#718 Wahala- Chinelo Okparanta

#718 Wahala- Chinelo Okparanta

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

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

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

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

#709 The Miracle Worker- Mia Alvar

#709 The Miracle Worker- Mia Alvar

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

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

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

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

#633 War in the Trash Cans- Guadalupe Nettel

#633 War in the Trash Cans- Guadalupe Nettel

A child is lonely and abandoned by his parents. They are “hippy” parents and have been fighting. When they separate, they feel unable to care for the child, so she is left with her aunt, a more proper middle-class family.

She misses her mother, even though she is a disaster, “An incredibly tender disaster to which I was of course deeply attached.”

She is lonely and quiet in her new surroundings. Her school is divided between the English speaking blond-headed children and the lower-class Mexicans. She is with the latter while her cousins are in the better school. Instead if integrating, she makes the decision to stay by herself, eat by herself and wander the kitchen at night.

“I ate alone, like a ghost shoes life unfolds alongside the living but is uninterrupted by them. I liked the silence and the stillness of those moments.”

One night she comes across a cockroach, and is frightened and angered by its presence. She squashes it, and Clemencia, the superstitious maid warns that the cockroaches will now invade. She is right. The house is suddenly overrun by roaches and the family is on high alert trying to rid themselves of the scourge.

“Of one thing I was certain: if we didn’t exile them, they would us.”

Only one thing will scare off the roaches, eating them. So all week they prepare meals with roaches, and eventually they disappear. The roaches could represent the child’s fear, or loneliness or any of her emotions. By trying to aggressively squash them, they will only come back bigger and more invasive. But by embracing them, literally making them a part of her, they will no longer haunt her. And when the roaches disappear she becomes more outgoing and a part of her adopted family.

However, there will always be that roach, or fear or loneliness lurkng around the corner, if only to remind her of what was once there.

Rating: 9-9-9-8 Total= 35

#570 Grendel’s Mother- Katherine Heiny

#570 Grendel’s Mother- Katherine Heiny

This started out as a pretty straight forward story. Maya and Rhodes are having their first child. As for the title of the story: after their first ultrasound they went to Rhodes’ parents’ house and told them the good news. Rhodes’ wacky mother wanted to name the child Thor if it was a boy, or Grendel if it was a girl. 

Meanwhile, Maya’s stepsister Magellan just broke up with her boyfriend and was devastated.

“Was there any breakup more painful than an unexplained one…It could haunt you for months, even for years, the unknown reason, and take on a nearly mythical importance, until you forgot, or almost forgot, that the truly important thing was that someone you wanted to be with no longer wanted to be with you.”

Like I said, this started out straight forward, then a lot of stuff got dumped on it. Magellan moved in with Maya and Rhodes; they ran into Rhodes first love; witnessed her OB-GYN breaking up with his girlfriend; Maya found out that Rhodes had a brother that died when he was only one day old; She caught Magellan and her ex-boyfriend having sex on her bed, etc.

It isn’t chaotic as much as it’s random. Some of these things make sense for the story but others just don’t add anything that I can see. I guess an argument can be made that all this stuff happens just before a big life moment to test you to see if you are ready, but that’s thin at best. It’s too busy for me—my favorite part is calling the unborn child Grendel.

Rating: 8-7-5-5 Total= 25

#553 The Stray Horse- Felisberto Hernandez

#553 The Stray Horse- Felisberto Hernandez

Now this is writing! In a period where some writers try too hard to make virtue out of the mundane, it is refreshing to read a story like this. Language can be an art-form in itself without having to be lofty. It can uplift without looking down its nose. Too many writers try too hard to be clever, mistaking word play for depth. Hernandez has no such affliction.

What better place to showcase beautiful language than through the imagination of a child. The boy in this story remembers fondly his childhood piano lessons. Like many lonely children, he sees the world around him and bends the things he doesn’t understand to a creative world he can. Inanimate objects suddenly have personality and life:

“Although the secrets of grown-ups could be glimpsed in their actions and conversations, I had my favorite way of uncovering them—when the people were absent and I could find their traces in something they had left behind…the moment it was left unattended I could begin to trace that person’s secrets in it.”

He idolizes and falls in love with Celine, his music teacher. Such a crush can have a lasting effect on a person:

“Celine would make me spread my hands on the keys and, with her fingers, she bend mine back, as if she were teaching a spider to move its legs. She was more closely in touch with my hands than I was myself. When she made them crawl like slow crabs over white and black pebbles, suddenly the hands came upon sounds that cast a spell on everything in the circle of lamplight, giving each object a new charm.”

Story aside, there are myriad phrases and paragraphs in this story that ooze with emotion and make the reader stop, breath deep, take a moment, and go back to read them again, only this time slower and with more time to savor:

“Someone dumps chunks of the past at the feet of the imagination, who hastily sorts through them in the swaying light of a small lantern it holds over them, mixing earth and shadows. Suddenly it drops the lantern on the soil of memory and the light goes out. Then once more the imagination is an insect flying over forgotten distances to land again on the edge of the present.”

Notable Passage (as if there were only one): “What never went quite to sleep was the specter of magnolias. Although I had left behind the trees where they lived, they were with me, hidden in the back of my eyes, and suddenly I felt their presence, light as a breath somewhere blown into the air by thought, scattered around the room, and blending into the furniture.”

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

#541 The Caretaker- Anthony Doerr

#541 The Caretaker- Anthony Doerr

Doerr’s short stories are not like any of the others I’ve read. They don’t tell stories about everyday occurrences, they don’t try to tap into common themes or try to make connections that the reader can relate to. These are singular tales, each an emotional undertaking that takes us into an experience we would otherwise never think possible.

Joseph is a thirty-five year old Liberian man, doing anything he can do to survive, including theft and looting. His mother is a loving woman, teaches his son English from a dictionary and tends to her garden. When civil war breaks out, she disappears and he is lost. He searches for her but only finds death, and he is forced to kill a man.

He finds his way aboard a freighter and is given an American refugee visa. He gets a job as a winter caretaker at a beach resort in Oregon. When he witnesses a pod of beached whales on the shore, he goes into a depression he cannot find relief from. He buries the hearts of the whales. He is fired from the job because during his depression the house was left in extreme disrepair and he settles into the adjacent forest tending to a garden he has planted over the whale hearts.

One day he saves the life of Belle, the daughter of his former employer. She was about to commit suicide. They begin a secret friendship. She is deaf and teaches him sign language like his mother used to teach him English. They grow the garden together, the only thing Joseph has left of his mother. He is discovered, arrested and when he won’t eat, he is hospitalized. He is on the brink of death, and he seems resolved with his plight.

“There is no fight is Joseph, no anger, no outrage at injustice. He is not guilty of their crimes but he is guilty of so many others. There has never been a man guilty of so much, he thinks, a man more deserving of penalty."

When Belle brings his the fruits of their garden, he eats with absolute joy. It might be a last meal, or it might be redemption. But it is pure light.

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

#521 Charity Begins at Home- Fatima Shaik

#521 Charity Begins at Home- Fatima Shaik

Loutie is a mute, she lives with her parents in Louisiana. They are a old couple, very religious, but not exactly pure of soul. They can physically be best described as very large people.

“Words like wide, broad, heavy or fat are not used in this house. They are much too personal for people in Mama and Papa’s condition.”

Loutie herself is a bit slow, but we see her thought process as she goes about her days. They told her that she was a twin, and her brother never made it. So, she waits for another one, and she thinks about children often.

 “I am a special and innocent child for no matter how old I get, Mama said. She told me that over 30 years past when my mind first wouldn’t work with my mouth. We could never get me to talk. The things I hear stay inside and don’t come back.”

Life in that house is almost dead. It’s stagnant and oppressive as August weather in Louisiana. Her mother has been talking about her own death for as long as Loutie can remember.

“She planned for her funeral over 20 years ago. Since then, she’s just been waiting.”

This is the first story in Shaik’s collection, What Went Missing and What Got Found. So far, so good. This was a unique look into the mind of a non-traditional narrator, so I like that. I hope that Shaik’s Afro-Creole background adds a new viewpoint from other collections we’ve seen here.

Notable Passage: “This is the plan: I will end the suffering of the foreign babies. And when they are all happy, I will be free to be happy, and everyone else will be too. Just like Jesus, I will be free for the sake of all the people and, in the process, I might even get famous.”

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

#519 Bravery- Charles Baxter

#519 Bravery- Charles Baxter

“Despite what other girls said, all boys were not alike: you had to make your way through their variables blindly, guessing at hidden qualities, the ones you could live with.”

Susan married Elijah, a good-guy, a sweet man, a loving, caring doctor. “He was the only man she ever loved and she was still trying to get used to it.”

After marriage they took a trip to Prague, where they wanted to conceive their first child. Susan kept seeing the sweetness, and tenderness of her husband and knew that he would make a good father, but something bothered her. In the plaza one day a crazy woman grabbed her and told her that she would have a son and she would become jealous of her husband, of the woman inside him.

When her son was born, she did in fact resent Elijah’s tenderness, his ability to sooth the child, and became insistent that he not ever feed the child, that was a mother’s job and he could not take that from her. The fight made him angry and when he came home that night bloody from a fight, he told her a story about saving a girl from being attacked. She didn’t believe the story—he might have made it up to make her think he was more of a man—but it still made her happy…at least for one more day.

Notable Passage: “Prague wasn’t Kafka’s birthplace for nothing.”

#503 Click-Clack the Rattlebag- Neil Gaiman

#503 Click-Clack the Rattlebag- Neil Gaiman

This is a short, well-developed horror story. A child is at home in his family’s large, dark, dusty house. He is being watched by his sister’s new boyfriend. He wants to hear a story before he goes to bed, and asks for a story about Click-Clacks:

-Click-Clacks, said the boy, are the best monsters ever.

-Are they from Television?

-I don’t think so. I don’t thing any people know where they come from. Mostly they come from the dark.

-Good place for a monster to come from.

-Yes.

So the boy and the boyfriend watching him walk down the hallway to the boy’s bedroom while they talk about what makes a good Click-Clack horror story. “Click-Clacks are much scarier than vampires.” “They’re made of dark. And they come in when you don’t pay attention…and they look like what you’re not expecting.”

While they discuss the anatomy of a good horror story, it turns into a horror story. Click-Clack!

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

#481 Mrs. Sen’s- Jhumpa Lahiri

#481 Mrs. Sen’s- Jhumpa Lahiri

Eliot has a new afterschool babysitter. He goes to Mrs Sen’s house. She is a very proper, but pleasant Indian Woman, the wife of the Mathematics Professor at the University. Eliot is the only one in her care. They spend the afternoons in normal rituals, he sits eating crackers and read the comics while she meticulously prepares dinner for her and her husband.

Mrs. Sen seems like a very lonely woman. She misses her home, the people, the closeness of the neighbors, the smells, the fresh fish, etc. It might be possible that she watches after Eliot because she likes the company, not that she needs the money. Back home she had enough money to have her own driver.

This story is strong on the senses; we notice the temperatures, the smells, the colors, the touch of other humans, or the lack of these things—in the case of being able to scream and having nobody hear. There is deep, but understated emotion as we find in most of Lahiri’s stories.

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

#476 The Conjurer Made Off With the Dish- Naguib Mahfouz

#476 The Conjurer Made Off With the Dish- Naguib Mahfouz

A daydreaming child is old enough to run errands for his mother, but doesn’t have the concentration level to carry out the simple task of going to get some beans from the market. Three times he must return home to be told the details about what to get. When he finally gets the order right, he has lost the money, then he loses the dish, then he gets waylaid by a conjurer's show, then a beautiful girl catches his eye.

Since he will certainly catch a beating when he gets home, might as well stay out to chase the day’s adventures. Oh, to be a daydreaming child again.

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

#364 Family Reunion- Kirsten Valdez-Quade

#364 Family Reunion- Kirsten Valdez-Quade

Claire lived with her mother, her step-dad, and her sister in a Mormon-dominated community. They were atheist, and for a young girl being that kind of different was hard:

-“By age eleven, Claire understood that the best way to overcome her disadvantages was to convert.”

-“At church and school, Claire hid the truth about her own family”

-“Claire became adept at playing Mormon, and while she never fooled anyone, at least she didn’t offend anyone, either.”

She found a good friend, Morgan, who didn’t seem to mind their differences, until Claire was invited to go with Morgan’s family to a family reunion. Only it wasn’t a family reunion. Claire could either be saved, cast into the outer darkness, or just freaked out by another disturbed, alcoholic parent.

Overall I’m enjoying this collection of stories. However, as in many of them, this one could have been pared down by ten or so pages. I find too much dialogue that doesn’t add to the story much. In a longer medium, such excess might add pace, or character depth, but in a short story just adds length.

After one whole year of short stories, I’m starting to believe that great short stories have meaning or intent behind most of its content. A short story has a certain shape based on where it’s headed and where it’s been. If there is something we don’t need to hear, most likely it should be cut. Of course, there are always exceptions, and I reserve the right to be wrong on this or change my mind.

Rating: 7-8-7-7= 29

#324 Movement- Nancy Fulda

#324 Movement- Nancy Fulda

This is a fantastic and touching story about the thoughts of a girl that has been diagnosed with temporal autism. Although, she herself thinks the autism part is false. In many ways her brain works in an advanced ways, but in others she is unable to partake in normal human activities. Her parents are debating whether of not to go ahead with a procedure to “fix” her condition.

“It’s a matter of trade-offs…the brain cannot be optimized for everything at once.”

She is ultra aware of her surroundings, she can perform high-level numeric function, conceptualize her own connection to time and space, but it takes her weeks sometimes to formulate a verbal response to a question posed to her directly. Its not that she doesn’t want to answer, just nobody is willing to, or understands that they should wait that long for a response.

“Words are such fleeting indefinite things. They slip through the spaces between my thoughts and are lost.”

While pondering whether she would actual want the procedure that would make her “normal,” she watches a flytrap plant that has evolved with a larger blossom then the others, one too big for its current stem to hold. She roots for the plant’s development and watches to see if it will survive.

“I wonder, if the plant had been offered the certainty of mediocrity rather than the chance of greatness, would it have accepted.”

Notable Passage: “It should not be surprising that, on the way from what we are to what we are becoming, there should be friction and false starts along the way. Noise is intrinsic to change. Progression is inherently chaotic.”

Rating: 8-9-10-8 Total= 35