#840 The Wolf-Tove Jansson

#840 The Wolf-Tove Jansson

A woman is acting as a guide for a Japanese artist. He wishes to see ferocious indigenous animals. There are no such animals in the south part of the country so she shows him stuffed animals at an old museum, These are nice  but he wishes to see some live.

She manages a trip to an island sanctuary or a zoo even though it is off-season. They have the place to themselves. It is cold and quiet and the artists enjoys his explorations around the grounds. Finally he gets to see live wolves pacing ominously in their cages.

“The wolves’ ceaseless pacing struck her as appalling. It was timeless. They loped back and forth behind their bars week after week and year after year, and if they hate us, she thought, it must be a gigantic hate!”

There is an undercurrent here with the narrator that I cant quite get a finger on. Her insecurity and isolation mirrors the wolves, but not the ferocity or intrigue. Much of Jansson’s power is the subtleness of her style. I wonder how much of that is lost in the translation. 

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

#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

#661 Felina- Guadalupe Nettel

#661 Felina- Guadalupe Nettel

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

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

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

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

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

#479 A Mean Utility- Craig Davidson

#479 A Mean Utility- Craig Davidson

If you’re an animal lover, this one could be hard to get through. James and Allsion breed and fight Pit Bulls. We see in graphic and terrible detail the scene of one of their animals winning a dog fight, but then being put down because of injuries sustained during the fight.

They are also trying unsuccessfully to have a child. Impotence and powerlessness are themes running through this one. That and over compensation for said impotence. I don’t care what kinds of lessons these two learn from their dog fighting world, their lack of judgment and compassion would make them lousy parents. If that makes me judgmental…so be it.

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

#441 The Girl Who Raised Pigeons- Edward P. Jones

#441 The Girl Who Raised Pigeons- Edward P. Jones

It’s the late 1950’s and on Myrtle ave. in Washington D.C. the neighborhood is falling apart. In a few years, it will be razed and taken over by the city. Besty Ann is a little girl being raised by her father. Her mother died of cancer late in her pregnancy and they were able to save her.

She is a survivor, but she is lonely. She is frightened by a neighboring barber who raises pigeons. The pigeons scare her the first time, but intrigue her enough that she wants to raise some herself. She is insistent, so her father builds a coup and for three years, Betsy raised her pigeons. Every morning before dawn, her father visits the pigeons and makes sure they alive. He wants to protect her from seeing one of her pigeons dead.

Of course there is only so long he can protect her; there is only so long they can stay there before the neighborhood is lost; and there is only so long she can keep the pigeons.

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

#422 Why Coyote Never had Money For Parking- Chuck Palahniuk

#422 Why Coyote Never had Money For Parking- Chuck Palahniuk

Coyote is in a struggling marriage with Hyena, and has a weekly tryst with Flamingo, the local prostitute. He loathes living in this (literal) urban jungle where he thinks nobody contributes to society and they’re all out only for themselves. He wanted to be a rock star, but ended up in this disappointing marriage instead:

“He knew that marriage was like one of those movies where the only exciting parts are all squeezed into the three minute preview.”

Nobody in this story is exactly what they seem, and not only because they’re written as animals.

Reading these anthropomorphic stories where all the characters are animals is like seeing those Gary Larson Far Side comics. Its funny on the surface because, “hey look a cow is talking like a human.” But then you see the satire right below the surface. If done well, you forget the delivery method, and are left with the message. It’s brilliant because too often, people see an archetypal character and assign a stereotype from their own mind into it, and the commentary is tainted or lost.

So in that way, it’s also kind of a Rorschach Test for the reader. When Coyote calls Ox and Llama lazy no good ____ you see them as ____. When really they are just an Ox and a Llama, there is no subtext for them written in. Which is fascinating to me. Sometimes a Jackass is just a Jackass.

Notable Passage: “Everything was free if you’d pay enough.”

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

#360 The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees- E. Lily Yu

#360 The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees- E. Lily Yu

Printed in the a Nebula Awards Showcase, this piece was named one of the best science fiction or fantasy stories of 2013. It is a political science lesson played out in apiary terms. A colony of wasps are forced from their home, so they strike out for new territory. Once they found it, they looked to conquer:

“Ours is a race of explorers and scientists, cartographers and philosophers, and to rest and grow slothful is to die. Once we are established here, we will expand.”

And expand they did, taking control of the indigenous bee population, one that far outnumbered the wasps but were less sophisticated or practiced in the arts of war and aggression.

One day “By the sheerest of accidents, one of the bees trained as a cartographer’s assistant was an anarchists.” The mutation stuck and slowly took root among the oppressed colony of bees.

“Anarchism being a heritable trait in bees, a number of the daughters of the new queen found themselves questioning the purpose of the monarchy…A perfect society needs no rulers…knowledge and authority ought to be held in common. In order to imagine a new existence, we must free ourselves from the structures of both our failed government and the new unjustifiable hegemony of the wasp nest.”

What followed is chaos, death, insurrection, and revolution, not in that order. Mistakes are made, but among the smart, they are only made once, pass it along!

Rating: 8-10-10-9 Total= 37

#290 How Monkey Got Married, Bought a House, and Found Happiness in Orlando- Chuck Palahniuk

#290 How Monkey Got Married, Bought a House, and Found Happiness in Orlando- Chuck Palahniuk

“Blessed was Monkey with charm, and when she smiled at Stag or Panther or Eagle, they smiled in return and sought to buy whatever product Monkey was shilling. She sold cigarettes to Badger who did not smoke. And Monkey sold beef to Ram, who did not eat meat. So clever was Monkey that she sold hand lotion to Snake, who had no hands!”

I read that and figured this would be a cute children’s story or something. Then I realized this was Chuck Palahniuk and braced myself for the coming dark, disturbing twist that would taint these poor animals in a puddle of decrepitude. But no, in the end this is just a small morality tale about faith.

“No one stood on Monkey’s side. She stood alone armed only with her faith.”

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

#222 The Heifer- Melissa Hardy

#222 The Heifer- Melissa Hardy

Aina and Uwe were teenage sweethearts in Finland when Uwe went off to make something of himself in  America. America was “that great hole in the world which was sucking up all the young men.”

They very much wanted to get married, but her father would only allow it when he could prove that he owned his own farm and could send enough money to pay for her passage across the Atlantic. It took him four years, but after a few successful enterprises, he fulfilled his side of the bargain. Father said no deal, but relented after Aina went on a two-month hunger strike.

Aina got what she wanted, and Uwe never waivered from who he was. Which makes it all that surprising that within a few months of being married, Aina turns on her new husband.

“Olga was a companion to Aina, and once she came to the farm, Aina, who had been so glum and sour the whole winter long, seemed to Uwe almost happy. What he didn’t know was that his little wife soothed herself to sleep at night thinking up ingenious ways to murder him in his sleep.”

Seeking her chance for escape, she murders Uwe and returns to Finland where her Father waited with open arms and a I-told-you-so attitude. “I always knew that Uwe…was no good.”

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

#212 King Bee-T.C. Boyle

#212 King Bee-T.C. Boyle

Wow, what a nightmare! A couple has trouble conceiving a child. They look to adopt but do not want to wait the many years it would take to adopt a new-born of their choosing. They get duped into adopting a 9 year-old boy named Anthony. He appears at first to be the Norman Rockwell archetype of the American male child, but things turn quickly.

“The smile was a regular feature of those first few months—He stopped smiling when the trial period was over, as if he’d suddenly lost control of his facial muscles. It was uncanny. Almost to the day the adoption became formal—the day that he was theirs and they were his—Anthony’s smile vanished.”

His calm demeanor turns to erratic behavior, foul language and an obsession with bees. He likes bees because they have no mercy, “You fit in or you die.” Nothing seems to rid him of his psychotic behavior and he goes in and out of institutions and youth prisons until he becomes an adult, scarier and even more bee-like.

There are obvious literary links here, from the Kafka-esque alienation insect references, or a twilight zone story arc. Personally, I see a lot of Stephen King in this story, which is something I wouldn’t have expected from Boyle. This is a fun outlier so far in this collection.

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

#169 The Myth of Bears- Rick Bass

#169 The Myth of Bears- Rick Bass

Trapper and Judith are married and live deep in the forest, isolated rom the world, relying only on each other. But Trapper is bordering on insanity, or a prolonged version of cabin fever.

“In Trapper’s nighttime fits, he imagines that he is a wolf, and the others in his pack have suddenly turned against him and set upon him with their teeth; he roused in roused in bed to snarl and snap at everything in sight.”

She decides to leave him, and run away. But where? She is a forest woman and doesn’t want to go to town, she is like the Northern Lights. For now she is just glad to be free:

“The sadness of leaving him being transformed into the joy of freedom, and the joy of flight, too.”

He is a trapper, so naturally he goes hunting her. She feels comforted by his pursuits but doesn’t relent. “It’s not that he is a bad man, or that I am a bad woman, she thought. It’s juts that he is a predator and I am prey.”

He thinks about trapping her with gold chains and sugar. He has no introspection. Everything to him is about the hunt, finding ways to catch what he wants. “The mistake last time was that he didn’t hold her tight enough.”

As he pursues Judith, he is being pursued by the wolves, symbolic of his growing insanity.

“The wolves that have been following at a distance draw closer, knowing they are safe when a fit wells up from within him; at such times they know that he is not a man but one of them.”

She is incapable of fully leaving, his pursuit is what gives her identity: “It’s terrible without the thought of his out there chasing her, hunting her. It’s horrible. There’s too much space.”

This is a very strong story, full, earthy, animalistic. It makes me want to go watch Jeremiah Johnson.

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