#824 Organisms- Julia Elliott

#824 Organisms- Julia Elliott

We’ve all heard parents say that all that junk food and mindless staring at the boob-tube will rot your brain. What if the junk food and TV addictions weren’t the cause of a disease but the symptoms of one?

T. hermeticus is a new protozoan-sized organism that is thought to cause comas from toxic-metabolic encephalopathy. Before the coma state kicks in, the affected are drawn hopelessly to TV screens, video games , smartphones, etc. It taps in to the proverbial reptilian brain cells acting like an internal brain-wash. 

Given all the recurring hyperbole about “these young kids are all lost to their technology” or “I weep for the future” warnings about the younger generation, I guess the only logical conclusion is mind-eating-amoeba…the zombie generation is coming!

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

#823 Out Here- David Leavitt

#823 Out Here- David Leavitt

Three sisters have gathered at the house of their parent’s after the death of their father. Their mother has also died recently so they are there now without parents. Gretchen is the oldest and she is there with her husband. He sees now first hand how resentful and judgmental the siblings are with each other. He doesn’t understand this negative family dynamic.

“In this strange house, Leonard is awed by the woman who surround him—woman who paint their fingernails, wear tiger-striped under-wear, were once track stars. Woman who run in circles pretending that they are horses…Because his own family is so close knit, he is puzzled buy Gretchen’s sisters, and wonders how they could have splintered so easily.”

He tries to help bridge family gaps, but it doesn’t work. The mood of this story makes me feel like I’m eavesdropping on something I shouldn’t. There is an uncomfortable uneasiness in this family that makes me want to shut the door and pretend it’s not happening. Maybe that says more about me than the story.

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

#822 Interesting Facts- Adam Johnson

#822 Interesting Facts- Adam Johnson

This is a cathartic look at a woman dealing with her own death and the loss of her to her family. The husband is clearly written as an autobiographical look at Adam Johnson himself. He’s a San Francisco writer that won the Pulitzer Prize for writing a novel taking place in North Korea (The Orphan Master’s Son). I don’t know whether he actually had a wife die of cancer, and since this is a short story, it doesn’t matter if the reader knows. But if he did, and he wrote this story from the perspective of his dying wife…that’s incredibly brave.

The story begins with the wife and husband managing three kids while she goes through cancer treatment. She wonders about her own death and how fast it would take for him to move on with his life. We see her jealousy and sadness. Halfway through the story, you start to wonder if she is alive at all. I don’t remember if there is a point where we are told that she had died, or if it is left vague. I don’t want to go back and see. The way I read it, things slowly coming into focus was a powerful thing.

Notable Passage: “If I want them to stop treating me like a ghost, I should stop acting like one.”

10-10-10-10 Total= 40

#821 Esmeralda- Mia Alvar

#821 Esmeralda- Mia Alvar

Esmeralda is a domestic worker from the Philippines. She has several jobs, one of which is working in one of the top floors of the World Trade Center’s north tower. On the day the towers were brought down, she does everything she can to get down there to look for her lover. She knows he’s there, but cannot get close enough. It is a prayer.

“You pray by heart the way you plow a field of soil, the way you push a mop across a floor. One foot before the other.”

On one hand this is a story about two people comforting each other at times of great need. Love born of despair doesn’t last, but when one dies in the middle of it, at the peak of the love story, that’s where it stays.

Notable Passage: “I like novels that are long enough to age you while you read them.”

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

#820 The Chair- David Means

#820 The Chair- David Means

This is a very touching look at a parent's view of child rearing. In particular a father raising a son, and spending time alone with him. The child is young enough to need the father there at all times, but old enough to start challenging his authority. The Father, as all parents must do, tries to find that balance to let the child grown by learning in his own in his own space, and setting guidelines and sticking to them.

“It’s not that I feel sorry for myself in any way, because I cherish these moments with my boy, delight in being with him. I relish the line I have to walk between being loving and soft and coddling one second, and the next, having to reestablish my command, or better yet, my guidance—a towering figure in his little mind—over his development at that particular point in time.”

Watching my own friends go through the adventure of parenthood, I imagine this is pretty dead on the money. 

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

#819 Little Brown Mouse- Tunde Olaniran

#819 Little Brown Mouse- Tunde Olaniran

Thomas developed a special ability, although he sees it as a burden and his family and his doctors see it as a mental problem. He is a seer or sorts. When he touches somebody or an object handled by somebody else, he can see thoughts from their minds. The process is mentally jarring, and what his physical self experiences can best be described a seizure. One day he has an episode and falls in front of his house as a strange apparition appears that he thinks is death.

“Thomas’s nightmare spoke to him from beneath her veil. Her eyes were beautiful and terrible, and he knew they would see him no matter where he ran or hid. Red and gold layers moved like water, and she floated toward him. The fan of long, shimmering spines atop her head grazed the doorway, trembling delicately.”

The apparition is no death but something far greater and enlightening. If Thomas can just let go, he can use his “affliction” for larger things. What most see as an abnormality, others can see as a blessing.

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

#818 “Lovebird” Furniture- Felisberto Hernandez

#818 “Lovebird” Furniture- Felisberto Hernandez

This is a bizarre little story, almost feels like something written by Kurt Vonnegut. A man is approached by another man on the trolley and gets tricked into getting an injection of something. Others also get the injection but seem to enjoy the experience. The next morning he begins hearing a radio broadcast from inside his head. The injection had made him a receptor for this station mostly broadcasting advertisements for “Lovebird Furniture.”

After a while the man can’t stand the constant stream of radio noise, but can’t track down the actual station to complain. He finds another injection man, who tells him that the broadcast can be silenced by taking new pills that are for sale. Nice satire on consumer marketing: Create a problem, charge for the cure.

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

#817 The Dowager of Bees- China Mieville

#817 The Dowager of Bees- China Mieville

A story about cards. A card player, a sly slight-of-hand man at that, is discovered by a card playing legend and is invited to play in a high stakes game. He knows he is the target of cardsharks, but he his actually a good player and holds his own. This is the night he will be “inducted.”

Among serious players it is known that very rarely, or more rarely than a straight flush gets bested by a royal flush, a player loses to a hand with a “hidden suit.” When this happens you are “inducted” into the pantheon of players and part of the club. You must forfeit a special prize that any book of rules will show (only at the time of the hidden suit) and that prize will vary from suit to suit. 

The player we follow travels around the world with his card playing girlfriend and occasionally witnesses other people’s “induction.” He fatefully pockets his favorite “hidden suit” and saves it to cheat sometime down the road. When he does, he may be in for a surprise.

Notable Passage: “There is no percentage thinking about the might’ves.” 

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

#816 Speech Sounds- Octavia Butler

#816 Speech Sounds- Octavia Butler

The world has been stricken with a man-made virus, a disease that acts like a stroke on the mind and body. “The illness had played with them, taking away, she suspected, what each valued most.”

So now the world that is left is without speech. In a post disaster L.A., Rye is trying to catch a bus twenty miles to Pasadena. Transportation doesn’t come by that often and can be very dangerous. As she expected, on the  bus a violent fight broke out. Because of the disease it was hard to communicate or understand what this argument was about.

“She had heard so little coherent human speech for the past three years, she was no longer certain how well she recognized it, no longer certain of the degree of her own impairment.”

“Loss of verbal language had spawned a whole new set of obscene gestures.” Of course!

The bus empties out with Rye afraid of a gunfight. Along comes a former cop still fulfilling his duty. He takes Rye with him and she allows for a rare relaxing of her defenses. They connect, but her bliss is short-lived as they come upon more trouble and he is killed. In the end, at the moment of her greatest despair, she finds hope in the future.

There is definitely more than a little Mad Max in here. In the afterward, Butler writes: “I began the story feeling little hope of liking for the human species, but by the time I reached the end of it, my hope had come back.”

Rating: 7-7-8-7= 29

#815 Leo Walks Home- Fatima Shaik

#815 Leo Walks Home- Fatima Shaik

Fatima Shaik has a knack for creating environment. It makes you sense everything around the characters. She writes about New Orleans, and if you have ever been there, as soon as you read one of these stories, you can feel, see, and smell everything that she does. 

This story is just another biographical take about the life of a New Orleans citizen. Leo has lived his whole life in this neighborhood. He survived a boyhood polio surgery in a white hospital and has lived a somewhat normal life. His neighborhood friends calling him “crip” gives him a sense of belonging more than the loneliness of being cooped up in bed watching the season change through the window.

He lives as normal a life as you can, seeing the world for what it is. He will outlive his wife who will die way too early, but at least they got to dance slowly. He is a man from New Orleans, and that should be good enough for anybody.

“A few of his relatives had run away from New Orleans, thinking that people in other places would be perfect…Leo knew better. He was once crippled, and now he was whole, even though he could hardly walk straight. Everyone was a cripple in some way at one time or another.”

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

#814 Cornsilk- Randall Kenan

#814 Cornsilk- Randall Kenan

The confusion of youth and passion. Aaron struggles with his first love. All his life he’s tried to recreate that feeling. His quest is for naught, and his fetish, forbidden and taboo, has become his defining characteristic. Only one other knows what it is. He is lost to obsession.

“Am I…scribbling the thoughts of a madman? Or am I merely depraved? Are these the thoughts of a neurotic? A Psychopath? Or am I just more honest than most?”

This whole story is written in twenty-three numbered sections, but they don’t read like chapters. It’s written as a list. I’m not sure why. I don’t understand the decision to do that. It doesn’t add anything and it’s not idiomatic of Kenan’s whole collection of stories. I could write it off as just a one time thing, but why?

Notable Passage: “There is no glory in tax law.”

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

#813 The Shiny Car in the Night- Nick Mamatas

#813 The Shiny Car in the Night- Nick Mamatas

Northport, Long Island is famous for a few figures. Jack Kerouac lived there during his later years and Ricky Kasso known as the “Acid King” once murdered someone in the summer of 1984 in a satanic ritual. Pete remembers that summer. He was the son of a connected Italian father who ran the Garbage removal business in those parts. It was a odd time to live there. 

Pete was the smart one of the family and was steered away from the family business. He gravitated towards the Kerouac side of things and wanted more than anything to go On The Road. He did, but came back to protect his father when things got hairy. Together, he hopes On The Road can become a family fairy tale, leaving all those roots behind.

Notable Passage: “I got over romanticizing poverty, and the road, but I never got over Kerouac.”

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

#812 And Weep, Like Alexander- Neil Gaiman

#812 And Weep, Like Alexander- Neil Gaiman

A little man walks into a bar and demands a whisky, because he deserves one. He has been here before but nobody remembers him. It’s an occupational hazard; he is an uninventor. He begins telling his tales of uninventing great technological devices like the jet-pack, flying cars, transporters, etc. The bar is enrapt in his unbelievable story. But why uninvent these potentially world changing advances? The answer lies in the cell phones the entire bar immediately went to after the story, those invented items that include things like the “unofficial Simpson’s Fart App.”

Satire about the too fast changing of technology can get a bit preachy at times, and often tend towards the luddite-shouting–at-the-moon caricature. But this one was just funny. The commentary only came at the end. The whole ride was a bunch of word play on “UN” inventing things:

-Still no use crying over unspilt milk, and you can’t mend an omelette without unbreaking a few eggs.

-It’s all about unpicking probability threads from the fabric of creation. Which is a bit like unpicking a needle from a haystack.

-It’s all been uninvented. There are no more horizons left to undiscover, no more mountains left to unclimb.

That last one leads to the title of this piece: “I shall go home…and weep, like Alexander, because there are no more worlds to unconquer.”

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

#811 The Storm- Tove Jansson

#811 The Storm- Tove Jansson

A woman is alone at home during a huge snow storm. She waits for a man to call her. As the storm gets stronger and the winds create chaos her despair grows. Why won’t he call? She is battered almost lost when he finally does. She lets herself sleep and when she wakes the world is again calm and covered in a beautiful blanket of snow.

The storm descriptions here are pretty good, as is the building of tension. 

Notable Passage: “And dreams, what are they? They dig up your fear and display it, enlarged by cruelty. There is no rest, there is no comfort!”

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

#810 The Angel- Bohumil Hrabal

#810 The Angel- Bohumil Hrabal

We slip once again behind the steel curtain early in the cold war. In an industrial waste setting, steel workers toil side by side with female prisoners. The workers get paid, and move freely in and out of the site but do the same work. Lenka, a prisoner befriends Mr. Hulikan and clings to him for a sense of hope and normalcy. Her despair and bitterness is momentarily silenced in small examples of human interaction. Given the circumstances anybody can be a guardian angel.

Notable Passage: “A stack of disabled typewriters, the consequence, he assumed, of a direct hit if a typewriter factory, their keys grinning in the sunlight like teeth in a dead man’s soul.”

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

#809 Fifty Ways to Eat Your Lover- Amelia Gray

#809 Fifty Ways to Eat Your Lover- Amelia Gray

Ok, another fun one from Amelia Gray. Not exactly a short story, but creative enough to include in the blog. As the title suggests, this is a list of fifty ways to…well, eat your lover. I dare you not to think of the Paul Simon song. 

-When he buys you a drink, plunge a knife into his nose and carve out a piece.

-When he asks you out again, stab him with a box cutter and suck the wound.

-When he moves his books into your apartment, take a grater to his knuckles.

-When he asks you to marry him, panfry his foreskin.

-When he says goodbye, eat his heart out.

You get the point. There are fifty of these wonderful recipes. You may look at this and see strong feminist commentary, and you’d probably be right to see that. But you could also just read this several times in a row and laugh your ass off, because that’s what I just did,

“Hop on bus Gus, you don’t need to discuss much….” See, it’s in my head!

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

#808 Food That Pleases, Food to Take Home- Anthony Grooms

#808 Food That Pleases, Food to Take Home- Anthony Grooms

Mary is lifted to the ceiling by the reverend Green’s sermon on civil rights. She has been seeing all the marches and sit-ins and speeches in the news and she wants in. She tries to recruit her friend Annie to take part. She is skeptical and doesn’t see how two people can do any good. 

They walk past a diner they know to serve only white customers and it’s a place they despise the woman who runs the place. Now’s their chance. The walk in and sit down at the whites-only lunch counter and wait to get kicked out. Today however, the owner is in the hospital and her sister is visiting from up north. She is looking after her large, mentally slow son and she really doesn’t want any trouble.

Mary and Annie try to push the issue by telling her:

“We done come all the way from Washington, D.C. We are part of President Johnson’s civil rights committee. And we gone report you to the Doctor Martin Luther King.”

Of course all that is a lie, and the fill-in server just gives up and tells them to serve themselves. Nothing is working like they thought it would. With nobody else involved, and no other customers, there is no one there to see what went down. There is a reason they call it “organizing.” Annie feels bad that she upset this poor woman who is clearly struggling to tale care of her problem son by herself…

“Things were complicated, far more complicated than she thought.”

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

#807 Chattery Teeth- Stephen King

#807 Chattery Teeth- Stephen King

Bill Hogan is a traveling salesman. He stopped at Scooter’s Grocery and Roadside Zoo to get gas before heading home to Los Angeles. They are in the desert and a big wind storm is headed their way. While paying for gas he spots a pair of Jumbo Chattery Teeth in the novelty display booth. It’s one of those wind up toys that jump around. Normally they are smaller and made of plastic, but these are cast metal. Even though they seem broken he buys them for his son.

The wind has picked up as he leaves the store, and against his better judgment he picks up a hitchhiker who is about to get stuck in a sand storm. Just like his premonition, the hitchhiker tries to rob him at knifepoint. A car crash, a wind storm, a knife-fight later, he barely make sit out alive. He survives, this time with a new look on life and a new friend.

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

#806 When All This Was Bay Bridge- Tim McLoughlin

#806 When All This Was Bay Bridge- Tim McLoughlin

This a nostalgic story about old Brooklyn. Daniel visits the old neighborhood the day of his father’s funeral. He remembers a time when he was seventeen and arrested for spray painting a subway car in Coney Island. His father, a former cop, got him released and warned him that it was his free pass. His father laments the changing of the neighborhood.

“When all this was Bay Ridge. He was masterful, my father. He didn’t say when it was all white, or when it was Irish, or even the relatively tame when it was safer. No. When all this was Bay Ridge.”

On the day of his father’s funeral, he visits the old Irish neighborhood bar, the last bastion of the Irish working class in Sunset Park. He talks with his father’s friends and tries to get them to reveal a secret in a photograph he has. Like the solid wall that cops create to protect each other, the old guard won't budge. They protect their own secrets, even against kin. It’s generational, and with each passing one, they get further from their roots and from what they remember as the old days.

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

#805 Flying- Thomas Glave

#805 Flying- Thomas Glave

Craig is a flight attendant for an airline. He has taken around 200 flight by now and he uses the time to ponder his life. He thinks about his native Curacao, his culture, the way the world thinks about him. Most of all he thinks back on his love, Mercedes. The good, the bad, full of regret and full of false promise. He is bitter and forlorn. He flies and he wishes they would all let him have his peace.

“They were at it again: breaking in. He might be a million miles away from all of them, safe, clean, at peace, and they would insist on breaking in.”

Freedom is unattainable.

Notable Passage: “The one thing there will always be, finally, is time.”

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

#804 Exposition- Rebecca Makkai

#804 Exposition- Rebecca Makkai

Another stunning story about the undying power of music. This is written as a transcript of a recording. A spy is being interviewed by his superiors about his last mission. He attended the concert of an enemy pianist, Sophia Speri. It was an illegal concert where she was performing outlawed music.

“It was hypnotic. The Music. The very reason it has been banned, I’m sure. It hypnotized, it entranced, it gave the listener visions of worlds beyond the borders of…the human heart.”

The concert took place in secret hall entirely in the dark. It was supposed to be her last concert, she presumably knew she would be caught and executed. She was shot and killed on stage by the spy ten minutes into the show. She didn’t stop playing even when the gun was put to her head.

The spy is trying to convince the interrogator that he did not enjoy the music, couldn’t remember the music. He was clearly moved by the performance and can’t explain why he waited ten minutes to kill the pianist instead of immediately. The musician is dead, but the music and the defiance lived on.

Notable Passage: “Not to unhear music, but to forget it. Are they not the same?”

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

#803 Which Reminded Her, Later- Jon McGregor

#803 Which Reminded Her, Later- Jon McGregor

Six years ago a young woman came to the church and needed help. Michael, as the vicar, often helped people like this. They were given food, maybe a little money and went on their way. This time, Michael invited this woman to come stay in a spare bedroom in his house, the Vicarage. He thought it his duty to do what he could.

“What does faith mean, if we don’t do these things for even the least among us?”

His wife Catherine was taken aback by her presence. It’s not that she didn’t believe in helping people, it’s that she wasn’t asked by her husband if this woman could stay in their house. The woman was quiet and kept to herself, but Catherine saw her as secretive and ungrateful. This was a test of her faith, not in the church but in her marriage.

“These were all good things to care about, to spend every waking moment worrying about. But she was tired of it now. She was tired of being towed along while he did these things.”

She married Michael, not the church, and she felt dragged around by his job and the faith. It was something she was not a part of. Years later, this incident still stuck in her craw.

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

#802 The House at the End of the Lane- Sheila Heti

#802 The House at the End of the Lane- Sheila Heti

Young love thwarted by meddling hands, self doubt and the promise of a rocky future. This one goes a little beyond flash fiction but it's short nonetheless. Like a good short story it leaves you with an impression and lingering thoughts. This comes from Sheila Heti’s collections (mostly very short pieces like this one) “The Middle Stories.”

Notable Passage: “A young man needs time to find his mind.”

#801 All This in a World Without Dragons- Lucas Southworth

#801 All This in a World Without Dragons- Lucas Southworth

This is an allegorical tale about allegorical story telling. This world is about fathers and sons and the passing of generations. Each boy must kill his father when he turns twenty. Killing a dragon slayer, makes you, yourself a dragon slayer. The dragons have long since been killed off, and with it, hope and discovery.

"We live in a world without dragons…it is a place where nothing is left to be discovered.”

A child becomes a man and kills off hope and discovery. He has lost the childish imagination where dragons exist. Unless a father (and a mother) decide early on to set their son on a different, riskier path.

“Find a dragon, he insisted, bring one back alive. If you do, everything might change. If you do, it might save us all.”

Rating: 8-10-9-9 Total= 36

#800 All This History At Once- Bryn Chancellor

#800 All This History At Once- Bryn Chancellor

A teacher spends her weekends selling her crafts with her husband. This weekend is the big annual crafts festival in the Tennessee statehouse. She is dressed in a corny but event-appropriate get-up that is giving her a bit of trouble as she hauls her gear up the large staircase.

“But you’re here this weekend, after all, for an arts and crafts festival, where red cowboy boots and short skirts are de rigueur, and with any luck, no children will puke or pee on you or smear you with paste or peanut butter or grape-scented markers.”

As she looks on the historic statues in the plaza she thinks back on her own history and imagines seeing her ex-husband. Everything together causes her to tumble down the staircase. She flails and tumbles in a painful and embarrassing display. Except she is not embarrassed and nobody is laughing. Her worst fears are put to rest and she can move on.

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

#799 Fingerprints- Justin Bigos

#799 Fingerprints- Justin Bigos

This is a series of memories a boy has of his father. They are not good ones, at least not from the reader’s perspective.

“He drinks a rocks glass of vodka. He drinks a plastic cup of scotch. He drinks a Dixie cup of ouzo, a beer stein of sherry, a mug of warm Chardonnay. He drinks handfuls and handfuls of water from the kitchen sink, combs his hair with his fingers. He has stopped shaking. You’re just getting started.”

The father is a drunk, a criminal, and a thief who at one point stole from his own son. However disgusted with his father the boy gets at times, leading sometimes to physical retribution, these memories are relatively non-emotional. It’s just a child or a adult remembering his childhood and these moments from his life.

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

#798 The Contestant- Daniel Alarcon

#798 The Contestant- Daniel Alarcon

Reality TV gone wild, sensationalism run amok. Ruth Thalia Sayas Sanchez was the first contestant of a hit Peruvian TV show called Moment of Truth. On it, contestants are hooked up to a lie detector test and asked increasingly personal and revealing questions. Of course the show is looking for dirt to come out. To make more drama, on the stage with Ruth is her parents and her boyfriend. She told the truth, including her stint as an exotic dancer and her two instances of taking money for sex. She won the money but shamed herself and her family.

Months after the show aired, she is knows as the prostitute from the game show. She goes missing, and turns into a national scandal. Reality TV meets tabloid journalism, add the ever present desire for money and fame, and we see the worst of humanity.

Notable Passage: “The truth is always illuminating…It will do no harm, even though it hurts.”

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

#797 The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach- 1979

#797 Karen Russell- The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach- 1979

Nal is in a weird point of his life. He is a lonely teenager with an out-of-work mother having a nervous breakdown, and a freeloading older brother that has just started dating the girl he has eyes for.

“That summer Nal was fourteen and looking for excuses to have extreme feelings about himself.”

He is the responsible one and the only one in the family that is working. The pressure, his age, and his normal disposition has lead him to a desire for disassociation. He wishes to exist outside of himself, he often has a running dialogue like a play by play sports caster going. This summer he is being followed and haunted by seagulls. While many other birds represent death and an ominous future, gulls are scavengers.

“The seagulls are stealing scraps of our lives to feather this weird nest…These birds are messing with our futures.”

These items act as sort of talismans for Nal and push him along in different directions. Whether they exist as anything mystical or whether he has conjured meaning out of normal avian activity is up to the reader.

Word of the Day: Homunculus- a miniature adult believed to inhabit larger beings.

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

#796 Caveman Dirt- Julia Elliott

#796 Caveman Dirt- Julia Elliott

We are at an expensive lifestyle/health retreat that brings you back to the times of Neanderthals. This Paleolithic program is lead by Zugnord, aka. Wilbur. He was once a pale, chubby loser just like all the camp participants but has transformed himsepf into a mighty hunter/gatherer man of steel. Ellen Wiggins, is one of these participants and she has been newly dubbed: Vogmar, daughter of the Blackboar Clan.

 “I’m here to lose weight. I’m here to become a sinewy cavewoman with a core of steel and a glint of primal vitality in my eyes. I’m here to purge my body and mind, shed the bloat of civilization, cast off the epochs of agricultural decadence that have collected around my midsection.”

Wearing caveman gear, and eating unseasoned meats and wild moss, she finds herself in an extreme theme park fully equipped with a troupe of actors acting like Neanderthals taking their roleplaying very seriously and chasing her around the forest. Even in this world there are cliques and human weakness. 

This story reminds me a little of TC Boyle’s Road to Wellville or something out of a Chuck Palahniuk satire against extremism, with a little bit of Lord of the Flies thrown in.

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

#795 Radiation- David Leavitt

#795 Radiation- David Leavitt

This story opens up referencing a TV soap opera. After that the whole thing read like that to me, a soap opera. I’m not entirely sure that was supposed to be the effect, but for me it was. Two children accompany their mother to a cancer radiation treatment. It’s their first time there and they watch and talk and get distracted and talk some more. I can’t tell exactly how old the children are, which is the second problem I have with this story. From one sentence to the next, they seem or act like drastically different ages. That caused a major disconnect for me.

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

#794 Hurricanes Anonymous- Adam Johnson

#794 Hurricanes Anonymous- Adam Johnson

Three weeks after Katrina Rocked New Orleans, Hurricane Rita hit. Many of the people that fled to places like Lake Charles, were now hit twice. Nonc is driving a UPS van and delivering to a few of the rescue and recovery crews. The area is a disaster.

“Outside the campers are bright purple laundry bins, molded plastic porch chairs and the deep black of weber grills, which is what happens when Wal-Mart is your first responder.”

In tow at all times is Geronimo, his son from a two-month relationship with Marnie. Geronimo has unceremoniously been handed off and Marnie is nowhere to be found. Nonc tries to track her down, raise his son, stay in Alcohol recovery, manage a new relationship, survive the post-hurricane chaos and deal with his estranged dying father. There is a lot on his plate. His head seems to be in the right place and with a little luck and a couple of right moves, he might just make it. Luck, however, is not something that has been on his side.

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