#770 Reeling for the Empire- Karen Russell

#770 Reeling for the Empire- Karen Russell

What I have found over the last few years during this project, is that the entire genre of short story writing is filled with the fingerprints of Kafka, from mere references, respectful homages or outright theft of ideas. So far no other story has come close to reminding me of the depth and soul of Kafka until now. I am left breathless by this story. Where Kafka often goes dark and desolate, Russell infuses hope and human endurance. Imagine metamorphosis meets fight club!

We are in the Japanese Empire mid nineteenth century. Someone has found a tea that can turn a human into a silkworm hybrid. Girls are “recruited” to drink this tea and work in silk factories where they spend their lives in the same room spinning out the best silk the world has ever seen. But they will never see the outside again, never see their families, never truly be human.

We see these Kaiko-Joko (silkworm workers) in a place they have dubbed “Nowhere Mill”. One girl, for the first ever, has drunk the tea voluntarily and a little too fast. She survived the metamorphosis, but remains a little off inside. Eventually this boldness has made her aware of the potential of her new form, or the ability to turn bad to good, weakness to power. She will not be marginalized again, and neither will her co-workers.

“For the past several months, every time I’ve reminisced about the Agent coming to Gifu, bile has risen in my throat. It seems to be composed of every bitterness: grief and rage, the acid regrets. But then, in the middle of my weaving, obeying a queer impulse, I spit some onto my hands. This bile glues my fingers to my fur. Another of nature’s wonders. So even the nausea of regret can be converted to use.”

Wow…I love this!!!

Notable Passage: “These wings of ours are invisible to you.”

Rating: 10-10-10-10 Total= 40

#759 The One That Did Not Get Away- Fatima Shaik

#759 The One That Did Not Get Away- Fatima Shaik

A young woman is in love. Like most girls in love for the first time, she is taken with everything about this young man, even his scar.

“My boyfriend is the first man I have met who has mystery. He has excitement, a past I don’t know and a scar as proof of his difference… It is my privilege now to have finally met a man with a scar. Not a deep scar, a fine scar. One that gives character to him and excitement to me—the plain, the sheltered, and the unadventured. ”

She has heard too many love stories, read too many romance novels. Her view of this affair is all flowery and dramatic. He tells her that his scar comes from a fishing accident with a hook, but she doesn’t believe that’s true. She thinks he is being coy. She is young and naïve.

“Sixteen years I have already spent without harpooning romance, without waltzing desire, without fulfillment. I have never been fought over under the Dueling Oaks. I have never been kissed on the levee and then held hands in suicidal duet and plunged into the river. I have never lived in a bordello or run with pirates, even though this is New Orleans.” 

She will learn the true nature of life and love soon enough.

Rating: 8-7-7-6 Total= 28

#757 Magic Man- Sheila Kohler

#757 Magic Man- Sheila Kohler

A very somber story. There is nothing more despicable than a child abduction, or the mistreatment of a child. Yet, many cultures have scary stories about just that topic. Fairy tales often have monsters taking young children, sometimes even eating them. They are told, of course, to teach children to be wary of strangers and mind their surroundings, but they are still scary stories.

S.P. is an eight-year-old girl with a troubled over-protective mother. They are visiting her mother’s family in South Africa with her two younger sister’s in tow. She is the oldest and often must take care of her mother’s depression and do things well beyond what an eight year old should have to concern herself with. Her mother clutches her close, physically like a security blanket. S.P escapes to go use the bathroom and comes across a man she believes is the Magic Man from the stories she has been told. Her inability to separate reality from fairy tale, the fault of her mother’s smothering parenting may get her into the type of trouble she has been protected from.

Taken literally, the story is a straight up abduction story, scary and unpleasant. Symbolically the abduction could be seen as the mother’s depression stealing her child away from her or S.P. caught between wanting to help her mother and wanting to escape and be a child—and being frightened of that freedom when she gets it.

The storyline and characters are a loose homage of the German myth Erlkonig (the Earl King) that was a child snatcher with magical powers. Wrapping an abduction story with mythology cuts some of the sharpness of such a distasteful topic. 

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

#737 Legends of the White Lady- Mia Alvar

#737 Legends of the White Lady- Mia Alvar

The Legend of the White Lady is a story told in the streets of Manila. The details change, but something awful happened to a white woman during WWII and now she haunts all men around a few blocks downtown. Alice is visiting Manila for the second time and has heard this story from a cab driver that has one of the ladies white lace gloves as “proof” she exists.

Alice is here for work. She is a late twenties model with an all-American look. She cant get much work in NY because she isn't exotic enough, and lately she hasn’t been looking for work because she is depressed. Her best friend, also a model died of a stroke and Alice is feeling her mortality. She is lonely and more than ever feels like a freak, being taller than most people around her, and like the ghost, her white image stands out.

Her model gig has some snags after she is attacked late at night by a senile woman who mistakes her for the ghost (or something like that), and as she mulls retirement, wonders what else she has to offer the world.

Rating: 8-7-7-7 Total= 29

#704 Cold- John Keene

#704 Cold- John Keene

You have to know a little about American Music history to get the full meaning of this one. This piece is a tribute to a great and tragic musician around the turn of the 19^th century. 

Bob Cole was a composer/songwriter/entertainer with much success, having written and published a couple hundred songs. His music was known to the general public but outside of the black communities he would not have been as recognized physically or by name as well as he should have been. He and his partners, brothers James Weldon and J. Rosamund Johnson wrote minstrel music, some of which has been used to perpetuate negative black stereotypes. After gaining success and creating his own black production company, he used his position to change the entertainment industry, trying to stop the use these stereotypes, of black characters as villainous or aggressive. 

He killed himself in 1911 while staying at a Hotel in the Catskills. The “Cold” of the title represents the creek water in which he drowned himself. This story is the last day of his life. We see his embarrassment at having to change rooms because a white guest requests it, we see his mental anguish at realizing some negative messages in his own songs, and we see the torture of his songs haunting him as they fight to be let loose.

“Then somewhere along the way after the first terrible blues struck you tried to hum a new tune, conjure one, you thought it was just exhaustion, your mind too tired to refresh itself as it always had, that’s why the old ones wouldn’t go away.”

Fantastic story. I love both the music and the history here, and the artistic manner in which Keene delivers a lecture on both.  It’s a shame that Cole’s memory is lost to most people, but I am grateful to Keene for reviving the name in such a meaningful way.  Knowing the reference helps, but even without it, this story stands as masterful.

Notable Passage: “I’m coming until the music breaks into a screaming silence that if you could describe it in a word would be no word or no note or sound at all but fleetingly, fleetingly cold…”

Rating: 10-10-10-10 Total= 40

#575 Miss Lora- Junot Diaz

#575 Miss Lora- Junot Diaz

Miss Lora was his neighbor; single, older and was shaped like a body builder. She wasn’t attractive to the other boys in the neighborhood, but to him, a boy in adolescence with a girlfriend that was shy about giving him physical attention, she was the perfect target for affection.

“You were at the age where you could fall in love with a girl over an expression, a gesture. That’s what happened with your girlfriend Paloma—she stooped to pick up her purse, and your heart flew out of you….That’s what happened with Miss Lora too.”

The inappropriate Mrs. Robinson relationship they had lasted until he went off to college. She was the one he remembered and associated with his teenage years, the one that taught him how to be a man. He knew it was wrong but it was his secret, and having that secret was important. 

Word of the day: Fulgurate- To destroy using electricity.

Notable Passage: "Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn’t mean you don’t have them.”

Rating: 9-7-7-7 Total= 30

#561 Underfed- Susan Steinberg

#561 Underfed- Susan Steinberg

Have you ever sat next to somebody at a bar who has just taken a hug line of cocaine? That is what this story is like. It is a non-stop ramble from the onset. In fact the whole story is a single paragraph with no periods. The statements are separated by colons and semicolons. The story even begins and ends with a semicolon making is seem like we entered somewhere in the middle of this coke-fueled diatribe, this late-night drunken confessional. Each statement begins with “I,” “I’d,” or “I’m” adding to the self-centered tone.

The narrative bounces from subject to subject focusing on her family or the man she took home from the bar. As many substance-filled blatherings, it ranges from pure rationalization to oddly poignant and honest, like this passage about her not wanting to go hiking with a boyfriend:

“I wasn’t adverse to dirt; I was adverse to something else: like the pressure of having to pretend I cared about a bird, a stone, a star: like the pressure of having to be so fucking nice: like the pressure of having to be a certain type of guy when I was just a certain type of girl;”

I appreciate the style here. I don’t want to call it fresh or original because she isn’t the first author to write a story like this, but as someone who reads short stories everyday, it is refreshing to be out of the box a little—and it works. I don’t find it different for the sake of being different. Two stories in and I am enjoying this collection (spectacle).

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

#556 Work Denis Johnson

#556 Work Denis Johnson

  

OK, let’s see: we have an abusive drug addict beating up his abusing drug addict girlfriend; we have an alcoholic so riddled with the DTs that he needs help lifting the day’s first shot up to his mouth; we have robbery, fights, and crooked card games…must be another Denis Johnson short story.

This is a world filled with misery, regret, shame, and little chance of redemption, unless your definition of redemption is a few ill-gotten dollars so you can partake in more bad decisions that lead to misery, regret and shame.

This story isn’t as fun as it sounds.

Notable Passage: “To me you don’t make no more noise than a fart in a paper bag.”

Rating: 7-6-5-5- Total= 23

#554 The Token Superhero- David F. Walker

#554 The Token Superhero- David F. Walker

Parents often have contradictory hopes for their children. On one hand they want them to be safe, normal, comfortable, but they also want them to be extraordinary, better than they were and someone that helps make the world better. Kelvin Ramey is in such a quandary. His son Alonzo is a superhero, and as much as Kelvin wants to be proud of him, he is worried that he will be in danger.

“Daddy K, are you really going to be angry that our son was blessed with wings and has decided to use them to fly?”

A genetic anomaly called K-24 has given superpower mutation to a select few in society. Most of the power are called “Standards” like extreme strength, speed, and bullet proof skin. But some have developed even more anomalous mutations that are uncontrollable. Kelvin is happy that Alonzo is a “Standard” because he believes that the world would look unkindly to a black man with super-human abilities. As it is, he is unhappy that his son will be part of a force called the Teen Justice Force, worried that Alonzo will become a tool for “The Man.”

Exploitation of Alonzo manifested itself first in his name, The Black Fist. He was also the only member of the force not to get his own comic series or an action figure.

“At the age of twenty, Alonzo was already bitter, cynical, and tired of being a token. He tried to reinvent himself, with a new costume and a new name, but none of it took. Twice he’d been attacked by other superheroes who’d mistaken him for a supervillain, and then there was the time he’d been shot by cops. Fortunately the bullets had bounced off.”

There is some pretty good satire here. And like most super hero stories there is a few good lessons to learn about symbolism, identity, and materialism…and that’s one to grow on.

Rating: 7-7-8-8 Total= 32

#553 The Stray Horse- Felisberto Hernandez

#553 The Stray Horse- Felisberto Hernandez

Now this is writing! In a period where some writers try too hard to make virtue out of the mundane, it is refreshing to read a story like this. Language can be an art-form in itself without having to be lofty. It can uplift without looking down its nose. Too many writers try too hard to be clever, mistaking word play for depth. Hernandez has no such affliction.

What better place to showcase beautiful language than through the imagination of a child. The boy in this story remembers fondly his childhood piano lessons. Like many lonely children, he sees the world around him and bends the things he doesn’t understand to a creative world he can. Inanimate objects suddenly have personality and life:

“Although the secrets of grown-ups could be glimpsed in their actions and conversations, I had my favorite way of uncovering them—when the people were absent and I could find their traces in something they had left behind…the moment it was left unattended I could begin to trace that person’s secrets in it.”

He idolizes and falls in love with Celine, his music teacher. Such a crush can have a lasting effect on a person:

“Celine would make me spread my hands on the keys and, with her fingers, she bend mine back, as if she were teaching a spider to move its legs. She was more closely in touch with my hands than I was myself. When she made them crawl like slow crabs over white and black pebbles, suddenly the hands came upon sounds that cast a spell on everything in the circle of lamplight, giving each object a new charm.”

Story aside, there are myriad phrases and paragraphs in this story that ooze with emotion and make the reader stop, breath deep, take a moment, and go back to read them again, only this time slower and with more time to savor:

“Someone dumps chunks of the past at the feet of the imagination, who hastily sorts through them in the swaying light of a small lantern it holds over them, mixing earth and shadows. Suddenly it drops the lantern on the soil of memory and the light goes out. Then once more the imagination is an insect flying over forgotten distances to land again on the edge of the present.”

Notable Passage (as if there were only one): “What never went quite to sleep was the specter of magnolias. Although I had left behind the trees where they lived, they were with me, hidden in the back of my eyes, and suddenly I felt their presence, light as a breath somewhere blown into the air by thought, scattered around the room, and blending into the furniture.”

Rating: 10-10-10-10 Total= 40

#552 Neighbors- Raymond Carver

#552 Neighbors- Raymond Carver

Can you really trust your neighbors? Bill and Arlene Miller live across from the Stones. The Stones seem to live a much more exciting life than they do. They’re always going on vacations or taking work trips. When they do, they ask the millers to watch their apartment and feed their cat.

They do watch the apartment and feed the cat, but they also drink their booze, steal pills from the medicine cabinet, try on their clothes, and rifle through drawers looking for dirty pictures. This peek intro somebody else’s life excites them, and puts a bit of an adventurous spark into their otherwise dull lives. Living vicariously through somebody else’ existence may be fun, but be careful you don’t find yourselves locked out.

Rating: 7-7-7-6 Total= 27

#551 Snakes- Danielle Evans

#551 Snakes- Danielle Evans

A rift in a family can be absolutely toxic for children. Tara is eight, her mother and grandmother do not get along, but this summer as her parents are on a research trip to Brazil, Tara will stay with her grandmother. Also staying there is her cousin, Allison, who’s parents also don’t get along with grandma.

The summer goes along with the cousins attached at the hip. Grandmother proves to be miserable, and judgmental and even when well-intentioned, does nothing but inflame and belittle Tara. Disaster strikes when Allison pushed Tara into the lake, and she barely makes it out alive. Her parents come back and for the next 15 years, none of them speak to either the grandmother, Allison, or Allison’s parents.

We learn later that before that summer, Allison was having “problems” and sent to grandmothers semi-permanently. The lake incident was just a manifestation of the girls trying to get back to their parents. But the situation and the split pretty much ruined Allison’s life. The isolation from the family drama may have helped Tara, but the details of the grandmother’s psychosis (or whatever you want to call it) are frightening. The story, Tara’s survival, and the revealing truth make for one hell of a story.

“My recovery turned my scars into part favors. If you had seen them—the dot on my leg, the line on my elbow, the water in my eyes when I talked about Allison—then you had something about me to take with you. If you knew what was behind it, you had even more.”

I was feeling towards the middle of this story that is trended a bit too long, like there might have been too much “filler”, but I was proven wrong. The story developed exceptionally well and unfolded perfectly by the end.

Notable Passage: “We are safe, with our families, until we are not.”

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

#549 Life is For the Living- Fatima Shaik

#549 Life is For the Living- Fatima Shaik

Thomas was a New Orleans eccentric, a creole original. His co-workers thought him odd, but they liked him because of it. Good and bad, they always appreciated the break from normalcy in their lives.

“Thomas thought he was special since he got their attention most of the time. He could not distinguish their negative feelings from positive ones…And in fact, they did not dislike him. Observing his clothes, dramatic conversations, and peculiar perspective was a high point in the day for many.”

Thomas thought of himself as: “Simply a man like other men seeking the meaning of existence.”

His most eccentric habit was taking his lunch break by sitting in the graveyard. He sat in the hot sun, listening for the spirits to talk to him. Even though he was the most expressive person most people had ever met, he was still looking for his own voice. He wanted to teach, to impart, to contribute like all the great men and woman of the past; like the spirits in the graveyard.

His wackiest idea was to create a Po Boy sandwich that stretched from New Orleans to Los Angeles. By his calculations, that would be big enough to feed all the Creole citizens of this world. It would be a symbol of racial unity.

“The point of this sandwich was to make a statement about America and race. The U.S. was completely wrong in the decades when it tried to force blacks and whites together. True integration could be demonstrated by the Creoles showing the unity of all races and human appetites when holding the French bread, Spanish onions, Italian Salami, German mustard, Creole tomatoes and Louisiana hot sauce.”

He tried hard to understand his co-workers, but fell short of being one of them. He was set aside by his own doing, trying to find his voice. There is nothing more frustrating, more oppressive, more heartbreaking than trying to speak and failing. Even for a New Orleans original.

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

#548 Charm City- Robert Stone

#548 Charm City- Robert Stone

Frank Bower falls for a con. He is attending a music recital alone at the museum, and lets himself be seduced by a mysterious woman. He is married but likes the taste of a little adventure and drives her across the bay to his second house. All the while, the woman remains vague and intriguing. When they get to the house, she feigns remorse and asks to be driven home.

We see later that the meeting was not a random occurrence, but a set up, and she had successfully used his vanity to scope out his house for a robbery.

Notable Passage: “Everybody loves you when you’re somebody else.”

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

#501 Man From The South- Roald Dahl

#501 Man From The South- Roald Dahl

This is a classic story. If it seems familiar it’s because it has been adapted into a couple of movies. Most famous of these adaptations was the 1960 short by Alfred Hitchcock starring Steve McQueen and Peter Lorre; and the most recent was Quentin Tarantino’s Four Rooms.

The plot is simple but brilliant. A young man is lured into a high stakes wager against a wealthy stranger. The man bets the youngster that he cannot successfully ignite his lighter ten times consecutively. The man bets his expensive green Cadillac.  The younger man not having that kind of loot to put up, agrees that if he loses, he will allow the rich man to chop off the pinky of his left hand.

They retire to the hotel and make arrangements for the wager to commence. The younger man, with his left hand tied down, strikes the lighter once, twice…seven, eight times. As the tension builds, a woman bursts into the room to put a stop to the bet. The car is hers, she has already won it from the man…she has won all of his wealth in fact. When she picks up the keys to the car, we see that she only has one finger left.

Clearly this is a monster of a story. We see its fingerprints in so many places. Besides the many film and television references I also remember a short story by Stephen King that paid homage to Man From the South. The finger cutting wasn’t a straight wager but an incentive to quit smoking, and the woman at the end revealing her lost fingers was a previous client. The story was called Quitter’s Inc.

Rating: 10-10-10-10 Total=40

#417 The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury- Neil Gaiman

#417 The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury- Neil Gaiman

This is a brilliant story.  Neil Gaiman can’t remember the name of a friend of his, presumably Ray Bradbury.

“I am losing words, although I am not losing concepts. I hope that I am not losing concepts. If I am losing concepts, I am not aware of it. If I am losing concepts, how would I know?”

So, this whole thing is mental game trying to get his mind to remember that name. Trying to trick his mind with hints, pictures, anything to open that path. He can remember a lot of other things, almost everything else about him, then why not the name of his friend.

“Icarus! It’s not as if I have forgotten all names. I remember Icarus. He flew too close to the sun. In the stories, though, it’s worth it. Always worth it to have tried, even if you fail, even if you fall like a meteor forever. Better to have flamed in the darkness, to have inspired others, to have lived, than to have sat in the darkness, cursing the people who borrowed, but did not return, your candle.”

The mind is a funny thing. In the introduction, Gaimen says that he wrote this piece and gave it to Bradbury for a ninetieth birthday gift. I’m so glad they decided to share it with us. Reading so many stories, I have come to appreciate truly unique styles an concepts. This is just great!

Rating: 9-10-10-9 Total= 38

#416 Marla- Jerome Charyn

#416 Marla- Jerome Charyn

Marla recently found out her sister, long since removed from her life, was still alive. She had been sent away by her family because of some disturbing tendencies and never spoke of her again. Now with her father dead, she found Irene and has welcomed her back to her family’s 15-room apartment on Central Park West.

As an attorney, Marla has gained a reputation as a viscous opponent, and outside the courtroom, she and her two shadowy body men, she is known as an old-school Bronx enforcer.

“Marla shouldn’t have been so cruel. She lived a monstrous life, shielding murderers and swindlers, defying prosecutors and ripping out the threads of their elaborate tales.”

Now with her sister in her life, and the law practice she has always fought for, she is at the height of her power, but at what cost? She defends the city’s worst criminals, and when one of them has eyes on her sister, perhaps the chickens have come home to roost. It was her after all that kept them out of jail.

“She was the criminal, not Marcellus Bloom. Marla had created the monster, allowed him to flourish. He should have been locked away a long time ago, with Marla in the next cell.”

She also, got her sister out of her institution living. Irene also had criminal tendencies. It’s hard to see who to root for in some of thee stories, and I’m not sure we’re supposed to feel good about any of them. The Mother is shallow, and will think good of anyone as long as they give her presents, Marla is a mob boss type amoral criminal attorney, Irene is a psychopath. I don’t suppose there is any hope for the children if these are the three role models.

What makes for a lousy family sometimes makes for a good story at least.

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

#381 Souvenir- Kurt Vonnegut

#381 Souvenir- Kurt Vonnegut

One of the great things about Vonnegut stories is the simplicity of his form. The first paragraph usually tells you exactly what the story is about. This story is no different:

“Joe Bane was a pawnbroker, a fat, lazy, bald man, whose features seemed pulled to the left by his lifetime of looking at the world through a jeweler’s glass. He was a lonely, untalented man and would not have wanted to go on living had he been prevented from playing every day…the one game he played brilliantly—the acquiring of objects for very little, and the selling of them for a great deal more.”

Another common theme in Vonnegut works is WW II, himself being a veteran and survivor of the Dresden bombing. One day a man walks into Joe’s pawn shop and wants to sell a very expensive watch. Of course, Joe tries to undercut the man. Then we hear an amazing tale about how the watch was acquired in the Sudetenland after the German surrender.

The man walks out after the story, unwilling to be taken advantage of, and Joe, in his greed losses out on a great and historic find. The tale itself was enough for a short story, but putting it in context of a flashback surrounding this war-prize, makes it more interesting, and vintage Vonnegut.

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

#371 The Purple Hat- Eudora Welty

#371 The Purple Hat- Eudora Welty

It’s a rainy day in New Orleans, men sit in a dark bar:

“Beyond the open door the rain fell, the heavy color of the sea, in air where sunlight was still suspended. Its watery reflection lighted the room, as a room might have lighted a mousehole.”

As the slow scene unfolds, a fat man tells a story about the woman in a purple hat. Everyday at five o’clock she can be seen at the Palace of Pleasure, a gambling hall. There she meets a young man and stays till midnight—this has happened everyday for the last thirty years.

The fat man tells his story as the bartender dismally looks on. She is a ghost, the fat man believes, as he himself has seen her murdered twice! When the clock strikes five, a young man listening at the end of the bar takes up and leaves—probably to go search for the lady in the purple hat. “New Orleans…is the birthplace of ready-made victims.”

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