#732 Blues- John Keene

#732 Blues- John Keene

As with all the stories found in John Keene’s excellent collection Counternarratives, "Blues"challenges the reader with an interesting and off-beat format. The narration is fed to us one sentence at a time separated by ellipses. I’m not sure how it effected other readers, but for my experience I found myself speeding up as I read, making the story more and more frantic as I went. This was made even more so on the last page as the sentences gave way to smaller phrases and single words.

This is the world through the eyes of a traveler, a lover of the arts, perhaps an artist him (her) self. The teller of the story jumps from city to city, enjoying the sites and the history as he goes. There is some pretention, at times a lot of it as he references artists and poets often just by first name in a manner than seems more like name dropping than homage.

The last lines mention solitude and the blues, but there is a definite sadness among the excitement felt throughout the running script. 

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

#731 Maurice in New York City- Fatima Shaik

#731 Maurice in New York City- Fatima Shaik

Some people come to New York for new opportunities, some come for the excitement, and some come running from their old lives looking for a place to hide. Maurice wanted a simple life, and for a while in New Orleans he found it. He had a good job and the perfect woman for him. Well, nobody is perfect and desire can leed to jealousy, and jealousy to violence. 

I’ve always felt New York embodies all that you bring to it. If you bring loneliness and despair, that’s what you get, only more of it.

Notable Passage: “Love had all the symptoms of a low grade flu that altered into something life-threatening.” 

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

#730 Things of This World- Randall Kenan

#730 Things of This World- Randall Kenan

Mr. John Edgar Stokes was an old man that lived by himself with his dog. When a stranger passed out in his yard he thought it was a Mexican migrant worker. It turns out, it was an Asian man who says he is visiting someone, although he doesn’t say who. He is weak and needs help. Stokes, although a little leery at first is happy to help this man. He likes the company, and while he has a strange feeling about this man called Chi, he feeds him and houses him and they become friends.

The sons of a rich town leader kills Stokes’ dog. He storms over to their store and shoots their dog in retribution, and eye for an eye. The rules for a poor back man are different around here, so only Stokes is facing any legal trouble. He is taken by the police and awaits trial. The case becomes big news and he becomes the center of the cause. 

He finds pride and purpose just as his life is ending. He feels that if he dies now, he will be happy and content. He will be judged one way or another, so he chooses who will judge him before he dies.

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

#729 The Siege at Whale Cay- Megan Mayhew Bergman

#729 The Siege at Whale Cay- Megan Mayhew Bergman

Whale Cay is a small 850 acre island 150 miles off the coast of Ft. Lauderdale. It is privately owned by a woman named Joe. There are about 200 or so natives still living on the island but Joe is the first and only authority.

“I’m the doctor and the kind and the policeman. I’m the factory boss, the mechanic too. I’m everything here.”

The story takes place during WWII and even though it is dangerous crossing the U-boat infested waters, Joe still entertains guests, mostly rich, important people. Her current girlfriend Georgie was a dancer in Florida and the epitome of cherry pie, just like Joe likes it. Her family has no idea: “…she’s spent the past three months shacked up with a forty-year-old womanizing heiress who stalked around her own private island wearing a machete across her chest.”

When a famous movie starlet comes to visit, Georgie feels threatened and jealous. She knows her place is likely temporary and doesn’t like the added population to her happy refuge. 

“What exhausted Georgie about Joe’s guests is that they were all important. And important people made you feel not normal, but unimportant.”

This island is exactly that, a refuge. It’s a false Utopia and a place to flee reality, your past, and perhaps your sins—at least for a while. But when problems arise that cant be settled by drinking more rum, the happiness of the island is in peril as is Joe’s position of dominance.

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

#728 Operation Haystack- Frank Herbert

#728 Operation Haystack- Frank Herbert

This is another Frank Herbert story about an intergalactic Investigation and Adjustment team. We see some familiar characters like Umbo Stetson, and Lewis Orne. Instead of Orne being on some planetary mission, the story begins with him being transported back to the League Capitol planet or Marak in a life sustaining medical pod. His condition is critical, and it doesn’t look like he is going to make it.

Being mourned for his sacrifice and service, Orne impossibly held onto life. Little by little, he was patched up using “spare parts” and fourteen months later walked out under his own power. He was immediately given a new assignment spying on the High Commander’s family under suspicion for conspiracy of treason. There was a battle being waged between powers, planets, and genders, and with enough Herbert twists and turns to make any Sci-Fi reader satisfied.

Notable Passage: “No political compromise is ever totally right…You keep patching up things that always have flaws in them. That’s how government is.”

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

#727 The Listener- Tove Jansson

#727 The Listener- Tove Jansson

The author eulogizes about her Aunt Gerda, the pillar of her family. She speaks about her life, mostly her later days where she began to lose her mental acuity, and began acting very different from the Aunt she remembered.

“When a person loses what might be called her essence—the expression of her most beautiful quality—it sometimes happens that the alteration widens and deepens and with frightening speed overwhelms her personality."

Once giving with her time and the writer of wonderful letters, Aunt Gerda was now very internal and keeps to herself. Knowing that her life was on the wane, she began a project to keep her mind sharp. She drew her life as a map, with planet like ovals, and satellites of her life, connected by her loves, and losses, her regrets and her family. By he end it is a beautiful creation, but she is afraid it is incomplete and false. She won’t destroy it but writes a note asking for it be burned, unread when she dies. We don’t know if her wish was granted.

In the introduction to one of her short story collections, Jansson writes: “I love the short story—concentrated and united around a single idea. There must be nothing unnecessary in it, one must be able to hold the tale enclosed in one’s hand.”

For this reason, this story is a success. It is a simple story, focused and complete. In style and art, it is wonderful.

Rating: 8-8-10-8 Total= 34

#726 Soul City Gazette Profile: Crash Jenkins, Last of the Chronic Crashers- Toure

#726 Soul City Gazette Profile: Crash Jenkins, Last of the Chronic Crashers- Toure

Many disgruntled workers have said it, or wished it: “I’ll never drag myself out of bed to race to some thankless job to slave under some merciless massa. That’s pain, man. I’d rather get hit by a Mack truck.” Koko Jenkins kept to that thought seriously and became a professional car crash victim. He’s been collecting settlement checks since he was a teenager. Now at forty, he’s the last of he breed. He’s injured, slothful, but at least he isn’t a working stiff.

The way he figures it, life is pain no matter what. But if you can choose a moment of a lot of pain, or a whole life of pain, there’s no choice—get hit, collect money, than sit in from of the TV the rest of the year.

Notable Passage: “Plan when and how you’re going to take your pain and you’re winning.”

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

#725 People of the Bay- Amelia Gray

#725 People of the Bay- Amelia Gray

Who’s more foolish, the fool or the fool that follows him? If you need inspiration go to a poet, if you need a house built to sustain an earthquake, go to a house builder. Perhaps it’s easy to follow the person loud enough for everyone to hear, or the first one that has an idea, but it’s likely that person is a fool. 

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

#724 The Snake From Beijing- Guadalupe Nettel

#724 The Snake From Beijing- Guadalupe Nettel

“Movements in the lives of human beings...begin below the surface, and therefore their origins are difficult to place in time.”

Michael’s family has a very interesting lineage. His father is a Chinese man raised by French parents and his mother is Dutch—they live in Paris. Until recently, his father was never in touch with his Chinese past. However, after a long trip, he returned a changed man. He is reserved and cold, and removes himself from his family life. He spans his time in a makeshift pagoda and bought Chinese texts and a poisonous snake.

The snake represents Michael's father, and he later finds out exactly why and how much. This story is more about infidelity than about culture, but the two are interwoven very well. This is the last of Nettel’s collection, Natural Histories. I look forward to reading more of her fiction.

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

#723 The Night Flier- Stephen King

#723 The Night Flier- Stephen King

Richard Dees was a reporter, or at least he thought himself one. He wrote sensationalized tabloid stories for a print rag called the Inside View.

“There were many things the Inside View was not—literate, for one, overconcerned with such minor matters as accuracy and ethics for another—but one thing was undeniable: it was exquisitely attuned to horrors.”

To give you an idea about their level of credibility, their latest cover was about intelligent alien penguins poised to take over the planet! He and his editor however have been tracking what they believe to be a great “legitimate” story. One that would give him fame and respect.  He thinks there is a serial killer on the loose, someone only he knows about. He calls it the Night Flier because the murders all happened at small airports. The twist, what makes this fodder for both the tabloid press—and worthy of a Stephen King anthology—is that the killer may be a vampire.

He tracks the killer down, while himself flying his own plane through a thunderstorm, to a landing strip that has lost power and confronts the man/vampire. At first he wants the story, then all he needs is a photograph, now all he wants is to get out of there alive.

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

#722 The Book Signing- Pete Hamill

#722 The Book Signing- Pete Hamill

Pete Hamill is a New York writer. He has written for every major NY newspaper, several NY based weeklies and of course his novels and memoirs outline a New York life in a way that has made the name Pete Hamill synonymous with the great five boroughs. He is the perfect writer to open this collection of stories, Brooklyn Noir.

Buddy Carmody is also a writer. He moved out of Brooklyn and headed west in 1957, the same year and direction as the Brooklyn Dodgers. He needed to leave, to free himself, to allow himself the things that would make him a writer. Now, forty years and seventeen successful novels later, he returns for his first book reading in his home town.

Before the reading, he walks his old neighborhood, now clean and gentrified. His memories make him uneasy and a run in with the brother of the woman he left behind reveals some unpleasant truths. His past, one he didn’t know existed, now comes back to haunt him. His freedom came at a cost, and the bill is due.

Notable Passage: “On this high slope the harbor wind turned snow into iron.”

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

#721 A Day for Saying Goodbye- Naguib Mahfouz

#721 A Day for Saying Goodbye- Naguib Mahfouz

Mustafa Ibrahim is forty-five, with two grown children and wife. He his profoundly unhappy. His marriage is beyond joyless, it has become unbearable. They both know this, but the anger flows and it cannot be stopped. The children were put in the middle and that is what he regrets the most.

“How greatly we harmed them. The love between us had suffered hour by hour and day by day till it breathed its last. It had been choked in the hubbub of continuing arguments, quarrels and exchanges of abuse.”

Life was a battle, and:  “Vengeance became mingled with the cost of living.”

He has done a desperate act and ponders doing another. As he walks the city during the day, he says goodbye to people he knows and the sites of his home city. Soon, one way or another, he will be leaving this world.

I absolutely love this style of writing. Mahfouz’ purpose of language and delicate character development is unparalleled. The plot isn’t spelled out, nor is it unraveled. It just appears at the exact right pace like seeing a landscape come into view while riding in a  car.

Notable Passage: “If the inclination of the inner self were to assume concrete form, crimes and actions of heroism would be rife.”

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

#720 Slatland- Rebecca Lee

#720 Slatland- Rebecca Lee

At age eleven, Margit was having depression issues but she didn’t know where they came from. Her parents sent her to see a professor of child psychology for a therapy session. This very peculiar man, knew exactly what the problem was and taught her how to literally rise above herself and allow her to see things more clearly.

“For every situation there is a proper distance. Growing up is just a matter of gaining perspective. Sometimes you just need to jump up for a moment, a foot above the earth. And sometimes you need to jump very far.” 

For twenty years, this technique she learned in one session proved to work wonders on any snag in her life. The larger the problem the higher she had to lift up to gain the proper perspective. One day she came across a problem she thought was too big to fix using her special ability. She had to go back for a little fine-tuning.

Such a unique story!

Notable Passage: “Oddly enough, the signs indicating that a man is in love with another woman are often similar to the signs of an immigrant in a new country, his heart torn in two.”

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

#719 If It Keeps on Raining- Jon McGregor

#719 If It Keeps on Raining- Jon McGregor

A Man wakes and looks out his door. He watches the river flow by. His manner is slow, contemplative, un-urgent.

“He stands there each morning and he looks at the river, the fields, the sky. He tries to estimate what the weather will do for the rest of the day. He makes some decisions about the work he is going to do on the treehouse or the raft. He thinks about making breakfast. He thinks about going to look for more wood.”

You get the feeling that he once lived a fast-paced life and reacted badly to it. He has taken refuge in this cabin by the river. Now he prepares for the coming flood. He doesn’t now when it will happen, but he knows it will. He will save himself, and whatever innocence he can along with him.

“But there will be time when it doesn’t pass. When the clouds gather and don’t pass away, and rain pours endlessly upon the earth. And some will be prepared and some will not.”

Beautiful, biblical, poetic.

Notable Passage: “Some people deserve it, what will come.”

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

#718 Wahala- Chinelo Okparanta

#718 Wahala- Chinelo Okparanta

The difference between pleasure and pain is sometimes in the eye of the beholder, or the perspective of who is watching. Chibuzo and his wife Ezinne have had trouble with having a child. It has been continually stressful as the failure to get pregnant becomes more a public embarrassment. It is known in the village that negative energy coming from the community can effect having a child or not.

“Surely, the rumors said, apathy had a way of creating negative energy, and this negative energy had the ability to reinforce itself in the barrenness of one’s womb.”

They visit a medicine woman and she confirms that Ezinne is “Cursed by the enchanted” and needs to be cleansed before she can conceive a child. After the procedure, they have a dinner for neighbors to give her a positive surrounding before trying again. Of course, there is something actually medically wrong with Ezinne and despite the wishes and hopes of everyone around them, her pain and inability to get pregnant will not be changed by mere ritual.

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

#717 Lincoln’s Face: A Resurrection- Lucas Southworth

#717 Lincoln’s Face: A Resurrection- Lucas Southworth

Denise is a world class makeup artist, a barrier breaking black woman in a tough industry. Her ex-lover, the man who helped break up her marriage, comes back into her life when he lands the role of a lifetime playing Abraham Lincoln is a new bio-pic. She is chosen to turn him into the 16^th president. As she spends weeks building this image, memories of her past linger, and thoughts about Lincoln makes her wonder what film can do to history:

“Makeup artists, cameras of directors, and brains and bodies of actors were always resurrecting the icons of human history. But when filtered through the subjectivity of so many living people, it was inevitable that the deceased’s life would be altered. Unlike scholars, who used sources and documents to back up their claims, a filmmaker could manipulate history on a whim. It led Denise to question how many of her beliefs were based upon the impulses of others.”

Some things shouldn’t be altered and some people don’t deserve second chances.

Notable Passage: “On the face of America…happiness makes no sense.”

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

#716 Water at Midnight- Bryn Chancellor

#716 Water at Midnight- Bryn Chancellor

Sunny is seventeen, an only child of divorced parents. Because of some undisclosed “trouble” she got into at her mother’s, she is spending this year with her father in Arizona. It is summer, and sweltering. She doesn’t know anybody and the loneliness has gotten to her. She watches a thirty-two year old irrigation man working in her yard at night. On occasion she secretly goes out to met him, and offer him iced-t. Her flirtations are overt and unreturned, although the man does like the attention.

The seduction goes unfulfilled, and this Lolita story ends before it goes anywhere. The tension is broken and Sunny gores back to being a teenager, and William goes back to being the neighborhood waterman.

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

#715 Who Wants to Shoot an Elephant- Wells Tower

#715 Who Wants to Shoot an Elephant- Wells Tower

This is not a piece of fiction but a magazine assignment. A writer tags along on one of the last legal elephant hunts in Botswana. It’s taken more than 700 stories for me to finally include something non-fiction (sorry, my own fault). Good story telling is good story telling, whether completely true, based on true events or entirely made up. Some non-fiction is just a record of facts and dates, but stories like this are how important issues are brought to many people. 

This topic of big-game trophy hunting is likely one that elicits strong opinions, and recently contentious, hyperbolic arguments, especially of the anonymous message board variety. Wells Tower does a good job trying to be fair, while not hiding his own distaste for the joy of killing—although I’m sure there are many hunters who will find this to be biased against their hobby. He refrains from some of the gonzo-esque mood that these stories sometimes rely on, making the hunting party out to be clownish and inept. 

Agree with trophy hunting as a valid sport or think of it as a shameful ego-boost for people with too much money, this is a good piece of writing.

Notable Passages: “Wild dogs, among the world most effective predators, are the biker gangs of Africa.”

“The elephants obliviousness is exasperating. It seizes my lungs with a breathless frustration to watch the elephant foolishly grubbing salad while we stand within a stone’s throw, plotting the proper method to put a bullet in its brain.”

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

#714 Gospel- Edward P. Jones

#714 Gospel- Edward P. Jones

Sundays mean church and church means Gospel music. Vivien is the leader of the Gospelteers, a local Gospel group that makes the rounds to different services every Sunday. The four woman are very good and in demand. But just because you sing on Sunday in church doesn’t mean you’re a saint. Vivien and her friend Diane and several of the congregation we see are sinners through and through. But there’s nothing wrong with singing and praying to save your soul.

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

#713 Feeling for Life- J. California Cooper

#713 Feeling for Life- J. California Cooper

Christine is a poor black blind girl. Her mother is old and losing her health. Both her sister and brother are selfish and no help. When the mother died, her siblings fought over whatever little money her mother had. When that was gone, the brother left and the sister abandoned her on the steps of the church. Her needs are simple but life is hard. How will she get by?

“I feared and wanted the love of a man. But, I thought, who would ever want me? I knew I would want death when my mother died. Yet! How could I know what I wanted? I had never SEEN anything! Never done anything! Never had anything.”

This story is a touching one of survival, faith and family, with a heavy theme of self-reliance. This is the final story on this collection, Some Soul to Keep.

Notable Passage: “You set your life by what you don’t have as much as what you do have.”

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

#712 The Wilds- Julia Elliott

#712 The Wilds- Julia Elliott

The imagination of children is wonderful. A Family has moved in to the long-vacant bug infested house on the block. They are the Wilds. Like their name, their reputation lends itself to exaggerated rumors. The kids, all boys, run wild around the yard, dig tunnels under the house and one of them wears a wolf mask during every full moon.

The girl next door, and only child, spies on them from her hiding place and imagines how depraved they are. Once she is caught and brought to their clubhouse. As neighbors, their activities are their own. But at school, their oddness is also taken note of. They are certainly a unique pack of boys. Children will be children and it’s all in good fun. Or is it?

This is the title story of Elliott’s collection. It’s good fun, imaginative, and the right level of off-beat.

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

#711 William and Mary- Roald Dahl

#711 William and Mary- Roald Dahl

William has died leaving his wife behind. A week after his death she receives a letter from his attorney that he had been instructed to give her upon his death. The letter describes his decision to allow his brain to be used for an experiment. It was to be removed from his body and kept alive using a heart pump and other artificial devices.

“The big difference, of course, would be that we have severed every single nerve that leads into it…and this means that your thinking would no longer be influenced by your senses. You’d be living in an extraordinarily pure and detached world. Nothing to bother you at all, not even pain…No worries or fears or pains or hunger or thirst.”

He would be left with the brain in a basin of fluid and one eye so he could see the world, but nothing else. Mary was shocked and disgusted. But she went to see the brain after reading about it. After getting over the initial grotesque nature of the situation, she was overwhelmed with a renewed sense of affection for her husband. All the things she despised about him were now taken away, leaving her free to do all the things he wouldn’t allow.

“No arguments and criticisms, she thought, no constant admonitions, no rules to obey…no pair of cold disapproving eyes.”

But with one eye, and no way of communicating, she could also make him see whatever she wished, for as long as the brain could stay alive. Revenge is sweet.

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

#710 Aliens- David Leavitt

#710 Aliens- David Leavitt

Imagine an argument between husband and wife. He argues that seat belts are more dangerous than they are safe. She asserts the opposite. They drive off in anger, she in a safety belt and him driving free to jostle about. Predictably their argument gets an immediate test as they get into an awful accident. She wins. Her husband is crippled and is now living in an assisted nursing home trying to recover some of his mental and physical faculties.

Back home, she has to deal with this new reality. Change can be jarring, especially for a child already going through adolescence. Their daughter Nina is now claiming to her family and to her school that she is an alien brought to earth to study humans. She has rejected her reality and crated a new origin story. A very creative way to disown yourself of your family. The oldest son, is also creating his own independence by raising his own college tuition. 

This is a family full of selfishness, ironically it’s a trait that connects all humans.

Notable Passage: “ It’s one thing to look ugly, another to act it.” 

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

#709 The Miracle Worker- Mia Alvar

#709 The Miracle Worker- Mia Alvar

Sally is a Filipina woman living in Bahrain with her husband. He works in the oil fields and she is a special education teacher. His new student is a special needs child with extreme physical deformity and mentally under developed. Her name is Amoush and she has been brought to Sally by a very rich mother seeking a miracle. She needs Sally to be Annie Sullivan to her daughters Helen Keller.

While development does happen slightly and slowly as Sally knew it would, no miracles will happen despite the lavish gifts given and the hope rendered. The mother shows a level of human frailty while also deluding herself. Sally is caught  between resenting the riches of this woman and feeling sympathy for her humanity. 

Out in the world, there is class warfare being waged. Despite its prevalence and relevance to her life, it always seems to stop at the door of her teaching Amoush. Whether she is ever able to live in this world with any degree of normalcy or not, she is a miracle, as are all children

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

#708 Small and Bright- Autumn Brown

#708 Small and Bright- Autumn Brown

Like most readers, I love language. Used as mere communication, it becomes utilitarian and replaceable. Used as art, it can inspire, excite, uplift. I am thankful to the authors of the Octavia’s Brood socially conscious sci-fi collection. Nowhere else have I found consistent respect for the power of words. I offer as example, the wonderful opening of Autumn Brown’s story:

“I dream again that I am lost again in the tunnels of our cities. The fire extinguished, but still a cool blue glow lights my way. The faster I run, the higher I ascend in the city toward the surface, and the light becomes brighter and burns my skin. I fill with knowing, knowing the place where I am going. More and more light fills each room. My skin burns and then becomes darker somehow. And then I am there at the door in the surface, and if I climb through, death and freedom await me. I stand there looking up. Up.”

A prisoner awakes from a subterranean cell and gets ready to surface for her punishment. This community under the earth is called “The people who are buried.” Nobody who has surfaced has ever returned. She will be separated from her family, her child, and most probably her life. Surfacing into exile is her punishment.

Before surfacing her mother tells her about blasphemous rumors of survivors still on the surface. They are people that stayed above during earth demise. They are thought to have not lost their color. In this rumor her mother instills hope—hope for her daughter’s life, and hope for the human race. 

“My people have never seen the stars. But we sing of them as though they are the last thing we see before sleeping, and the first thing upon waking.”

She is lifted to the unknown, into a world once belonging to all humans. Is there anything left? Can she survive? Can she return to help the people that have exiled her? Can her sins be redeemed?

Notable Passage: “Tears start streaming from my eyes before I even realize I am on the verge of crying. Something inside of me begins to collapse, and I claw for the edge of my sanity.”

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

#707 The Woman Who Looked Like Me- Felisberto Hernandez

#707 The Woman Who Looked Like Me- Felisberto Hernandez

This is another beautiful story by Hernandez. A boy thinks he may have been a horse in a former life, or an alternative life. He remembers himself as a horse searching for freedom. Maybe it’s a horse that imagines himself as a boy. Together they are an orphan, fighting for a loving home, one without beatings or hard back-breaking work. The horse would find a new owner, but at the first sign of trouble would jump the fence and run until he hurt.

“The pain made me pay attention to reach separate part of my body as it tried to keep pace with the rest. Now and then, out of step with my other movements, a chill ran down my back, but the next moment it was a shiver of anticipation of the thought of being alone later on, quietly going over my new store of memories.”

He walks into a school during a play and finds an adoring crowd. He settles in with a teacher that kind of looks like him, and he thinks he has found his home. But horses aren’t free around here and one of his owners comes to find him. If you keep running, you will always be alone.

Notable Passage: “I set out slowly because I was tired. But my freedom made me fearless.”

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

#706 Sixty Acres- Raymond Carver

#706 Sixty Acres- Raymond Carver

This is a little slice of Americana type of story, taking place somewhere in a frontier setting on reservation and allocated to Native Americans. Lee Waite sits on his sixty acre plot and gets a familiar phone call from a neighbor. Somebody has been illegally shooting on his land probably poaching ducks. He doesn’t much care about it, and is more annoyed at the bother of the phone call than the trespassers, but he drags himself outside and goes to check it out.

He catches two kids with killed ducks, his ducks. Recently other neighbors have shot and killed poachers on their and, and it seems to be their prerogative. Lee doesn’t want to shoot anybody, and lets the kids go after he takes the ducks. He ponders his past and the future of his land. It’s a slow and sleepy kind of pace around here. As long as everyone knows their place, there should be no more problems.

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

#705 Wherever You Go, There You Are- Danielle Evans

#705 Wherever You Go, There You Are- Danielle Evans

This is an intertwined and somewhat scattered family, but nothing much out of the ordinary. A man is in the hospital dying, his daughter Chrissy is fourteen and needs someone to watch over her while he is attended to. The task falls to her cousin, just past college age.  She has planned an overnight trip to watch het ex-boyfriend’s band play and meet his new fiancé. She takes Chrissy along for the ride.

There is a bit of a coming-of-age thing in this story, but i’m not sure if we’re supposed to follow Chrissy’s story or her cousin’s. Chrissy’s dad dies while theye are out of town, and while she is flown back, her cousin stays and contemplates making bad decisions with her ex. The whole story seems to be a long way to get to the last sentence:

“I should take you to your hotel’—but he doesn’t start the engine and he doesn’t get out of the car, and we just sit there like that, waiting for something better to present itself.”

There is a theme about letting go, or moving on, or self-reliance, but none of it really grabs me much. I have a similar feel about most of Evans’ collection. These are just not focused enough for short stories. Either expand them or tighten them, but for me, they fall too much in the middle.

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

#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

#703 Driving Without a License- Fatima Shaik

#703 Driving Without a License- Fatima Shaik

A dead beat mother abandons her daughter, even after the child was already abandoned by her father. She just leaves her in a cradle on the steps of someone she knows, and takes off out of town. She has someone keeping tabs on her over the years, through grade school and High School graduation. Now her daughter contacts her and asks her to come to North Carolina to visit her. 

She reflects on her choices and rationalizes leaving the child in more capable hands. She is thinking about her bad choices as she twice gets pulled over speeding in a stolen car with a loaded gun visibly sitting on the floor next to her. She won’t get to see her daughter today. That’s probably for the best.

“She’ll never see me. Hopefully, she’ll never want to see me again. That’s how much I love her.”

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