#763 The Dark Dining Room- Felisberto Hernandez

#763 The Dark Dining Room- Felisberto Hernandez

A young up and coming pianist is looking for work, but it is hard to come by. He manages to get a lowly job playing twice a week for a private audience. A strange woman, both widowed and jilted has hired him to fill the house with music. He finds the surroundings odd and uncomfortable, especially his encounters with a disgruntled maid at the estate.

As all the stories in this collection, music plays a huge roll. Here it evokes memories and desire, whether wanted or not. That part of the story was, as always, written delicately and with great effect. However, this was the first of this Piano Stories collection I found disappointing. It was left a bit unresolved or undeveloped in an unsatisfying way. Unlike the others, this was written in a classic style without Hernandez’s penchant for spiritual or other-worldly themes. Classic is fine, but using that as a measuring stick, this fell a bit short (and I’m only using the high level of achievement his other stories hit as a barometer).

Notable Passage: “I hadn’t wanted the title of the song to bring back her bad memories, but I was drawn to the tragedies in other lives.”

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

#762 Night School- Raymond Carver

#762 Night School- Raymond Carver

A tipsy man sits at a bar by himself, separated from his wife and living back with his parents. You can imagine the mood around such a man at a neighborhood bar. Two woman, out for a bit of fun try to rope him into their evening, hoping he has a car. He doesn’t. As they try and hatch a plan to go bother a professor of theirs from night school they get a bit drunker and head out into the night. 

Nobody in this story gets what they want, nor do they listen to anybody else’s words. It is a lonely sad world, not even a few drinks can make it better. Maybe reading a few stories is the only things that can get you to bed at night.

Rating: 7-6-6-5 Total= 24

#761 Polynia- China Mieville

#761 Polynia- China Mieville

“They’d started as wisps, anomalies noticed only by weather watchers. Slowly, they’d grown, started to glint in the early-winter afternoon. They solidified, there sides becoming more faceted, more opaquely white. They started to shed shadows…Social media went mad with theory. The things were dismissed as mirages, hoaxes, advertising gimmicks for a TV show. They were heralded as angels, abominated as an alien attack or a new superweapon.”

Thus fifteen years ago, strange ice-bergs appeared over London, impossibly levitating in mid air, 9/10^th of which are not to be seen. At first they are the only thing the city can think about. What are they? Where are they from? What do they mean? Eventually curious climbers venture into the unknown never to be seen again. They still float there as life goes on, one more unexplained mystery for humans to ponder and fight over, selfishly wanting to know its secrets.

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

#760 The Evening and the Morning and the Night- Octavia Butler

#760 The Evening and the Morning and the Night- Octavia Butler

A portion of society is stricken with Duryea-Gode Disease, a genetically transferred condition that devolves into animalistic violence and cannibalism. It is supposed to be a cross between Huntington’s Disease, Phenylketonuria disorder and Lesch-Nyhan disease, but sounds to me like it turns people into flesh eating zombies.

The people that have the gene are aware of it and know that as some point they will “drift” into a spiral ending in murder, self destruction or imprisonment in centers designed to house them. It’s a horrible death sentence that causes those with the gene to commit suicide, or at the very least not have children to pass it along. But human nature as it is, some still have children.

Lynn and Alan live in an apartment together with 4 other DGDers. They find comfort in each other. Eventually they decide to visit Alan’s mother who is in a high end facility for those who have already drifted. What they find there is both a revelation and somewhat hard to handle. The decisions they will have to make about their future gets more and more complicated.

Notable Passage: “If you work hard enough at something that doesn’t matter, you can forget for a while the things that do.”

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

#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

#758 The Foundations of the Earth- Randall Kenan

#758 The Foundations of the Earth- Randall Kenan

Maggie was a seventy-year old matriarch of a southern sharecropping family. The joy of her life was her grandson Edward who left some years ago to go to college in Boston. He never came back. She is left lonely and confused.

“Her [spiritual weight] born not of the sun but of profound loneliness, an oppressive emptiness, a stabbing guilt. Sometimes she even wished she was a drinking woman.”

Some years later, Edward dies and she learns that he had been living with another man, afraid to tell her of his homosexuality. God comes to her in a dream and tells her to avoid judgment and hate. She invites her son’s lover—a white man—to come south to visit her and tell her about the real Edward. She is open, albeit confronted with her upbringing, and finds peace in the life she sees. After all, she knows discrimination, and she knows respect.

Notable Passage: “Healing sleep, soothing sleep, sleep to make the world go away, sleep like death. Her mama had told her that sleep was the best medicine God ever made. When things get too rough—go to bed.”

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

#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

#756 Beyond Lies the Wub- Philip K. Dick

#756 Beyond Lies the Wub- Philip K. Dick

I guess “You are what you eat” is an apt adage for this story. Men and local creatures are loading a cargo ship when one crew member comes walking back with a huge pig-like creature called a Wub. It is a greatly respected animal around here and the crew member bought it for fifty cents. Looking like a pig, and being four-hundred pounds of potential food, Captain Franco wondered how it would taste.

Aboard the ship they had suffered some food spoilage, and the Captain now looked towards the wub again for a food source. Except the wub isn’t really a pig, it is a highly evolved race and has learned to defend itself with reason. It had accessed the minds of the passengers and “spoke” to the captain using some sort of ESP. Trying to philosophize his way out of the boiler, the Wub uses mythology to illustrate his usefulness. Ever wonder whether we’d still consume animals if they talked like us? Well, some life forms have a strong survival instinct.

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

#755 Black-White- Tove Jansson

#755 Black-White- Tove Jansson

This story is dedicated to Edward Gorey, the American illustrator. Like him, the man in this story drew dark and scary images for books. He has been commissioned to create the pictures for a terror anthology, the chance of a lifetime. When his wife, a talented designer critiques one of his drawings as too gray, he takes it to heart. 

The house she has designed for them is literally a glass house and is too light for the dark subject matter of his book. He moves to a different studio for a few months where he can wallow in darkness and create the proper level of black as the dominant element in his work. How dark is too dark? How far can an artist get lost in his work?

This is a nice homage to an artistic master. The imagery is stark, the black/white symbolism is obvious but handled well. 

Notable Passage: “The darkness crept away, and they stood side by side, throwing no shadows, and he thought, This is perfect. Nothing Can Change.

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

#754 Mr. Kafka- Bohumil Hrabal

#754 Mr. Kafka- Bohumil Hrabal

Mr. Kafka: And Other Tales From the Time of the Cult (of personality) has only recently been published in English. Mostly written in Czechoslovakia in the 1950’s when Prague was still recovering from the war and a Stalinist government was reeking havoc on their culture. There is something both dark and intensely human about these stories, something that could only be crated behind the Iron Curtain. 

“This book is an expression not only of my own evolution, but of a part of society’s evolution as well, a society I live is that, like me, wishes to live in habitations where humor and the possibility of metaphysical escape reign supreme.”

There is such an intensity of mood and a richness of language that comes from oppression. But creativity will never be suppressed. This reads like a cold war echo of Henry Miller, living a wild life that’s both surreal and intently deliberate. Of course you have to love a story that references both Kafka and Job.

Notable Passage: “It’s good to live in anxiety, good to hear one’s teeth chatter in fear, good to push life to the brink of ruin and start fresh the next morning. It’s also good to part forever and praise misfortune.”

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

#753 Western Passage- Amelia Gray

#753 Western Passage- Amelia Gray

You meet a lot of odd people on long distance busses. The dynamics can be interesting. Sometimes there is just someone that needs to be protected from the dangerous elements that can be found on bus rides. On this bus there is such a man, large, dirty, and ogling every female passenger as he goes past. Our narrator is a string woman and knows how to deal with such a man.

“When he smiles at me, I held my gaze one inch into his eyes, not at but in, where he might register my personal wall. This trick took thirty years to master. From there, we had an understanding.”

The woman sitting next to her needs protection, so she thinks. She’s alone and needs a place to stay and wants to sidle up to the man. But in a move of sisterhood or something the narrator threatens the man and invites the girl to stay with her. This move is both territoriality and very animalistic. We’re not sure entirely of her motives or whether she herself is the real danger.

Notable Passage: “Attention is the most worthless currency on the planet…When you treat it like it’s precious, you’re blinding yourself to the possibility that you might find it elsewhere. And it’s everywhere, attention is.”

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

#752 Uncle Beasley’s Courtship- Anthony Grooms

#752 Uncle Beasley’s Courtship- Anthony Grooms

It’s thanksgiving. Gerald (middle school aged) watches as his Uncle Beasley pours himself another gin even though his mother warned against drinking today. They have invited over Mrs. Perkins, a retired school principal for dinner. They are hoping the two of them hit it off.

Dinner goes well, but Uncle Beasley keeps drinking and eventual gets to the place they were all worried about. He gets huffy and almost spills too much information, but Gerald makes the biggest mistake by repeating a word he doesn’t even know the meaning of. He takes his licks like a man, but still gets no respect.

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

#751 Popsy- Stephen King

#751 Popsy- Stephen King

Sheridan has a gambling problem, he loved cards. He often got into debt with the wrong people who likely had a crooked game. When he got himself into a jam he couldn’t get out of, Mr. Reggie gave him a name to call and a week to pay him back. The name was a Turk who needed him to pick up a child. Any child really. He was now in kidnapping business.

Debt was paid off, but Sheridan still had a gambling problem, And when addicts find an amount they can pay off, they push that amount further. So, now he has a kidnapping habit. The most recent kid he picked up is different. He’s unbelievably strong, has a razor sharp bite (which now has Sheridan’s hands bleeding) and an increasingly strong odor:

“He could smell the kid. That fear had an odor was something he had learned on his expeditions, but this was unreal—the kid smelled like a mixture of sweat, mud, and slowly cooking battery acid.”

By the time, he realizes what this kid is, “Popsy” has caught up with him and he has no chance. Standard King fare, a little campy with the description of Popsy.

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

#750 Hasidic Noir- Pearl Abraham

#750 Hasidic Noir- Pearl Abraham

In Williamsburg, Brooklyn during a morning service, a private investigator learns of a murder. He is the city’s first and only Hasidic detective he says and since it is an “inside job” he is the only one that can solve it:

“Anywhere else, murder, even when it occurs with some frequency, is front page news; in the Hasidic world, it’s kept out of the papers.”

In a Hatfield and McCoy type of local feud, the murder is someone in line for the Grand Rabbinical Throne. Two congregations pitted against each other, printing propaganda and hiding true intentions. The intrigue is deep and what seems cut and dry, of course is anything but.

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

#749 Accidents- Thomas Glave

#749 Accidents- Thomas Glave

The story opens with a large mob of people crushing to get a look at an accident. Cars, mangled bodies splayed in pools of blood, and people everywhere clamoring for a better view. Melvin and his boyfriend finally get to the front where the police are forcibly keeping the crowd back, but quickly flee when the view makes them sick. 

This view keeps Thomas up for days. He has a history with accidents and this one may be one too many. He can’t sleep, can't function, can’t decipher reality from nightmare. When Melvin finally drives him to the hospital for an evaluation, the speed of the moving car freaks him out and causes his own accident.

Notable Passage: “Loving another man wasn’t strange; people can’t hate the idea enough to change it, for us or anybody.”

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

#748 Min- Rebecca Lee

#748 Min- Rebecca Lee

Sarah and Min are students and best friends at college in Missoula. Min is from Hong Kong, a son to an influential family that deals with Vietnamese refugees back home. Min is marrying age and when he returns for the summer his family is to choose a bride. Because his mother, normally the person to recommend a bride, has passed, the father is left to the task. Min asks Sarah to come home with him this summer. She can work for his father and get to see Hong Kong. She agrees, but when she gets there the job the father wants her to do is screen the bride applicants. 

It’s a confusing time in Hong Kong, and it’s a confusing situation for Sarah. Things get more difficult when she befriends a union leader and gets a whiff of the class politics she has fallen into. A large part of this story is about the political landscape of late 80’s Hong Kong, but it’s also about friendship, family and culture. Not least of which is the story about father and son: 

“I wondered how that would be, to be a father and stare across a table, through the crackling candlelight, and see your own face, younger, broadened and transformed by both time and race. How interesting it would be to see the future that precisely.”

Notable Passage: “Only a man who hates his privilege can be trusted with it.”

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

#747 Fleeing Complexity- Jon McGregor

#747 Fleeing Complexity- Jon McGregor

The full title for this story is- Fleeing Complexity: Irby in the Marsh. The entire text of this story reads as:

“The fire spread quicker than the little bastard was expecting.”

That’s it. Far before the terms “flash fiction,” or “micro-narrative” were discussed writers wrote whatever their story required and didn’t worry about what to call the form. Surly this sized “story” can be called something other than a short story, right? I say a story is a story. I included this for this blog to illustrate that true craft is to create a story in the reader’s head by any means in the writer’s tool box. 

There is much implied by this one sentence. Without realizing that your mind immediately fills in certain blanks, for certain you imagined Irby doing something about, near, or because of a giant fire. He was likely frantic or in serious trouble, and if he was near a marsh…etc. If we did this for one sentence, what do we do in a story that’s 100 pages long? The exact same thing, probably. Great thing to ponder for both readers and authors alike.

If I were a writing teacher I would show this and assign my students to write one sentence stories with depth. Maybe I’d have an entire semester where they could only write one perfect sentence a day. That would be fun, and telling I think.

Rating: don’t know how to rate this, so I wont.

#746 Fairness- Chinelo Okparanta

#746 Fairness- Chinelo Okparanta

Inside a Nigerian aristocratic family, the woman are wishing for better things. They want the things they see in American fashion magazines. The mother knows that if her daughter were to study in America, things would be better for everybody. They associate American things and American images as promise for opportunity. 

Taking these feelings to heart, the schoolgirls of this community associate lighter skin for fairness. They see a classmate with lighter skin and feel enough envy that she is no longer part of their clique. The girls try and bleach their skin with disastrous results. Even with the scabs they imagine peeling them off and having pink skin albeit temporarily.

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

#745 Same Life, Different One- Lucas Southworth

#745 Same Life, Different One- Lucas Southworth

Written in an interesting meta style, this is a sort of commentary on a society lost to television. It’s just running descriptions of images and story clips as they go by on the screen. We see the couple, they could be and probably are any couple mindlessly watching as the crude, or the grotesque, or the inane get fed into their psyches. 

It’s not really a new idea, but its ok. 

Rating: 7-6-6-5 Total= 24

#744 Any Sign of Light- Bryn Chancellor

#744 Any Sign of Light- Bryn Chancellor 

Co-workers on a first date on their way to the state fair are sitting by the side of the road watching a huge fire that has tied up traffic. Sam is twenty, Ruby ten years older. They are both broken. He has a bad heart and she bad lungs. They sit their, drink beer, listen to her choice of music and watch the smoke. 

In silence there are secrets. He doesn’t talk much, and finds that girls will fill the silence and he can play the part of listener. The tension that silent moments create is filled emotion and desire. She fills her moments with music, he fills his with sex, clearly substituting those for larger needs. This is a little sad, a little meditative. 

Notable Passage: “Sam’s eyes were brown, like dirt, or maybe cooked hamburger meat. He blinked, thinking of his face in the mirror in the morning. Sometimes he would stand there and look at himself, trying to see how others see him, until his face became a stranger’s, someone he might vaguely recognize in the grocery store. In the sky, the smoke was as thick as pavement, impenetrable. He wished his eyes were that color.”

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

#743 Jack/July- Victor Lodato

#743 Jack/July- Victor Lodato

You cannot always tell what a story is about from the first sentence, or what kind of characters you might encounter. But a good first sentence can set a tone and announce to the reader that the author enjoys a certain type of language. It’s a language shared between the writer and the avid reader, one that says literature is more than merely telling a story. Like good food, language can be savored. That’s the thought I’m left with after reading the first sentence of this story. I love a good opening sentence.

“The sun was a wolf. The fanged light had been trailing him for hours, tricky with clouds. As it emerged again from sheepskin, Jack looked down at the pavement, cursed.”

The story is less glorious than the language, being about a meth-head, but no less entertaining. Jack is deep into a binge, up for days. His mind cannot imagine structures of time and fact. As emotions flow through him he is reminded of good things, and he can't remember if they are real or imagined; whether they occurred yesterday or last year. To himself he is merely going through life looking for joy. To others he is a menace and a nuisance. There are many stories about drugs and their misuse, this was a good one with a few poignant quotes about drug use:

-Soon he knew the freak would come, the soul suck, if he didn’t get one of two things: more crystal or a sound sleep.

-Running out of crystal was like running out of time, sinking back into the mud that was your life.

Notable Passage: “It was so easy to forgive those who betrayed you, effortless—like thinking of winter in the middle of July. It cost you nothing.”

Rating: 9-7-8-8 Total= 32

#742 A New Man- Edward P. Jones

#742 A New Man- Edward P. Jones

This is a family story, a sad one. Woodrow is a poor working man with a bad heart and a simple life. He has a wife, a daughter and a father that writes to him about his visions. He is the only son that writes back. Their world is small, and a bit somber. He is unhealthy and that weighs over everything.

One day he comes home from work and finds his fifteen year-old daughter cavorting with two boys. He angrily shoos them out of the house, banishes his daughter to her room, and lies down to rest. When he awakes from his nap, his daughter has left the house and he will never see her again. She has runaway. 

He spends the rest of his life searching the street for her. This becomes his identity. After a while, he doesn’t even have hope for finding her, but he gets satisfaction from exploring the city and meeting new people. He shows them a picture of his daughter when she was five not because that will help him find her or because that’s how he remembers her, but because a picture of a cute five year old gets more sympathetic responses.

Life goes on, and family history repeats, as long as the heart keeps working.

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

#741 Vampires in the Lemon Grove- Karen Russell

#741 Vampires in the Lemon Grove- Karen Russell

The title story of Karen Russell’s first short story collection sets a good tone. It’s a vampire story, but original and touching. These characters don’t need to be vampires, they could be anyone going through life with normal emotions—love, loneliness, depression.

Clyde grew up alone hearing all the horror stories about vampires, the killing, the bloodsucking the aversion to sunlight, etc. He built his own life around these stories until he met the only other vampire he has ever met, Magreb.  She becomes his wife and disabuses him of the lore. They travel and live somewhat normal lives, but his hunger once psychosomatically about blood has led them to an Italian lemon grove. Lemons, it seems can quench their nocturnal thirst for a while.

“After an initial prickling—a sort of chemical effervescence along my gums—a soothing blankness traveled from the tip of each fang to my fevered brain. These lemons are a vampire’s analgesic. If you have been thirsty for a long time, if you have been suffering, then the absence of those two feelings—however brief—becomes a kind of heaven.”

He sits all day in the grove looking like an old Italian widower and with Magreb he feels that he need not travel anymore. He is no longer lonely:

“There is a loneliness that must be particular to monsters, I think, the feeling that each is the only child of a species. And now that loneliness was over.”

However, he is not an old man, and Magreb is ready to keep moving. Clyde’s dilemma is a very human one, caught between love and life, feeling lonely and depressed and not wanting to let go of old feelings.

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

#740 Regeneration at Mukti- Julia Elliott

#740 Regeneration at Mukti- Julia Elliott

How far is too far when trying to get healthy and stay young? This is a funny satire on holistic healing and new aged health spas. Mukti is a ultra expensive resort somewhere in the islands. The clients stay in tree houses and undergo a hellish suffering cure that includes everything from bee sting therapy to leech sessions:

“Freaky to have bloodsuckers clamped to my face, but it’s good for fatty orbital herniation and feelings of nameless dread.”

The body undergoes a series of abominations until enough pustules and boils create a kind of scar sarcophagus around the body. When it is all over, you shed your old peel like a snake shedding skin and you are reborn with a baby-like epidermis. 

This reminds me of some of T.C. Boyle, or Chuck Palahniuk satirical stories  mocking extremism. Of course this story follows a love thread that under the circumstance, makes for some big laughs:

-I pass the wine and our fingertips touch. I imagine kissing him, forgetting that in two weeks we’ll both be covered in weeping sores.

-And we take another hit of ghoni, distillate of the puki bloom, a small purple fungus flower that grows from tree-dung. We drift out onto the porch and fall into an oblivion of kissing.

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

#739 The Way Up To Heaven- Roald Dahl

#739 The Way Up To Heaven- Roald Dahl

I guess the most apt adage for this story would be: “Never keep a lady waiting.” Mrs. Foster is a nervous traveler. What she is most nervous about is being late. She is always ready to go to an appointment or a train a good half hour earlier than she needs, and she will wait anxiously until her husband comes out to go with her. Mr. Foster is almost always running just a bit late, and this makes his wife frantic on the edge of breaking down.

For their long marriage this has been going on, and recently Mrs. Foster has been suspicious that her husband makes her wait on purpose, as if taunting her and her fear of missing her train. The biggest trip of her life is coming up, a solo trip to Paris to visit her daughter and granddaughter. When Mr. Foster seems intent on making her miss her plane, she does the unthinkable—leaves without him. This act of insolence or one of liberation (depending on your perspective) will be his undoing.

Rating: 7-7-7-7 Total= 28

#738 Danny In Transit- David Leavitt

#738 Danny In Transit- David Leavitt

This is a study in psychology. A man demanding to have a “proper” marriage with defined male/female roles comes to the realization after having a child that he is homosexual. The wife, already a little in need of mental therapy, loses it. She has a nervous breakdown and literally tears her own hair out. Danny, the only child, normally very self-reliant turns into a high maintenance situation with a hair-trigger reaction to tantrum.

The author does a great job flushing out each persons psychological tendencies in such a traumatic family break-up. It is also a test for the reader in which character you feel more sympathy for. Clearly none of this is the child’s fault so he had automatic sympathy. But what about the mother who is another clear victim, trying her best to be a mother in the face of her breakdown and being honest about not being able to handle life? Or perhaps the father, who is forced by a patriarchal expectation and an uber-machismo career to be something he is not, and then when he finds a road to freedom it causes so much harm to others. Stay in a cage and try to hold together a lie, or be honest and hope to weather the chaos?

Children are the only ones here that have carte blanche excuse for being selfish, but they are also the most resilient. Good story.

Notable Passage: “Just never trust cleanliness. All the bad stuff—the really bad stuff—happens in clean houses, where everything’s tidy and nobody says anything more than good morning.”

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

#736 In Spite of Darkness- Alixa Garcia

#736 In Spite of Darkness- Alixa Garcia

The Suns have been quieted and the land has fallen into darkness. The humans have lived without solar warmth for eight years. Luminescent beings called Sol gatherers hide from them afraid they will be stolen and disappear forever.

 “The Sol Gatherers were effected by mood—fear and love being the strongest emotions that could make their firelike skin radiate.”

Mikra, born on the first day of the war and at the beginning of the current darkness is a mixture of Sol Gatherer and Pattern Keeper. For generations the Sol Gatherers had flown together to different dimensions in search of suns and returned to share their magnificence. This time, however they have not returned and the child gatherers are without teachers and the lineage is in danger of being broken.

This could be a morality play about human disrespect and destruction of the planet, or it could be a parable about forgotten culture. Either way it’s a powerful story about hope and perseverance in the face of utter darkness.

Notable Passage: “…and like any movement toward an unfolding future, so thundered down the unknown hand of destiny.”

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

#735 My First Concert- Felisberto Hernandez

#735 My First Concert- Felisberto Hernandez

You can practice all you want, for years on end. Your technique could be perfected and your understanding of the music impeccable.  In the comfort of your own studio you may be the greatest musician ever, but unless you can overcome the nerves of stage-fright, you will never be as good as you think.

This is a charming and all-too realistic look into the fragile nerves of a first time performer. Having been a musician myself, I am very sensitive to these feelings. The days leading up to the performance is a steady roller coaster of emotion that Hernandez writes perfectly. Here are just a few of the telling quotes in this story:

“Rounding a corner I saw my name written large on two huge posters stuck on either side of a cart, and felt even more miserable. If the letters had only been smaller, perhaps less would have been expected of me.”

“I distrusted myself that morning and started going over my program like someone counting his money because he suspects it has been stolen from him during the night, and I soon found out I didn’t have as much as I had thought I did.”

We see the performance, and thankfully is wasn’t a disaster. The lighter moments on stage make for a great tension/release. I love using both a coffin and cannon as metaphors for the piano.

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

#734 What’s in Alaska- Raymond Carver

#734 What’s in Alaska- Raymond Carver

This is a story about diversion. A couple going through life, a little bored and worn out. A man comes home from work, buys shoes and comes home to his wife who sneers at the shoes and gives him a drink. Maybe it’s the shoes and the beer, but at this point of the story I had Sinatra’s Love and Marriage running through my head (as the theme song from Married with Children, of course).

They go visit another couple down the street that just bought a hookah water pipe. The rest of the story is a whole stoner scene, full of laughs, munchies, misinterpreted conversations, fun with pets. Everyone is hyper-sensitive and yet extremely unaware. Funny, although not up to par with great stoner stories. Stylistically It is dialogue heavy. If there is any subtext beyond adults needing a diversion from their humdrum lives, I missed it and don’t feel the need to go back and find one. We never find out exactly what’s in Alaska.

Rating: 7-6-6-5 Total= 24

#733 Blood Child- Octavia Butler

#733 Blood Child- Octavia Butler

In this reality a group of humans fled earth as refugees and now live on another planet with superior beings. They are large slug-like creatures that, after seeing the violence in human nature, keep them in preservations. They allow humans and themselves to live together as host families. “Host” also being literal as they are used to incubate their young. When old enough, they are implanted with baby slugs.

“They don’t take woman” he said with contempt

“They do sometimes.” I glanced at him. “Actually, they prefer woman.

You should be around when they talk among themselves.. They say woman have more body fat to protect the grubs. But they usually take men to leave

The woman free to bear their own young.”

“To provide the next generation of host animals,” he said, switching

from contempt to bitterness.

In the family we see, Gan has just become implantation age and is chosen by his host slug for the job. There is a theme of subservience, with most humans living off the eggs of slugs that keeps them in a dreamlike trance and also helps them live longer. That theme turns into one of choice and free will as Gan has second thoughts about the situation.

There is a lot packed into this story. In the preface to this collection Butler, talks about her struggle with the short story:

“The truth is I hate short story writing. Trying to do it has taught me much more about frustration and despair than I ever wanted—yet there is something seductive about writing short stories. It looks so easy. You come up with an idea, then ten, twenty, perhaps thirty pages later, you’ve got a finished story.”

For the most part, I have had some trouble with stories that pack in so much, with stories that could and should be turned into longer pieces. However, this story I like both at this length, and could also see it expanded to a larger format. Perhaps it’s the genre. It’s more about the conceptual situation you’d want to hear more about than the characters themselves. Either way, good start to this book. 

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