn’t seem to think about it. I’m guessing she’s learned the hard way not to pry.

Emily has a bad moment when she touches the chicken – “Eek, Mommy, it’s slimy. Its legs won’t stay closed – I’m putting on rubber gloves – bad chicken, slutty chicken.” This isn’t comedy. I don’t know how, but it’s conveyed with total seriousness. The “mommy,” the rubber gloves, and the “slutty chicken,” this is anorexia, all right (though I admit, I hate handling raw chicken. I do it, but I hate it). Mom gives her instructions. Mom’s call-waiting beeps – it’s Paige, the younger daughter in pre-med who never needs anything – and Mom doesn’t switch over. This, too, is anorexia. No, I’m not anorexic, but I’ve known quite a few. Getting all the attention is what it’s all about. Call waiting beeps a second time later in this story, and is ignored a second time; then Paige is forgotten. The daughter who made it into pre-med gets telephonically lost. At the end of the story, I still wondered what Paige was calling about – because somebody has to. I wonder if this thing about Paige not needing anything is Mom’s wish, her invention, because she had nothing left to give her.

There’s another little moment – this story is full of them – when Emily mentions how everyone thinks they look great together, she and her new beau. Mom goes to: how many people have you introduced him to, before you’ve introduced him to me? Because introducing him is still not in the picture here. She’s there for cooking instruction only. Mom doesn’t say anything. This is so loving-motherish, it breaks my heart.

There’s a wonderful sequence in which Mom counts back the years by Emily’s birthdays – at 15, she refused a party, ate angel cake crumb by crumb and started complaining about clothes not fitting, not coming in size double-zero. At 14, she wanted butterfly cakes and had an elaborate party and careened between elation and despair. Back to her first birthday, Mom’s marriage and Emily’s illness are traced. It’s always interesting to see things this way, to see how things progressed backwards. Great technique, effectively used.

The cooking continues, along with other revelations. Finally, we discover the kicker: it isn’t a chicken at all, it’s a Cornish game hen. Emily is that distorted. Now, half a Cornish hen is a meal, in fact. But you cut it in half and serve it that way, you don’t roast it and carve it at the table. It’s not a chicken. Unless you’re anorexic.

Kristi Reilly: “Water Party” from One Story, Issue 151, 6/16/11

Gelada Monkeys: National Geographic 2004

Hani tafash, Theo would say. Meaning, Long time no see. But also literally, You’ve disappeared. You’ve tafashed. You didn’t have to wait long to say it. You could say it after seeing someone only a couple of weeks before. You could say it after a day. Connections were tenuous here, so you grabbed, and you held on.

Tess is an American worker for an unspecified aid agency in Ethiopia. When the water line to their house fails and they are living on bottled water, she and her roommate Esther decide to throw a water party, where guests will bring a jerrycan of water instead of wine or beer. Tess invites Theo, her married lover (but he’s, you know, not really married, it’s more like he has “a roommate he never sees,” she tells Esther, not really believing it herself). He can’t come to the party. He’s researching the overabundance of a weed, crowding out the sorghum, in some area twelve hours away. They invite biologist Quinn, who has been researching gelada monkeys and living in his car in the Sheraton parking lot since his girlfriend walked out on him to count turtles. “‘Turtles,’ he sighed, shaking his head, as if that were the unbelievable part.” Tess uses some of the water they rake in to finally wash her hair, and puts on a dress Quinn gave her (presumably his disappeared girlfriend’s) when she ran into him at the Sheraton the day before. She goes after him. He follows, into the darkness.

As I read this story, I enjoyed the tiny details that seemed so authentic. Like the water situation. The feel of dirty, tangled hair. Using paperclips to raise the hem on pants so they won’t drag in the sewage by the street. Overloaded busses, passengers who crouch down when passing police so there are no tickets, and banging on the roof to request a stop. Tales of Harari newlyweds who are locked in a room for a week after the wedding, with food pushed in through slots. Tess tells of the send-off from her family, complete with a cake decorated in colors of the Ethiopian flag; Theo, who doesn’t really understand connections or goodbyes, is surprised at such a fuss. And we hear about the gelada monkeys, how they groom each other, and this forms the basis of their relationships. And when an old male gelada breaks his hand and can no longer groom his females, they leave him. These are wonderful bits.

It’s supposed to go from monkeys – their grooming, their relationships – to people, but I think the story is too short to make the jump. Quinn clutching his girlfriend’s clothes in his car came close. Winchet the landlady, the personification of that self-critical voice in the head, an observer of her tenants’ behavior, was a great idea, but I don’t think she had enough to do. I wanted to know more about the monkeys, the Harari, the busses. I didn’t care about Tess. She seemed silly, juvenile in this land where war is on the border and the embassy leaves messages on the phone: “the status on travel warnings, the likelihood of ordered departure, how fast the U.S. could lay an airstrip if the airport were taken”, where anything can happen any time, where an aggressive weed can cause starvation. Yes, I see the connections. And I understand that having these things revealed as matter-of-fact is quite a powerful way to state their significance. But in this setting, a lovelorn grad student isn’t really what I want to focus on. I wanted to know more about the work these people are doing – Theo and his agricultural observations, Quinn and his monkeys, Tess and her reproductive health programs. But Tess and her love life? No, it just didn’t make the jump for me. It isn’t a bad story – One Story doesn’t do bad. But it’s achingly short of what it could be.

In her Q&A with One Story, the author says she visited Ethiopia in 1999 where her sister worked at an aid agency and heard stories of a biologist, outrageous tales, and these never made it into the story. I’m thinking that would’ve been a far more interesting story to me than some kid mooning over a guy she knew was married, then making a beeline for another lovelorn soul. It gave this story an adolescent quality it never should have taken on. ” I’ve been trying to write an Ethiopia story ever since I took the trip. I tried it from different points of view and characters, but I couldn’t get it to work” says the author. I wish she’d kept trying, because I’m not sure this is the best story she could’ve come up with.

Nalini Jones: “Tiger” from One Story, #150 5/26/2011

…Essie found she could not express the full sweep of her thoughts. Each memory had eight or ten more at its back – a dozen, a hundred – too many to record so that anyone would understand how quickly and powerfully they came upon her. She could write and write, letters enough to span the globe; she imagined the lines of longitude and latitude in her own handwriting, floating gently over green and blue. And still it would not be enough to record the longings of even a single moment. Everything she hoped for was connected to everything she remembered and everything she had lost – a web spreading in all directions. Words moved in single file.

Passages like this one make me want to jump up and down and yell, “YES! That’s it exactly!” I, too, try to include the entire web of associations in writing, which is why I’m always digressing.

But I digress.

I enjoyed this story of Essie, an Indian Catholic matriarch (her husband Francis has a very limited role here) whose daughter Marian, now married to an American and with children of her own, is concluding a visit. Just before they return to the States, two things happen: the children find a stray mother cat and two kittens, and Essie finds a lump in her breast. Essie does not want the cats anywhere near her house (or near the children, for that matter), but kids have a way of collecting strays. At one heartbreaking point I realized Essie is willing to have cancer to keep her daughter close to her. I understand that. I was once willing to have a routine test come back positive so I could get out of a job I hated. My boss was very hurt when I told him that. But I digress again. I told you.

This is the heart of the story: Essie’s deep wish for her daughter’s presence and concern and love, a mother who can’t let go, to the point of obsession. It seems a bit extreme to me, and I’m left wondering why, though she has a husband and two sons, though Marian has lived in the States for some time now, this separation is so difficult for her to accept. And I wonder if there’s something wrong with me that it seems so extreme. But imagine children who are desperately attached to stray kittens they’ve just found but don’t turn a hair at leaving Grandma a half a world behind; now imagine how Grandma might feel about that. This feels absolutely true: it’s exactly how kids would react. Somehow they always assume Grandma will be there, but the cats are ephemeral. But it has to sting. Motherhood has many angles in this piece.

It’s an engrossing story with a lot of wonderful details, including a charming story line about Gopi, the coconut harvester whose anticipated and delayed arrival frames the story. I have to admit I’m not crazy about the aesthetic of the prose itself, though it doesn’t get to the point where I have trouble reading. It’s just not a style I particularly like, though I find it appropriate for the story and setting.

I was a bit confused about the mention, in her One Story Q&A, of her story collection about this family set in this same Catholic enclave of Bombay. What You Call Winter was published in 2007; at first I got the impression the story was from the collection, which would not make sense (One Story would not print an already published story from four years ago), and then on rereading the interview, realized the story was left out of the collection (then resurrected and rewritten for One Story) because it was overrun with cats: ” The cats were everywhere. It was all about the cats. The editor of my story collection gently suggested that the world might not need a story in which the cats are more memorable than the people.… The cats twined through everything. It was all so discouraging that I introduced a dog into the novel to bark fiercely at any cat intruders. Then an editor at One Story made a brilliant suggestion.” I wish I knew what the suggestion was. And I’m afraid to admit this – I wish I could read the original story, too; I might like a story overrun with cats. But mostly this points out the value of One Story Q&A’s: they actually inform the reader and add to the enjoyment of the stories.

I’ve ordered the collection because I’m interested in this family, in this community, and I’d like to read more about them. My “To Be Read” shelf is sagging badly, but there’s always room for one more book, right?

PEN/O.Henry 2011: “The Restoration of the Villa Where Tibor Kalman Once Lived” by Tamas Dobozy, from One Story Issue 128

And all that time Laszlo had been tormented by Tibor Kalman’s villa – it was like the place was imagining him rather than the other way around – it sometimes appeared in place of what he was running from, and Laszlo had to stop himself from leaping into a burning apartment, a metro tunnel, or a garden under shelling, thinking: this is it, finally, I’ve made it.

Hello, I am Zin!

I did not think I would like this story. I started reading it in the waiting room of my dentist (I was very early), so it was not the best of circumstances for reading. I was discouraged by the time and setting (1944-1947 Hungary) and it is a war story. I am glad I started over later. I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would.

It is a very interesting story. Now, “interesting” is often used as a euphemism for “yuck” but not in this case! I liked this story very much, and the best description of how I liked it is “interesting”. It is not really what I would call a beautiful story. There are passages that knocked the wind out of me, but their power is not beautiful prose but meaning. It was a story that kept tumbling. I was interested. I was interested in the character and the story of course, or I would not be able to say I liked it! But I was interested in the world it described. I have read quite a bit about WWII but not much about Hungary or the Siege of Budapest (to be honest I had never heard of it) or how Hungary went from being a Nazi captive to a Soviet captive overnight (which I knew about but was pretty vague on the details and certainly had no grasp of the human situation). So I found the story an interesting way into learning a little about those events. And I found it very interesting how the villa in the title is a character in the story. And how the title is so very important.

The story follows Laszlo, a very young Hungarian soldier. It is quite complicated. I started to outline it, but there are many details and every one of them is important, so my outline got very long. Laszlo is dealing with a lot of guilt, and he hungers for safety which becomes personified by Timor Kalman’s villa, where he can get documents that will allow him to escape Eastern Europe entirely. He commits several betrayals to get himself into the villa. He longs for absolution but that is not going to happen. In the end the villa is restored, but it is not a physical restoration. In spite of Laszlo’s sins, I felt a lot of compassion for him.

I am glad this One Story piece made it into the collection; One Story has become one of my favorite publications! The author wrote this story as part of a novel of linked stories generated from his research into the Siege of Budapest. He did not complete the novel, but ended up with four stories. He visited a villa that became the inspiration for the one in the story. You can read his Q&A with One Story editor Pei-Ling Lue; I found it very interesting (that word again! But it is!). Most authors will decline to speculate on the future of their characters beyond the end of a story or novel, but he knows (and tells!) what happens to Laszlo because he wrote another story about him! And I thought his answer to “what is the best writing advice you’ve ever received” was funny, and maybe I should think about it a bit!

Grant Munroe: “Corporate Park” – One Story #135, May 2010

There was always a vague understanding that mountain lions, in theory, roamed nearby. I think everyone just assumed there would have been a much sharper distinction between our workplace and the surrounding wilderness.

I love this story. Last year, when I received it, I skimmed it (big mistake: literary fiction is not skimmable) and got: mountain lion, corporation, blood, camping. I lost interest immediately. It slid down behind my tv set, where I clean but once a year, and I left it there until this year’s Spring Cleaning unearthed it. I dusted it off and put it in the pile to read on my bus journeys. I was not enthusiastic. I was wrong.

My skimming never uncovered the hilarity in the story, nor the arch parable of corporate life it is. As I said, literary fiction is not skimmable, you miss too much subtlety and nuance. I giggled my way through a round trip and couldn’t wait to finish it when I got home. It’s hilarious (how was I to know? One Story doesn’t usually do humor), and it skewers the economically-driven corporate world very effectively.

In his One Story Q&A, Munroe gives the source of this story as: “The collision of two events: the near-collapse of the market in 2008 and my discovery of Julio Cortázar.” “Bestiary” is the story, which I have not read, but will add to my list. This is his first fiction piece (he was whisked out of the slush pile by virtue of his cover letter), though he’s been publishing Corporate Folk Tales in McSweeney’s for a while. He’s now enrolled in an MFA program, and I hope that means more pieces like this. Others have commented this reads too much like George Saunders, but is that really a bad thing? There are dozens of writers of war stories, family tragedies, vampire stories, police procedurals; isn’t there room for two George Saunders in the world? I think the world could use five or six, actually.

The story concerns Halloway, a lawyer at a nebulous Corporation. Kinsella, a fellow employee. And a mountain lion. And executives, Eastman and Westman, an administrative assistant named Patty and a paralegal named Yvonne and other people who start disappearing from the office, leaving smears of blood and body parts behind, after Kinsella leaves the door open during his smoke break and presumably lets th mountain lion in. Don’t worry about my description – read the story. It’s worth buying the issue, if you’ve ever worked in a corporation and have a sense of humor about it. If you don’t have a sense of humor about it, you should read it anyway; it will help.

I only regret I let this little gem lie tangled in the dust bunnies behind my TV for so long. I hope it will forgive me.

Claire Vaye Watkins: “Man-O-War” One Story #140, September 2010

“We used to stay up all night, just listing the places you could take a girl in a city. One of us guys would say, ‘To the park.’ And another would say, ‘A museum.’ And another would say, ‘The movies.’ That was our favorite, the movies. Whenever somebody said the movies, we’d all together say, ‘The movies,’ all slow. Like a goddamn prayer.”

A lovely story full of description. You’ll know Nevada, rocks, and desert heat by the time you’re done. Harris, a retired miner, is out on a dry Nevada lakebed scavenging fireworks left behind from the Fourth of July. His dog, Milo, finds a pregnant teenager named Magda. He takes her home with him (the nearest clinic is hours away) and takes care of her. He intends to take her back to her home, but she convinces him to let her spend the night, and the next day, to go swimming. They talk about their lives: his ex-wife lost a baby and they never conceived another; she moved away and now has a nineteen-year-old. Magda won’t say who the father of her child is, other than it isn’t her Mormon boyfriend; something dark is hinted at. Harris sets of the fireworks he found, including a large Man-O-War, and tells her the minerals used to make the different colors. He starts to think in terms of Magda staying with him to have her baby: “Though he knew better, deep down in the bedrock of himself, he couldn’t help it. He thought, She will need a stroller. She will need a car seat. How the barren cling to the fertile. We, he thought, we will need a crib.

Magda’s father shows up and takes her home. The scene is written exquisitely: he comes to the porch, doesn’t ask about his daughter but says he is hunting and shows Harris the gun he’s brought. Then he goes into the house and comes out with Magda. By the way he is touching her, Harris realizes the father is indeed the father of the baby, but Magda does not ask for sanctuary, in fact looks at him “pityingly” when he says she wants to stay. The last few paragraphs are devastating: Harris “loses his shit” as the author says in her One Story Q&A.

I did have a problem with the last paragraph. It refers to “levanta” and I had to go back and look for this. I only found one reference, where Harris dreamed Magda was saying this. Apparently it means “get up”. But I had to do some research to learn that (and I had a couple of years of Spanish in college). Also, “the Hastings brothers” are mentioned, and again I had to go back and find that. I have a habit of writing characters’ names on the front pages, since I do forget them, especially when the names are only mentioned once, but I didn’t write these because they were mentioned in a conversation as people from Harris’ past, the kids he hung out with when he was Magda’s age. Their names just didn’t seem that important, though the memory, partly quoted above, was, of course. To encounter these things at the end was distressing, since the last paragraph is quite beautiful but the meaning and impact was obscured by not-total-recall of these two things quickly mentioned.

Still, it was quite a beautiful story of someone having a second chance and losing it, seeing his possibilities as he tries to help Magda see her own, from different ends of their lives.

Smith Henderson: “Number Stations” from One Story #136, May 2010

Goldsmith’s mother took her own pictures of the ostrich. A man had led the bird to her door and kept it on a small chain. A sorry-looking sack of shit, she thought. The man and the bird both.

I’d never heard of number stations before reading this story. Am I the only one? It seems (according to Wikipedia and The Straight Dope, my go-to sources for things I’m not really going to research that carefully because they don’t matter that much but are fun) there are shortwave radio stations that broadcast artificially generated voices reading numbers and letters. They’ve existed since at least WWII (maybe earlier). Speculation is that these are for the use of spies, or possibly in recent years, drug dealers. No one – no government, no station operator, nobody – admits they exist. But they do. I’m perplexed.

I’ll admit, I’m pretty stupid sometimes. When I started this story, I saw “Number Stations” and I saw “ostrich” and I thought, Australia. Because sheep farms are known as stations, at least they were in The Thorn Birds (oh, shut up, you read it, too, it was the chicklit DaVinci Code of its time). So it took a while for me to get oriented. And as you may have noticed, it took me a while to read the damn thing in the first place (hey, they’re small, One Story booklets, they get misplaced).

Goldsmith is a restaurant owner in Montana with a secret. Bill, his employee, is an ex-con with an ostrich. Emily, another employee of the young, attractive, married female variety, has a thing for Goldsmith, whose wife is out of town. Goldsmith’s mother is watching his daughter (a girl who, at seven, “already did not forgive herself her own crooked features and was certain that her destiny was to ride an ostrich or a griffin or a rainbow to her true self, who was beautiful and free”), and she hears the number station on the baby monitor. There’s no way to say much more about the story without retelling it, and that would be complicated. A lot happens. Bill loses his ostrich; it’s Goldsmith’s mother’s fault but he forgives her. The ostrich taps on the window of Emily and Van’s (her husband) home, and they go chasing after it. At an end-of-season party for his employees, Goldsmith gets a little drunk and tells Emily his secret. Bill… well, it’s not pretty, what happens to Bill. In fact, it’s right out of “Incarnations of Burned Children” and that kinda pisses me off. But it’s also very fitting. The whole story works, even with (or because of) the ostrich running around and Goldsmith’s mother obsessing about the number station. We’re all getting messages, all the time, and sometimes we listen. Other times, we don’t. The soundtrack is Neil Young’s Helpless. That’s how I felt in the presence of this story – helpless to stop reading, helplessly lost in this craziness that comes from all sides but makes absolute sense, helpless helpless helpless.

The One Story blog claims this was snagged from the slush pile (uh huh) by an assistant who sent it to the editor with a note: “This is the best story about an ostrich I read today.” How could anyone resist?

ETA: I just read that this story is in the 2012 Pushcart volume (I read it in One Story); congratulations to Smith Henderson – and to all the ostriches.

Karl Taro Greenfeld: “Partisans” from One Story #149, May 2011

I enjoyed this battlefield story (which I typically do not like) more and more as I read. It’s set in an unspecified desert during an unspecified time and war. Our first-person narrator is a newbie soldier, a conscript who feels all this messy guarding outposts in the desert stuff is a little beneath him (he packs lots of books so he won’t be bored in the desert equivalent of the boondocks). Minor-Leftenant Hillel is the only Regular Army in the platoon, and he’s fresh out of the Academy. As they head for their destination, first by rail then on foot, the narrator abandons some of his books, regretfully, as he can’t lug them any more. Finally he loses all of them except one, a centuries-old novel set back when his country was being formed, which is a lovely little tale in itself and figures into the resolution. Of course, adding books and an old novel into a story like this gives it great appeal to someone like me, since I’m not likely to enjoy a straight war story. The platoon finally reaches the outpost they are to guard from partisans. We never are sure who the partisans are. Some, perhaps, ride with the train, but we never see any partisans attacking or doing any violence at all: “They rode alongside us and then, only as they passed, did I wonder at the Minor-Leftenant’s description of them as “children”. They were indeed young, but as I looked around at my platoon, I realized that we were younger.”

It’s a tale loaded with ironies like that, partisans who might be there and might not, soldiers killed by friendly fire in chaos, mysterious beasts and ghosts that (like the partisans) may or may not exist. As I read, I thought it was pretty clear that the partisans did not exist, and were used as an “evil empire” to keep the country in line, or perhaps they had existed at one time and now had to be kept going to allow the power structure to retain its control. The author’s Q&A at One Story makes me doubt this (it started as a sort of bedside tale told the comfort a sick friend), but I actually prefer it to his own vision for “what happens next”, so I’ll stick with it.

Josh Weil: “No Flies, No Folly” in One Story #143 11/30/10

I was not always a peddler. I was once, too, a lighter of lamps. Street lamps. In the city of Providence. I was once a seller of lemons in Baltimore. I was a greenhorn seeing from the deck of a ship for the first time the lights of New York. I was a beggar. I was a deserter. Once upon a time I absconded from the Army of the Tsar. Once upon a time I was a soldier. A draftee. I was a Russian, a Jew. A brother. A son. The small sound you cannot hear in the dark on this road beneath the clanking of my pack is my spit landing. The other one you cannot hear is my sigh.

One of the most powerful story openings ever is: “And God said: Let there be light!” We of the Judeo-Christian traditions are fascinated by light. We see the light. We light the way. We look for the light at the end of the tunnel. A lamp unto my feet, a light unto my path. Light is life.

So cross-pollinate a Jewish peddler with an Amish housewife in the late 19th century, just at the time when incandescent light was developing. Add a little strange eroticism. And you end up with a helluva story. This booklet was a little thicker than most One Story’s, so I was dubious, but I ended up mesmerized.

Yankel visits the Hartzler farm about every three months. This provides the structure for the story. With each visit, he becomes a little more involved with Mrs. Hartzler, who is very interested in light bulbs. Then in generators. Yankel, who has his own interesting history as sketched in the early paragraph above, goes from carrying a rucksack to pushing a wheeled pushcart to driving a mule and wagon. Mrs. Hartzler – Esther – goes from an interest in light bulbs to generators to batteries. And their relationship becomes more intimate, albeit in unusual (and usual) ways. Let’s say you’ll never look at a light bulb the same way.

According to the Q&A with the author, the story was edited down by about a quarter to fit the One Story space requirements, though he plans to include it in a collection focusing on humanity’s lust for light. Yankel’s background is based on Weil’s great-grandfather whose life followed a similar path.

The prose is a little unusual (I thought it was charming, appropriate, and totally readable) since the story is set over a hundred years ago and the characters are from cultures that use other languages – Yiddish, German – freely. In fact, language is yet another erotic touchstone for them, and sort of reminds me of, forgive me, Wanda’s obsession with foreign languages in A Fish Called Wanda. It’s not really played for humor, though if you’re familiar with the movie, you may smile, as I did.

It’s well worth a read, as almost all One Story selections are. Oh, and the title? It has to do with Ecclesiastes, which is as much of a hint as I’ll give.

Reif Larsen: “The Puppet” from One Story #137, June 20, 2010

The National Library in Sarajevo. Photo from http://www.newcombat.net/article_thelibraries.html

For the first time in his life, Valise felt the alabaster ache of a story racing up the column of his spine, tendrilling the back of his neck, grasping at the base of his skull. All he wanted to do was this: to get Thorgen to trust him and to be the first to deliver his show to the world. To write the story that had never been written before,. That would split it all open. Les marionnettes dansent au couer de la guerre.

Hello, I am Zin! I am doing this story, from One Story back in June 2010, because it is my kind of story and I think Reif Larsen is my kind of writer from what I have seen of his first novel, The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet and his plans for his next novel, which he says in the One Story Q&A is: “a love story that takes place in New Jersey about an epileptic radio operator. There’s puppets and particle physics in there somewhere. It’s very different than my first book, more of an international thriller. My version of Dan Brown, but a Willy Wonka Dan Brown.” This is a Zin book if I ever heard of one!

This story, “The Puppet” obviously has puppets. It also has particle physics: “We have two systems that work brilliantly on their own but are absolutely not compatible with each other. The principles of quantum tell us how the very small particles behave. And the smaller you get, the more uncertain things become. At the smallest, most minute level you find these tiny vibrating strings. They are never still – they tremble, they quiver, they can even be in two places at once.” Strings and puppets, those things relate. And war. The war in Bosnia, it is set there in Sarajevo, including the zoo where the animals have all been eaten, and the library which was destroyed – why would an army bomb a library? All these things fit together in this story. I love that they are all woven together so well.

Valise, he is our protagonist, and he has come to Sarajevo to be a war journalist (though he does not know how this is done) following the death of his father. He has loved war journalism since he read Hemingway and Dos Passos in his library in Oklahoma City and dreamed of elephants in the zoo there. And now he is in Bosnia and the elephants are bones and the library is “a great shell of a building,once elegant and sublime, now with scorch marks streaking the feathered weight of its façade.” He goes there to see a puppet show by Thorgen, the man who has told him about string theory. He finds “carcasses of thousands of books. They were splayed open everywhere, their pages burned, ghastly in their nakedness.” War has many horrors. It is odd that this is one that I find particularly excruciating. I think if I were in a war I would rather see books burned than people. But this scene breaks my heart.

So Valise stumbles his way through the war, and he links together all these things to discover this is not, after all, his story. To run across the world, through a battlefield to find what you want, and then to discover it is not what you want after all, this is so sad and so often true.

The story is not perfect, however. For one thing, there is a sentence missing in one of the early paragraphs. I was puzzled by the mention of “the woman in the picture” because I did not see where the picture had come from: turns out it was in a sentence that was omitted! Who omitted the sentence, the author or the editor, I do not know.

Also, as one clever reader noted on the One Story blog entry for this story, the time line is not quite right. The story takes place in approximately 1992 or 1993, and Valise, who has graduated from college, could not have been born before the late 1970s, as that is when his father came to America. I did not see this because I do not do those kinds of calculations while reading, but yes, I can see that maybe 1970s should be 1960s and maybe this is another mistake. This would be quite unusual. But it is a lovely story nonetheless!

Naomi J. Williams – “Snow Men” in One Story #131, 1/30/2010

Tlingit canoe full of warriors in Lituya Bay, as drawn by La Perouse expedition, July 1786. Source: Brown University

There is a big disagreement in my family about what happens if you drown and your body is never found. My aunts say that you are turned into one of the Land Otters. The Land Otters come up out of the water, in the dark, and steal away the living. You cannot see them, but sometimes you can hear them – they whistle. We lie in our huts at night and listen for whistling, because we lost a canoe when we arrived for the salmon season, and afterward we found only four of the bodies.

I did not particularly like this story – though I did not dislike it at all – and I feel bad about that (not to mention stupid, since Naomi Williams received a Pushcart Prize in 2009, so who am I to not like her work), because it is well-meaning and has some real research behind it and I’m all for voices of other cultures and I take seriously my White American Guilt. I have two other Inuit-voiced (or at least Northwest Native American-voiced) works in my Online Fiction Etc. To Read And Love page: Denise Duhamel’s The Woman With Two Vaginas, which she calls a feminist interpretation of Inuit myth and legend in poetry, and Vivian Faith Prescott’s recent digital chapbook on White Knuckle Press, Slick. Some of my best friends are Inuit! No, I have no Inuit friends, but that just seemed like the next step in the defensiveness I can’t seem to avoid here. Because I wish I’d loved this story.

Here’s the problem, to me: defamiliarization has become familiar, which is ironic and kind of sad. The “winged war canoes” (sailing ships), “white food that looked like maggots” (Wheat? Barley? Rice?), “juice that looked like blood and smelled like spoiled berries” (wine: after all, they were French). It’s just so familiar. In her Q&A on the One Story website, Williams explained the research she did for this story. It’s based on the arrival of the La Pérouse expedition in Lituya Bay (on what is now the Alaskan coast) and their encounter with the Tlingit people, stories of which the Tlingit have been handing down for 200 years. I respect the accuracy of the story, the faithfulness to Tlingit legends and customs, and the reactions to the French explorers. I’m just not that interested, as it reads like every other “oh, here come white man, destroy peace” story that every eighth grader has written.

No, that isn’t fair at all. The story doesn’t even go into the tragedy of native cultures as Europeans decided this land was uninhabited and therefore their own. It’s a story about a teenage girl who lost her cousin, the boy she was to marry, and is trying to get used to his younger brother, who she will now marry. Then these Snow Men sail in, and, as happened sometimes 18th century sailings, they lose many of their men in one morning. There’s a point of agreement there, and the girl has some empathy for them and some curiosity about how they will deal with the deaths of so many of their people. She recognizes the “excitement” that accompanies such a tragedy, and the cultural significance of the loss of her cousin and the men with him: “I was thinking, This is one of those terrible things that I will remember always, I will tell this story to my children and grandchildren.” And she recognizes the difference between someone else’s loss, and her own: “It happened again when the Snow Men drowned, but with out any sadness – just the excitement.”

She has a brief encounter with a couple of the sailors as she is out picking berries. There’s this aura of impending doom, as if she is about to be raped, but it never happens; they are just mourners of different souls. She meets up with her little cousin again and has an interaction with him concerning a canteen left behind by one of the sailors. This, at the very end of the story, is a wonderful little play, as they deal with each other in ways that remind me of teenagers anywhere: what is his motivation? What does she want me to do? It’s lovely, and it makes the story worth reading. I just wish we could’ve done without the berry juice and winged canoes.