#671 Nobody Said Anything- Raymond Carver

#671 Nobody Said Anything- Raymond Carver

This is a story about adolescence. A young teenager, or almost that old, wakes up to his parents fighting; they do that a lot these days. He tries to get his younger brother to wake up and make them feel guilty about fighting but he is asleep. The fighting subsides and the day is about to start but he doesn’t want to go to school. He is at that age where boyhood is ending and everything starts to change, what can he do to stop it. Why not go fishing?

The attachment to fishing is what reminds him of boyhood. As he starts to fantasize about girls, not sure exactly what that’s all about, and he understands that his parents are probably on their way to a separation, all he wants is one more day by the water, with no more than a canteen full of water and a fish tale for the ages.

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

#670 Jellyfish- Danielle Evans

#670 Jellyfish- Danielle Evans

The roof is caving in. For William this is literally what is happening in his life. For his daughter Eva, it was symbolic of the state of her life. This is a Father/Daughter story. A few days after Williams apartment was condemned and lost forever, he was on his way to meet Eva for a celebratory lunch. She was running late having woken up in her ex-boyfriends bed, his new girlfriend out of town.

There is a loneliness throughout this story. We see normal parent-child sentiments like this: “Sometimes he thought her whole life was an elaborate series of barricades against him.”

And more vulnerable realizations that make life seem cold and disconnected: “There were moments when you new things about what was inside of people you didn’t want to, knew how deeply they could disappoint you.”

Each character in the story has their own disappointments, has hurt someone close to them, and doesn’t know how to make themselves happy. There is love here, but not any self-love. 

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

#669 Acrobatique- John Keene

#669 Acrobatique- John Keene

Reading a short story about a trapeze artist, you immediately think of Kafka. Whether this is an homage or merely a wink at the old master is of no matter, the seed is planted in your mind. Like Kafka’s artist, the acrobat here is tragic performer, trapped in her own success. She feels the glamour of attention and accolades from great composers, statesmen, and painters—but she also feels keenly the seedy stares and gropings of drunken stalkers. Her fear is not of falling from her high-wire act but of losing the freedom of the act itself.

“How am I to exceed every limit placed on me unless I place it there, because that is what I think of when I think of freedom, that I have gathered around me people who understand how to translate fear into possibility, who have no wings but fly beyond the most fantastical vision of the clouds, who face, death daily back out into the waiting room, and I am one of them.”

Great writing.

Rating: 10-8-9-8 Total= 35

#668 Bird Whistle- Fatima Shaik

#668 Bird Whistle- Fatima Shaik

This could be a beautiful New Orleans Love story, or this story could be a love letter to New Orleans—like most of the stories in this collection, What Went Missing and What Got Found. A recent Widower, a local neighborhood doctor, deals with life without his wife. The neighborhood is changing and he tries his best to hold onto what he remembers of the good times.

Once a day at dawn, a woman comes by his fence and whistles to the birds. She was his wife’s lifelong friend and she is mute, perhaps by choice. They would spend morning coffee together. The whistling would get louder the more days that would pass without seeing each other. Now she still comes by, and he waves out the window.

In the refrigerator are a few meals left that his wife had prepared. He has been eating them slowly, but now with only one left, he is afraid to heat it up. Because of his reputation, and a chance earlier meeting outside, three local criminals come barging in one evening, one with a bullet wound. They demand medical attention and food. One of them heats up his wife’s last dish over the Doctor’s resistance. Before the meal is consumed, the warbling of the bird whistler comes ringing through the house, scaring off the hoodlums. He brings the meal out to her, and she in turn feeds it to the birds.

I don’t know exactly how she does it, but like Anthony Doerr stories read earlier, Shaik infuses a subtle but permeating spirit in her stories, making them float in your consciousness slowing everything down and blowing a warm New Orleans breeze over everything she writes. Stunning!

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

#667 The Archer- Robert Stone

#667 The Archer- Robert Stone

This is like a Hunter S. Thompson story, but without the humor and with a lot of anger. Duffy is an art teacher who has a small mythology around campus. It is rumored that he once threatened to kill his wife and her lover with a crossbow that he pointed out them while wearing nothing but his boxer shorts and a tweed hat. He didn’t kill them, or lose his job, but he lost his wife and his house.

Now he was on the college lecture circuit. Most of the story revolves around one of these college trips to Pahoochee Sate University. He gets drunk, belligerent, arrested and can’t leave town until his case is cleared. I can believe that this guy—an asshole—did all that. But why do I care. There is no humor, or irony, or even a subtle wink to the reader that any of this is in good fun or for a reason—even tragic self-destruction would be fine. He’s just an asshole! The literary world is full of them—just like they are full of stories that want to sound like Hunter S. Thompson. 

I wasn’t as impressed with this collection as I wanted to be. It’s ok, maybe a 6 out of 10 compared to the other collections I’ve read for this project. It’s weird though, I’ve picked up a few collections that claim to be “raw” or “edgy” stuff, with tough-talking, hard-drinking characters, like Stone, Denis Johnson, and Craig Davidson—usually a genre I really enjoy—all three have fallen short of the mark.

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

#666 The Man From Out of Town- Sheila Heti

#666 The Man From Out of Town- Sheila Heti

At first this seems like an amusing innocuous boy-meets-girl tale, but of course it isn’t. Heti has a comic eye about  romantic interactions and the pretense that comes with them.

“It was her high ass that mysteriously lifted itself up to her waist that caused the man to see what a nice girl she was, and how pleasant she would be to spend good times with.”

Or:

“There were simple ways some woman had of telling a good guy from a bad, and her way was as stupid as any.”

Pick your adage for this one: A good man is hard to find—Don’t trust strangers—Men are dogs—A bird in the hand…etc. Who knows, this is what it is. Like all of these little vignettes, they usually leave you with an impression, this one leaves you with a slap in the face.

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

#665 You Take the High Road- Frank Herbert

#665 You Take the High Road- Frank Herbert

Lewis Orne was on his first assignment re-discovering and re-educating a far off planet. He is to make sure there are no dangerous signs of a warring society. Without any evidence of war or armies or aggression he presses the panic button and reinforcements show up, but with no evidence, he is on the hot seat. He can’t prove that these people are violent, but he has a hunch, and has to prove that to the investigator from I-A. The I-A officer is skeptical, assuming that Orne is nothing more than a mere nervous first timer. When he asks what gave him a bad feeling, Orne responds:

“They have no spirit, no bounce. No humor. The atmosphere around this place is perpetual seriousness bordering on gloom.”

After investigating himself, the I-A team finds subtle but sure-fire evidence of military presence and Orne is validated and promoted. Would these people even know what peace was without war?

“The most important point on the aggression index: peaceful people don’t even discuss peace. They don’t even think about it. The only way you develop more than a casual interest in peace is through the violent contrast of war.”

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

#664 The Creation- Maxine Clair

#664 The Creation- Maxine Clair

An outsider should be able to recognize another outsider. Irene has befriended the only girl from Redtown that goes to her school. The community of Redtown is a kind of closed-off religious sect. Irene likes that her new friend is a bit different and she likes that she is from the same town as the strange but intriguing boy that comes by the house each weekend selling chickens.

She is learning a poem called The Creation for an oration competition. She goes to her new friends house in Redtown to practice saying aloud to strangers but they scoff and drive her away, all except Dell, the boy she likes. He is a great storyteller, and they share a lot of time together while she is preparing for the competition. Things happen that force her friend from the school and Dell from coming by anymore, and suddenly her connections to Redtown are all but cut.

She can now focus on the competition, but something bad happens. She learns that the competition is not desegregated yet, and she will not be allowed to compete. It was a the mistake of her teacher—the only white teacher in school—to not take that into consideration. She has never been an outsider, how would she know?

Notable Passage: “We can use the same words you use, but it doesn’t mean we speak the same language.”

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

#663 It’s Life and Death at the Slush Puppie Open- Toure

#663 It’s Life and Death at the Slush Puppie Open- Toure

This is a political science lesson played out on the tennis court. Two teenagers who attend the same junior tennis academy in Harlem are playing each other at the Slush Puppie Open tennis tournament. The favorite is Kwame Christmas:

“Kwame had been abandoned by his dad, and for him, tennis was about roaring back at the world. It allowed him to exercise the anger inside him through using his arm like a bullwhip, swinging hard and free.”

The director of the academy liked Kwame because he played like Malcolm X would have played:

“Attack the weak…We’re not here to have points given, we’re here to take them! To attack those whiteboys with a fury! You must play this game the way Malcolm would’ve played it! He would’ve hit the ball hard because he was all about acquiring power for the black community! He would’ve always held serve because holding serve is like controlling your community.”

Kwame was entangled in a heated contest with a lesser player from the academy, Paul Flambe. The director did not like Paul’s game, and considered it akin to Booker T. Washington:

“Paul talked proper. He used big words and pronounced everything crisply…[he] could sit on the baseline for hours and retrieve  almost any ball…he never felt the need to crush his opponents, never wanted to attack the net, never wanted to end points suddenly.”

This practice of wearing his opponents down aggravated the director, calling it “Uncle Tom Tennis.” But this day it won, he beat the top ranked Kwame. And that was sin enough to get all the other boys at the academy to see him as an enemy. They attacked him for beating their Malcolm X:

“Paul struggled the whole time. Especially when we slipped the noose over his neck. We held him up the way people hold people in victory. Then we dropped him.”

Toure is not subtle nor does he parse his symbolism. But the stories are so well done and packed in a clever delivery system that somehow makes the lesson entertaining. However the lessons are harsh and grave and need to be discussed. Why do we treat those political opinions slightly different than ours to larger penalties than those diametrically opposed? Those who agree with the teachings of Malcolm X should not be the enemy with those who agree with the teachings of Booker T. Washington. Not at all!

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

#662 House Heart- Amelia Gray

#662 House Heart- Amelia Gray

A couple engage in a human pseudo-sexual experiment. They hire a prostitute who they convince to squeeze inside a vent in their home. The prostitute is skeptical but reluctantly agrees after being promised more money. Inside the walls they built a series of ducts where the prostitute can move around, kind of like a human-sized series of gerbil tubes. She is now trapped and frightened, but the couple tells her it is of her own choosing:

“I pointed out that she had made all the choices that brought her to that moment, that if she had been forced to do anything in her life, it had not been in our presence and we would not be held accountable.”

Days pass, with each person falling into a routine; the prostitute in the ducts, the woman in her house and the man going to work each day. Each with their own limitations, boundaries, and freedoms. It is in how we embrace these things that we label them, and if we don’t see them as boundaries, are they?

“…it was only natural that the girl had become comfortable with her surroundings. He reminded me that I had not challenged the boundaries of my own life in many years, nor had he challenged his own. Even though we feel quite free, he remarked, every life has its surrounding wall.”

This is a very dark, and provocative story, intriguing and scary. Thinking about walls and enclosures we build for ourselves, I am reminded of Hamlet’s statement: 

“I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.” 

You may argue that Hamlet’s prison was a mental one, and one of his own doing; the woman here is being physically imprisoned by others. True, but we all make choices that allow others to effect us. If we look at it with a wider angle lens, those lines seem smaller and less distinct. If we all live in a prison of ANY making, by denying it as a prison, or refusing to see it as a limitation, we take that power away. I guess the lesson here is: Either challenge the walls around you, or learn to live within them.

The more I think about this story, the more I love it. 

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

#661 Felina- Guadalupe Nettel

#661 Felina- Guadalupe Nettel

Animals can be just as caring as humans, and often can take the place of humans for roles of companionship and friendship. A doctoral student once had roommates, but now she had two cats, a male and a female. They quickly take up the place in her life that her roommates and casual romantic partners one held. 

Both the female cat and her got pregnant at he same time, and comforted each other during the process. When she lost her pregnancy (an act of fate), the cat’s childbirth was kind of a spiritual surrogacy for her own. There was a lot of surrogacy in this story; people or animals taking the place of others. There was also a lot about fate and choice.

“A team of scientists I met a few months later at Princeton University claim that if they put all our genetic information, education, and the most significant events in our lives into a computer and give us a hundred different dilemmas and make us choose for each one, the machine would figure out our responses before we could think of them. In reality—so they say—we don’t make decisions. All of our choices are predetermined.”

Whether fate or not, her decision to go to Princeton was made, or at least helped along by someone else. And when it was made for sure, the cats made their own choice too.

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

#660 The End of the Whole Mess- Stephen King

#660 The End of the Whole Mess- Stephen King

Geniuses don’t always have the best ideas, in fact they often are some of the most shortsighted. This is a story about a genius that tried to rid the word of aggression and violence and failed miserably. Right off, the opening line is pretty gripping:

“I want to tell you about the end of war, the degradation of mankind, and the death of the messiah.”

The whole story is told as a last statement written by the genius's brother as he has about two hours left to live. He tells about the uncommon brains of his little brother, Bobby:

“Guys like my brother come along only once every two or three generations, I think—guys like Leonardo da Vinci, Newton, Einstein, maybe Edison. They all seem to have one thing in common: they are like huge compasses which swing aimlessly for a long time, searching for some true north and then homing on it with fearful force. Before that happens such guys are apt to get up to some weird shit.”

By the time Bobby was old enough to grasp his own mental abilities and look at the self-destructive tendencies of the human race, he set out to try and fix it. He found towns in Texas like Waco, had an uncommon rate of violent crimes. He studied these populations and discovered something in the water that made them more peaceful and docile.

He thought that if he could get the entire planet to ingest this chemical, he could rid the world of suffering. He set about synthesizing this water into a sort of peace-moonshine, and released in in the atmosphere via a Krakatoa-sized eruption. It worked at first but ultimately was a monumental disaster. Human kind was not meant to be docile, at least not like this. At least the planet was saved:

“We killed all the plants, but at least we saved the greenhouse.”

Notable Passage: “You got a kid trying to pass a mental kidney stone…I could prescribe something for his headaches, but I think the drug he really needs is a typewriter.”

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

#659 The Street Ends at the Cemetery- Clark Howard

#659 The Street Ends at the Cemetery- Clark Howard

This is another excellent selection from the 2013 Best American Mystery Stories collection. $1.2 million was taken from a Modesto bank. The robber was caught with the stolen getaway car but the money was not recovered. Now In jail there is a plan to find out where it is. Here are the characters:

-Cory- A low level prison guard that befriends the thief’s girlfriend and accomplice. 

-Billie-Sue- The girlfriend, waiting patiently for Lester’s release.

-Lester- The thief himself still in prison.

-Hardesty- A former FBI agent still claiming his credentials.

-Duffy- A nervous prison warden who thinks Hardesty is for real.

Who ends up with the money? We have a sting operation, a planned prison break, quickly shifting allegiances, and a few hastily procured weapons—all sorts of fun!

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

#658 His Mother’s House- Edward P. Jones

#658 His Mother’s House- Edward P. Jones

This is a family story, a tragic one. Joyce has moved into her new house bought by her son, Santiago. He wants her to have all new furniture but she likes the old stuff, her stuff. She lives with Ricky, a common-law husband that works for Santiago. Santiago is a gangster. 

The trouble starts when Humphrey owes money to Santiago. He is like a second son to the family and Joyce has know him his whole life, but money is money. Family should be more important, but blood is thicker than water and Humphrey isn’t really Santiago’s brother, so his leniency will only go so far.

When the conflict ends in tragedy, all Joyce wants to do is create a safe haven for her son, That’s what mother’s do. “And outside that house there was a very cruel world and she did not like to think that her child was out there without a place to come to.”

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

#657 Feral- Julia Elliott

#657 Feral- Julia Elliott

This is a wildly original story. The world is in an extreme downturn and the excesses of society are starting to turn to our downfall. With cities in ruins and the overall health of the human race in question, dogs have become more wild and taken to their more natural, wild instincts. 

“The American pet craze had led to an epidemic of abandoned dogs. A rash of dog-fighting rings had flared in rural ghettos. And the repressed wolfish instincts of domestic dogs had been coaxed out, had transmogrified into weird new breeds.”

Everyone is in alert and in the local school, the children are obsessed with the dogs—except the religious ones who consider the phenomenon akin to a  biblical plague. The teacher of the school has an odd connection to the packs of dogs. Her heightened olfactory perceptions she believes are strangely tuned to the dogs, and she can sense when they are coming. She claims that woman may have a more advanced vomeronasal organ that can utilize these senses better.

This was a fun one to read, imaginative and a bit exciting. In a pop-culture world where there are whole genres focused on post-apocalyptic zombie attacks, it would seem obvious in a case of societal breakdown, packs of wild dogs would be likely.

Notable Passage: “The world is a tempestuous tangle of significant odors…and humans are blunt-nosed fools.” 

Rating: 8-9-9-7 Total= 33

#656 Red-Winged Blackbirds- J. California Cooper

#656 Red-Winged Blackbirds- J. California Cooper

This is a story about taking control of your own life. A girl is orphaned when her mother and father are killed by the KKK. Her father had just stood up to the father of the boy that tried to rape the girl, and that set their fate.

She didn’t let anyone take her, but lived under the school until she was old enough to get a job. After working for a diner she made herself a proprietor of a boarding house. She had what she wanted, all except a child. She wouldn’t have a child of her own, so she set out to find one that needed a mother.

“I was scared for her, but I was proud of her! I like people who take control over their own life! Don’t just let life happen to them…but fight back to have some say-so of their own, bout their own life.”

If we can choose our own paths, and choose our own jobs, why not choose our own families? The most powerful thing we can do is make our own decisions. 

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

#655 Neck- Roald Dahl

#655 Neck- Roald Dahl

Sir Basil Turton has just inherited his father’s estate, title and control of a large newspaper and media empire. He is forty and single and the sudden target of every single socialite in England. He is a recluse and manages to avoid entanglement for a while, but eventually gets snagged by a foreign beauty who quickly takes her new position and uses it to its full potential.

Years later, both Lady and Sir Turton are rarely seen in public, but a gossip columnist has secured a weekend invitation to their country estate. What follows is a scene of English High societal weekending. Drinks, gossip, a little intrigue and meddling butler. Normally I would not enjoy a short story about English high society (just not my thing) but Dahl has a way of telling a good yarn. The buffoonery is pretty spectacular.

Rating: 7-6-8-7 Total= 27

#654 Counting Months- David Leavitt

#654 Counting Months- David Leavitt

Mrs. Harrington is in a doctor’s office waiting room, lost in her thoughts until she sees today is December 17^th. Why should she remember that date? 

“Then, through some untraceable process, that date—December 17^th—infected her with all the horror of memory and death. For today was the day she was supposed to be dead by.”

She was suffering from cancer. It was terminal, but luckily she had survived quite well past the initial date she expected to live. She goes home after her appointment to her children. She worries about them, about what they will do when she dies. But she is proud of them and happy for the time she has left with her family.

Notable Passage: “You had to lie to live through death, or else you die through what’s left of your life.”

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

#653 Signifier- Susan Steinberg

#653 Signifier- Susan Steinberg

Another selection from Spectacle. It’s getting to feel like all these stories are going to go the same way. This one is about desire:

“Desire is desire for recognition, and I was controlled by desire just like you.”

“And desire is about the long-tailed birds as long tailed birds. Not as metaphor. Not as signifier. Not as anything other than what they are but long-tailed birds switching from branch to branch.”

Like the others, this is an internal running dialogue by a woman going through her unsatisfying life. As things happen she relates it to her childhood. A style at first that looked like a good attempt at tapping in to the modern mind, is now starting to look overly shallow and judgmental. The whole: I’m fucked up-the world is fucked up-that’s the way it is—just feels like I’m sitting next to someone at a bar that’s sharing their miserable life with me after I said "how’s it going.” At first I’ll listen, maybe find some of it interesting, but pretty quickly I’m going to just tune it out.

I’ve been here before with other authors. Once you get a bad taste, it’s hard to get it out. I see phrases like this one: 

“There was what one could call a clearing, and there was trees. There was what one could call a waterfall.”

OK, what else would you call the waterfall? It’s a waterfall, call it that, there doesn’t have to be irony in everything. Like the person sitting next to you at the bar, once you tune out, you should switch seats if you want to enjoy the rest of the evening. I’m going to put this collection down for a while. I may revisit later in the project, but for now, I’ll give someone else a chance to bend my ear.

Rating: 7-5-5-5 Total= 22

#652 The Third Dumpster- Gish Jen

#652 The Third Dumpster- Gish Jen

I’m not entirely sure what to make of this story. On the surface it’s a story about family. But there seems to be a lot of other stuff rumbling beneath the surface that kind of pops up briefly but never really develops.

Goodwin and Morehouse are brothers. They are both unemployed contractors and they buy a house to move their aging parents closer. The parents were born in China but have lived here for fifty years, never fully assimilating to American culture and sometimes opening despising it as garbage.

The house they purchased is an asbestos filled dump that they bought cheap and are fixing up. Not having enough money to do it properly they cut all sorts of corners like illegally dumping their demolition waste and hiring illegal Spanish speaking workers (who in turn mock them somewhat openly. In the end nobody is really happy. The brothers never get their parent’s approval, the parents have to put up with the “garbage dump” Americans and the workers barely get enough pay to survive.

So, I say again, I’m not sure what to make of this story. If there is a moral or clear point of view, I missed it.

Rating: 7-7-5-5 Total= 24

#651 The Lawsuit- Naguib Mahfouz

#651 The Lawsuit- Naguib Mahfouz

Money can tear a family apart, it can cause jealousy, hatred, and ruin. If you make your life about getting and keeping wealth, when its gone what else do you have? A man takes a second wife; his family worries that she will take all their inheritance. They fret and complain but the woman stays. The rift and jealousy causes the eldest son to be arrested and die, the mother and father also die. 

As they feared the young wife has taken all their father’s money. The youngest son, the narrator, has been the most level headed about the situation and has always taken care of himself. Now years later someone has robbed the young wife of the money she had stolen. Broke, and destitute she sues the son for more money.

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

#650 Bobcat- Rebecca Lee

#650 Bobcat- Rebecca Lee

The narrator is a woman, late in pregnancy. Her and her husband are having a dinner party. She is surrounded by people in the writing world, authors and literary agents. She feels both inadequate and superior to her guests, judging them at times harshly. She knows that the husband of one the couples invited has been having an affair with her colleague. 

An author at the party has written a recent acclaimed memoir accounting her harrowing experience of losing her arm to a bobcat while being stuck in the mountains. She wonders if the story is made up and later hears the author say that the bobcat is both real and a metaphor. The bobcat is the things we fear ready to pull us apart when we are at our weakest. It is just like the story about woman creating civilization to create safety around themselves after pregnancy, again at their most vulnerable. 

This dinner party is that type of nesting or civilization building for the narrator. But she spends too much time worrying about her guests and their problems, not seeing the bobcat lurking in her shadows waiting to attack her at her most vulnerable moment.

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

#649 In the Winter Sky- Jon McGregor

#649 In the Winter Sky- Jon McGregor 

There is a lot of love in this story, love of family, love of the land. It’s authentic and earthy. It is also tragic like love often is, but this not a love story. This is a story about truth and life, living with your mistakes; it is about inevitability.

George kissed a girl for the first time when he was seventeen, the same night that he killed a drunken stranger with his car. The kiss led to his marriage and the killing led to a secret he would keep for many years. Both were defining moments, both were inevitable and both represent the land and the earth. 

Things happen differently in the farmland. You marry the girl nest door, you work your family’s land when your father gets too old, you live with your mistakes the best you can. Macgregor writes this atmosphere so well; The slowness of a farm, the stillness of time and the deep meaning in small gestures.

“She has seen the faint smiles and nods which indicate that he is well pleased. She hopes that George has noticed; She suspects that he has not.”

The pastoral setting somehow smoothes over the tragedy as a mere fact of life. The whole story is interwoven with the poetry of Joanne. It’s from her notebooks and either unfinished, unpolished or re-written so we see the changes. Like the story itself the poetry is both delicate and deeply rooted, and at times stunningly emotional.

There is no history here.

No dramatic finds of Saxon villages.

No burial mounds of hidden treasures.

Only the rusted anchors our ploughs drag up,

Left when these fields were the sea.

Notable Passage: “The death he had made in the hole he had made in the earth.”

Rating: 9-9-10-9 Total= 37

#648 The Lesson- Toni Cade Bambara

#648 The Lesson- Toni Cade Bambara

“Back in the days when everyone was old and stupid or young and foolish me and Sugar were the only ones just right, this lady moved on our block with nappy hair proper speech and no makeup. And quite naturally we laughed at her.”

That woman ended up being Miss Moore, a strange woman to the neighborhood but trusted enough to be allowed to teach the children some things. On a field trip they all went to F.A.O. Schwartz to marvel at the toys and gawk at the outrageous prices. She let the children imagine how long it would take to save that much money, how the price of one toy could feed a family in their community for a year, etc.

It was a duel lesson of how the world is not fair and how we are a product of our environment. Seeing these things could help us change these things, or at least not fall victim to the effects they have over us.

“Where we are is who we are…but it doesn’t always have to be that way.”

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

#647 Everyone Here Has a Gun- Lucas Southworth

#647 Everyone Here Has a Gun- Lucas Southworth

This is the opening and title story to Lucas Southworth’s 2013 collection. The book won the Grace Paley Prize for short fiction.

This is a parable about guns. A pair, a man and a woman sit together in a room full of people, each with a gun. There will be shooting, and there will be defending from the shooting which of course means more shooting. I will be careful in assuming this story is anti-gun, because often, the same arguments made in opposition can be used in support.

 Lets just day, this is a scary place to be, and we should all do our best not to end up in this room.

Notable Passage: “In the confusion, we’ve all drawn our guns. I have mind aimed at you. You have yours aimed at me.”

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

#646 Wrestling Night- Bryn Chancellor

#646 Wrestling Night- Bryn Chancellor

Kindred spirits find each other. Walt is an outcast at school, bullied for being different, quiet, weak, gay. Like many outcasts, all he wants to do is hide. He finds two ways to hide. One day while being chased by a gang of rock throwers, he is defended by Mrs. T, a teacher. Every day after school he goes to her house and does his homework in a safe comfortable environment while she putters in the garden.

She herself is too trusting. Her husband has been cheating on her with a friend of hers. On the day she finds out, she kicks him out of the house and dyes her hair. She too wants to hide behind something. She wanders the neighborhood and ends up inside the local coliseum where “Wresting Night” is taking place. An amateur match is under way with the crowd favorite The Butcher winning. She is overtaken with anger and she charges into ring looking to beat up on the winner. It turns out that he is just somebody else hiding behind a mask.

In this story, the masks and costumes represent freedom for strength. When we aren’t burdened by the labels others give us, we can find out who we really are, even if for only brief periods of time.

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

#645 Black Angel- Walidah Imarisha

#645 Black Angel- Walidah Imarisha

This is another great selection from Octavia’s Brood. A. is a fallen angel, sent to earth as punishment for questioning God letting genocide occur. She has been left with only one wing and she walks the streets of Harlem rarely getting involved in the world around her. She is afraid of more pain, the pain of helping, of associating with a race with so much anger.

“One of the many reasons she avoided interacting with humans when at all possible. She’d already suffered enough pain for them.”

She cant always ignore the violence around her however. She came across a Palestinian man being nearly beaten to death and she intervened. Tamee was the man she saved, and in doing so she used her powerful “voice” that helped rid the perpetrators of their anger and will to so evil. Not wanting to represent the angel that she used to be, she was cold and brusque toward Tamee. That made her all the more real.

“Tamee was taken back by her callousness. She didn’t sound mush like an angel. For one thing, he had not imagined that an angel would curse. He thought there would be more love and compassion. She wasn’t really at all how he imagined an angel. She was a million times better.”

This scene set about a realization in her that maybe she should get involved. Her responsibility was to help. She was in fact an Angel of Mercy, but she could also be an Angel of Vengeance. The world doesn’t need angels it needs courage and strength. If you can help, it is your responsibility to do so.

“A. had seen so many horrific scenes since she had been cast out, so mush violence and hatred and ugliness. She had almost forgotten what else she saw when she gazed down from Heaven; self-sacrifice, immense acts of love. Bravery beyond words.” 

Notable Passage: "The only way I’m like Lucifer is we were both cast out. Him into hell. Me into Harlem…same difference.”

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

#644 The Usher- Felisberto Hernandez

#644 The Usher- Felisberto Hernandez

An usher at an old-fashioned movie theatre believes himself to be special, something better than a mere usher. He “knew how to bow at once with respect and contempt.” While he went about working and exploring the city, he developed a delusion. Most of us may believe we have an inner-light, but his was an actual light that could make him see things in the dark.

Like many working class people who believe themselves to be better than their station, this usher focused his “power” on a wealthy man and his estate. He convinced the estate’s butler to allow him inside at night to illuminate things in the dark, believing that the wealthy man’s things to be more interesting than his own.

What makes this a fable is the lesson that it teaches. Maybe this usher did have an inner-light that made his special. Who’s to say? When he used it to for diligence and being good at his job, he was making his way to bigger and better things. He was making money and enjoying himself. When he fell to delusions of grandeur, worrying not about himself but coveting what others had, he lost his job and his enjoyment of life.

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