#865- These Are the Fables- Amelia Gray

#865- These Are the Fables- Amelia Gray

Like a lot of short or flash fiction, this piece is a kind of Rorschach test. Depending on your outlook on life this could either be a hopeful or completely depressing look at a middle-aged wayward couple struggling with the reality that they are going to have a child. Their lives are not suited for such responsibility, they can barely take care of themselves and their surroundings are literally going up in flames.

“All I had wanted that morning was an old-fashioned and the absence of puke. I said that everything would be all right, that we were living in the best of all possible Dunkin’ Donuts parking lots.”

That’s probably the first Voltaire reference I’ve seen wrapped in a fast food plug.

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

#837 The Moment of Conception- Amelia Gray

#837 The Moment of Conception- Amelia Gray

A couple have secluded themselves in a room and are discussing methods of conception. They live in an abode built for such an event: “We had made a life together, a quiet house. In the center of our home was our bedroom, and in the center of our bedroom was an extravagant bed, which we had specially made.” 

The bed was elevated off the floor high above their reach; they had to get up to it using ladders. They sit there now discussing an extreme and painful ceremony of union and sacrifice. Marriage and parenthood are sacrifice of the self…how far are you willing to go?

Notable Passage: “I knew from her kindness and her spinach torte that she was my spiritual equal.”

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

#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

#780 Away From- Amelia Gray

#780 Away From- Amelia Gray

This is a Vegas abduction story written from the perspective of the woman who has been tied up in the abductor’s apartment. She is remarkably calm about the situation, reasoning ways to survive, knowing that there have been five woman who have unsuccessfully tried to escape before her. She sees her mistakes but even with impending doom, they don’t weigh heavily on her.

Notable Passage: “The thing about drugs is you can fight them all your life but you’re fighting a brain that wants you dead, and the thing about fighting is that you can't fight forever.”

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

#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

#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

#690 The Lark- Amelia Gray

#690 The Lark- Amelia Gray

Another day another story with a sickening plot element, this time literally. William has a puking problem. He vomits every time he speaks. After the words come out, so does the bile in direct proportion to the length of his sentences. As you can imagine, this makes William very quiet and very lonely.

He naturally gets a job working at a post office, where his speaking can be brief and his customers either odd themselves or at least wanting to spend very little time in the post office. He manages to find some sort of equilibrium and can hide his affliction. That is until one day a woman seemingly crazy comes in toting a legless can in a carrier and he spews all over the office and ruins some first class mail. The proverbial cat is out of the bag and his co-workers are sickened. Everyone is sickened except the crazy cat lady. They say there is a soul mate for everyone.

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

#662 House Heart- Amelia Gray

#662 House Heart- Amelia Gray

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#634 In The Moment- Amelia Gray

#634 In The Moment- Amelia Gray

“Gutshot” is a collection of short stories by Amelia Gray that comes to me highly touted. This is the opening story. Mark and Emily are in love. It is true and intense. They attempt to live inside this love, and cut ties to the past and the future. To be truly non-attached has a certain religious appeal, but in the real world it can all be a bit messy.

They go from madly in love to strictly nihilistic. They rid themselves of possessions, cut off outside influence (like light) lose their jobs, and forget their families. Taken to the logical-illogical extreme, cutting yourself from past and future would mean losing all those memories like who you are and what things do. 

“Emily taught him to view each day as a wild element divorced from past and future. He needed not to exist as a point on a vector but ultimately to destroy the vector and inhabit that solitary point, like living inside a meteor without fear or knowledge of its movement.”

This is a fun mind experiment on taking an ethos a bit too far. Camus would be proud.

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