#92 Two Brothers- Brian Evenson

#92 Two Brothers- Brian Evenson

Daddy Norton has fallen and broken his leg. He refuses to let his sons leave the house for help. He believes: “God has foreseen how we must proceed.” That’s the jumping off premise of this O Henry Award Prize Story. Can faith alone heal all?

While Aurel, Theron, and Mama look on in worry and doubt, “…before Daddy Norton’s pure spiritual eye, celestial messengers [cleansed] the wound with God’s Holy love.” It appears Theron is fed-up with the self-proclaimed prophet and his martyr act. He makes a series of callous remarks:  “Tell daddy to ask God what time lunch is served.”

Daddy Norton’s delirium causes him to attempt to cut his own leg off before falling back into darkness. Theron puts his father out of his misery while his mother also dies of starvation and neglect. It appears that God did not provide.

The children, scarred from this experience as well, it is assumed by the crazy upbringing being sons of a living prophet. They go feral in their empty house, naked, demented and occasionally fall into metaphysical hallucinations. They eschew outside influence, hunt their own food but hold the locked room of their dead father as something sacred.

This is pure parable and extremely well done. I wish I had a better grasp of the religious symbolism here to fully understand the references.

Rating: 9-8-9-9 Total=35

#91 A Scandal in Bohemia- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

#91 A Scandal in Bohemia- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Yes, this is about Sherlock Holmes, and why not? He was “the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen…” The man who “loathed every form of society with his whole bohemian soul…buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition.” Who wouldn’t want to read a story about Sherlock Holmes?

As with most of the Holmes stories, this one is narrated by his assistant Dr. Watson. This has all the telltale markings of a good Sherlock Holmes mystery, all the intrigue, scandal, blackmail, plot twists, and of course the secret identities that he assumes:

“It was not merely that Holmes changed his costume. His expression, him manner, his very soul seemed to vary with every fresh part he assumes. The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoned, when he became a specialist in crime.”

The King of Bohemia has had a lurid affair with a woman below his station, Irene Adler. She threatens to make public the affair with proof of a photograph. Retrieving that evidence is Holmes mission. A fantastic series of pranks, and deductive tricks ensues.  In the end, the King is safe from humiliation, but Holmes is bested by the equal mind of Irene. Fun!

Notable Passage: “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.”

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

#90 The Queen Of Puerto Rico- Joe Frank

#90 The Queen Of Puerto Rico- Joe Frank

Nick travels with his family to St. Thomas for the summer. He’s seventeen, “too old for the other children and too young to feel comfortable with the adults.” Spending most of his time at the hotel bar and the beach, he spies a woman in pink. He falls in lust and follows her around the island never getting his nerve to speak with her.

He meets a man on his last night that tell him that the woman in pink is a washed up prostitute and takes him for a ride in his motor boat. He is taken advantage of by this man and becomes the target of his unwanted affection. While back home, he gets phone calls, letters and free plane tickets back to St. Thomas from this creepy man.

This is a story about longing, and like most longing its skin deep and self-centered. There is no noir here, no dark mystery deep within the characters, there is just  superficiality. The woman sent to him from a mutual friend, the legless woman with too much makeup, probably the pink woman or a surrogate sent by the old man, is a lesson in superficiality.

These Joe Frank stories in this collection have some entertainment value, and I enjoy reading them, just like I would enjoy sitting on the beach with a pina colada staring at the woman in pink, but like Nick’s story, nothing substantial will come of it.

Rating: 7-6-7-6 Total= 26

#89 Two Boys- Lorrie Moore

#89 Two Boys- Lorrie Moore

Mary is enjoying her young single life. For the first time, she has two boyfriends. Number One is good-looking, funny, and married with two kids. Number Two is brooding, warm, and a little intense.

“Alone Numbers One and Two were missing parts.” She fantasizes about having a Number Three, perfect and there when the first two aren’t enough. This goes fine for a while, but she has predictable problems balancing her desires and her emotions.

“Her heart was big and bursting. Though her brain was drying and subdividing like a cauliflower.”

She reacts in odd ways like painting her entire apartment white, and throwing out all the furniture, "she needed plans.” So, she takes a random trip to Canada and writes to both suitors when she will be back. Number Two is at the station waiting. She is grateful and disappointed as she always seems to be about Two. Number One is glib about not being available and seems to be leaning back towards going back to his wife and family.

She has not found happiness, has stressful dreams and imagines herself as a young girl waiting for her boyfriends, who are either dead, or hanging there as slabs of meat.

Notable Passage: “You choose love like a belief, a faith, a place, a box for one’s heart to knock against like a spook in the house.”

Rating: 8-7-9-7 Total= 31

#88 The Child Who Favored Daughter- Alice Walker

#88 The Child Who Favored Daughter- Alice Walker

This heartbreaking tale is one of sin, betrayal, forbidden love. The kind of love that drove his beloved sister to madness, he sees now in his own daughter.

“His love for her had turned into a dull ache of constant loathing, and he dreamed vague fearful dreams of a cruel revenge on the white lover who shamed them all.”

“If he cannot frighten her into chastity with his voice he will threaten her with the gun.”

“In a world where innocence and guilt became further complicated by color and race, he felt hesitant and weary of living as though all the world were out to trick him.”

Madness has gripped all of them, just one generation away from servitude, they struggle with innocence, family, and obligation, but they fail in all: “Stumbling weakly towards the house through the shadows of the trees, he tries to look up beseechingly to the stars, but the sky is full of clouds…”

In a way, failure is its own form of failure: “resignation is a kind of dying.”

Notable Passage: “The heat from the sun is oppressively hot but she dos not feel its heat as much as its warmth, for there is a cold spot underneath the hot skin of her back that encloses her heart and reaches chilled arms around the bottom cages of her ribs.”

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