#883 Bride- Julia Elliott

#883 Bride- Julia Elliott

This story is the first Elliott story that I read outside of her The Wilds collection. As always she is inventive, original and utterly unpredictable. Always with a touch of goth, this takes place in an abbey during the great plague. Wilda is a young nun trying desperately to stay chaste and Godly. Using extreme self-flagellation, she takes pleasure in punishing herself, believing this form of worship will lead to transformation to the holy.

                                           

“She chastises the filthy maggot of her carnality until she feels fire crackling up her backbone. Her head explodes with light. Her soul rejoices like a bird flitting from a dark hut, out into summer air.”

The plague has hit hard, and as the abbey loses nun after nun, fear leads to a breakdown of daily hours and responsibilities. Wilda and another nun develop a loving relationship, sharing a last meal before Wilda’s final transformation is set.

“Wilda has the strange feeling that everyone in the world is dead. That she and Aoife are completely alone in an enchanted castle. That they are just on the verge of some miraculous transformation.”

Rating: 9-9-9-9 Total= 36

#882 Dougbert Shackleton’s Rules for Antarctic Tailgaiting- Karen Russell

#882 Dougbert Shackleton’s Rules for Antarctic Tailgaiting- Karen Russell

This is a pretty hilarious satire of sports and extreme fandom. You think tailgating at a warm weather football game is being a hard-core fan? Imagine being at the south pole for the “Food-Chain Games.” Only the hardiest of the hardy can make it here.

                                        

Like the title suggests, this is a suggested list of rules for how to survive competitive tailgaiting in the harshest climates. It’s not that there might be fatalities, its that if there are, make sure you bury them in the proper container…nobody likes a litterbug!

“Be prepared to see a black-nosed victim of frostbite; a boatload of probable cannibals, suspiciously fat and sheepish in their snug parkas; a scurvy-riddled tailgater in a lifeboat, vestless and begging oranges.”

Rating: 8-9-9-8 Total= 34

#881 Lorry Raja- Madhuri Vijay

#881 Lorry Raja- Madhuri Vijay

Working in the mines is a family affair. Everyone has a job, no matter how young. Guna’s older brother, Siju is lucky that he gets to drive a Lorry owned by the mines. Guna wants to drive a Lorry, too. Everyone else wants him to go back to school. He is a special boy, but they can’t afford to send him.

Back at the mines, he has a crush on his brother’s sometime girlfriend. She represents hope and the world outside the mines. But like everyone else in their world she, like hope, is spoiled. She will have to do things to survive like all the rest of them. The only thing they can count on is inevitability.

“There didn’t seem to be a reason for any of it, a logic that I could see. There was repetition and routine and the inevitability of accident."

Rating: 8-8-8-8 Total= 32

#879 Antonya Nelson- Chapter Two

#879 Antonya Nelson- Chapter Two

Hil is in AA, we see her tell a story at a meeting. The story is about her crazy neighbor that likes to get drunk and strut around the neighborhood naked trying to get herself arrested. Telling stories about other people is probably a deflection about not wanting to tell her own story. But as we find out, she actually is telling her own story.

I’ve never read anything by Nelson before. I liked this. I don’t know if this is her normal tone or if this was just for this story. The dark, heavy sarcasm of Hil is an obvious coping mechanism for such a far gone alcoholic. It’s funny right up until you see that it really shouldn’t be.

Rating: 8-7-8-7 Total= 30

#878 Haight Ashbury- Cookie Mueller

#878 Haight Ashbury- Cookie Mueller

This is an atmosphere memoir type story about San Francisco in the summer of 1967. It has all the drugs and hippie flair you would expect from such a story:

“The air was thick with the smell of marijuana, patchouli oil, jasmine incense and Eucalyptus trees. Black guys were playing congos and flutes; white guys were playing harmonicas and guitars. It was as crowded as Coney Island on the Fourth of July. Hippie Hill was like this every day of the week.”

Although fun for what it is, Mueller clumsily tries to show exactly how cool the scene is while also trying to show her disdain for it, and thus how much cooler she is than the whole thing. She name-drops all the regulars like Joplin, Hendrix, Morrison, Carmichael. Like the others from this collection, I see the value of her writing, clearly an edgy and important voice for her time, but one that loses its importance this far removed from the scene.

Rating: 6-7-7-5 Total= 25

#877 Kafka’s Last Stand- Vagabond

#877 Kafka’s Last Stand- Vagabond

This opens up in New York during a protest on Wall Street. The writer does a great job painting a picture of the intensity and emotions of a real-life street protest. Being at more than my fair share of NYC protests, I immediately recalled all the sounds and smells of such an event.

                     

“The protestors stood their ground, shouting their demands. Some of them shouted because their lack of voice had been building in them, some because their patience had finally run out, some simply because they found that the sound from their throats converted fear into courage.”

Our protagonist was beaten within inches of her life and woken up inside a hospital after three days, only to find she was arrested and facing three years in jail. In the story’s reality, the seventh version of the Patriot ACT she was:

“…charged with 680 counts of seditious conspiracy to overthrow legitimate business interests.”

Without her consent or input, the court appointed lawyer took a plea deal and she is sent to prison and a life of prison-sponsored slave labor. There is a lot in this that is outright hilarious, like calling the prison: Sunny Day Prison, or the punishment program Corrective Retail Operation Confinement (CROC). The latter is a program where those that protest against capitalism are required to work retail jobs to rehabilitate their wayward minds.

Like I said there is a lot of hilarity in this, but then there is a lot of outright terror in them as well. As much satire that is in here, there is an equal amount of truth. These programs and laws, and punishments aren’t all that far off from what happens now in our criminal justice system. Protecting commerce over human rights is nothing new of course. When the world equates capitalism with democracy, being against harmful commerce becomes treason.

Notable Passage: “As long as you could find a way to laugh at the madness, they couldn’t reach you. And if they couldn’t reach you, then they couldn’t beat you.”

Rating: 7-8-8-8 Total= 31

#876 Train- Alice Munro

#876 Train- Alice Munro

Wow, seems like ages when we last read an Alice Munro Story. She is always a joy to come back to, one of the legends of the short story genre. It helps keep in perspective the few hundred other others read for this blog. This story settles in to Munro’s slow fluidity right away.

                       

Jackson is a man coming home from the war (WWII?) and finding himself a little lost. Instead of returning to his life, he jumps off the train, literally, and decides to start new. When he comes across a lonely woman living in near squalor next to a Mennonite community, he decides to stick around. For many years they live as non-intimate life partners, co-habbitating for mutual benefit.

“He had emerged as just one of those loners who may have got themselves in too deep some way or another but have not been guilty of breaking any laws.”

It was the perfect situation. He could live a bare-bones life, un-stressful and unashamed and never have to come into contact with his past mistakes and hurt. He didn’t expect to become old their, but life moves on.

“It made him realize how he must have aged and changed over the years, and how the person who had jumped off the train, that skinny nerve-racked soldier, would not be recognizable in the man he was now.”

When the woman became ill, he brought her to a hospital and left to, once again, run from responsibility and attachment. This is not a “new start” story, it’s about escapism and denial.

Rating: 9-8-8-8 Total= 33