#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

#487 The Landing- Lydia Davis

#487 The Landing- Lydia Davis

A nervous passenger recounts her experience during an emergency airplane landing. The landing itself is not much of a story, but the narrator’s fearful thoughts makes up the core of the story. It doesn’t appear that they are in all that much danger, but she is phobic and so goes through some of the steps of grief and acceptance.

“Our lives might be almost over. This required an immediate reconciliation with the idea of death, and it required an immediate decision as to the best way to leave this world. What should be my last thoughts on this earth, in this life?”

That would make for a fun dinner party conversation, or possible the topic of a thesis paper in psychology: If you could choose, what would be your last thought before you die?

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

#296 Future Emergencies- Nicole Krauss

#296 Future Emergencies- Nicole Krauss

The city has announced an impending threat to public health, and every citizen is required to pick up a gas mask for protection. When such a threat is imminent, people feel danger everywhere.

“A week earlier the clocks had been turned back…I always feel a little pang of hurt that first day when darkness fall without warning. It’s the slight sickening feeling of being reminded of the reckless authority of time, of losing your bearings in a words who’s dimensions you thought you’d learn to live with.”

The world is a dangerous place, and it seems like these types of threats are more and more likely. Was the threat a coming apocalypse? Or, was it “a necessary scourge, natural or manmade, that comes through periodically to control the population.”

Either way, we find our solace and comfort wherever we can: “I have the feeling then that Victor is standing between me and some distant harm, and that his presence is what shields me from it.”

We sometimes forget that the world was always a dangerous place, and by looking into the past, we may find comfort or protection from the dangers of now.

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

#179 The Boy on the Couch- Jabari Asim

#179 The Boy on the Couch- Jabari Asim

It’s tough being a 9 year old boy. Have to battle with older brothers, neighborhood bullies, parents always telling you what to do, and now you have your first crush? Life is complicated.

“Your grandma likes to say that there are no boys under this roof, but I’ll tell you this: there’s only one man and he ain’t you.”

Unfortunately for Crispus, the girl he had decided to have a crush on was playing with his fears, telling him that there was a ghost in his house. More specifically, there was a ghost of a boy sitting on his living room couch. That sent his whole world spinning.

“Then I went to my room, sat on my bed, and considered the situation. I didn’t like to visit the third floor because it was scary up there. I didn’t like to go to the basement by myself because it was scary down there. I had been avoiding the couch for several days because of the scary dents in the cushion. I was running out of places to cower.”

His mind, like his almost girlfriend, like his older brothers, start to play tricks on him. Life is rough for a 9 year-old boy.

Notable Passage: “I caught a whiff of her as she entered the kitchen, and she smelled delicious, just like the pie. She was wasting her time with Avon perfume. If she could bottle that stuff, she’d be a millionaire.”

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

#151 Sic Transit Gloria- Jabari Asim

#151 Sic Transit Gloria- Jabari Asim

Gloria is paralyzed by fear, fear of people, fear of outside, and more of all fear of the Devil. She is a shut-in, trying her best to fend off the evil of this world and raise her son, Roderick. Roderick is a special child with unnatural intelligence, he is aptly named by everyone in the neighborhood, The Genius. Gloria rarely leaves the house, not even for her own mother’s funeral, because cemeteries have too many places for the Devil to hide. While looking out for Satan, she awaits signs from God.

“All these years of fearing—maybe even believing—that I’ve been marked by the devil. All these years spending every living minute looking over my shoulder for Satan, and here come God, right on time.”

Roderick’s story is an interesting one. He is a Christ-like figure in these tales. Born of a mother with no father, he will bear suffering to uplift the community, his talents likely will have to be sacrificed like his Mentor/Father (figure) Orville. But for now this story is about his mother. What will it take for her to overcome her own burdens, her own fear, and face her own demons. It appears that she is now prepared to face the world to protect her son, her very own savior.

“The sound doesn’t enter my ears like noise normally does. It’s born in my bones, rises out of my pores, and takes shape in the air. It makes me hot and cold at the same time. Chills up my spine, sparks in my limbs. My son speaks, God touches me, and I get up and go.”

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

#142 Peace of Mind- T.C. Boyle

#142 Peace of Mind- T.C. Boyle

Giselle sells security systems to the rich. She sells fear, paranoia, anger…peace of mind. She’s very good at it. After all it’s easy to sell these things in a world as messed up as ours:

“The world was a violent, rotten, corrupt, seething with hatred and perversion, and there was no escaping it. Everything you worked for, everything you loved had to be locked up as if you were under siege.”

Door-to-door she goes, answering inquiries about the alarms, and she herself is armed with horror stories about men in masks, perverts dressed nicely, and pure woman being violated. She has already made a big sale and its barely noon:

“It was a few minutes past twelve, crime was rampant, and she was feeling lucky.”

However, things turn bad when she visits a man looking for trouble. This man eats salesmen for fun, chews them up and frightens them with his own horror stories. He ends up becoming one more tale she uses to sell.

What is security, who is dangerous, and what can we do to protect ourselves? Perhaps the things we fear are the wrong things, and the places we are looking are the wrong places and security is only a Peace of Mind.

Notable Passage: “Giselle slid into the front seat of the Mercedes and cranked up the salsa music that made her feel like every day was a fiesta.”

Rating: 8-8-8-6 Total= 30

#82 The Lagoon- Joseph Conrad

#82 The Lagoon- Joseph Conrad

Having only read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, I was very excited to read this one. Like that tale, The Lagoon begins on a vessel in dark and mysterious tropical waters. He must stop in an Indonesian lagoon at the hut of a Malaysian man, Arsat who it is said: “Such a man can disturb the course of fate by glances or words.”

This is not a place he and his crew would like to stay: “They would have preferred to spend the night somewhere else than on this lagoon of weird aspect and ghostly reputation.”

Arsat is nursing his sick love and while she suffers, Arsat tells his tale. He believes he betrayed his brother to be with this woman, and has been living with that weight. When the tale ends, the woman dies and the sun rises as if that weight and guilt has cleared.

Conrad has such a fiercely intense style of prose. Just once in my life I’d like to be able to write a sentence like this one:

“In that fleeting and powerful disturbance of his being the earth enfolded in the starlight peace became a shadowy country of inhuman strife, a battle-field of phantoms terrible and charming, august or ignoble, struggling ardently for the possession of our helpless hearts. An unquiet and mysterious country of inextinguishable desires and fears.”

Or this one:

“The fear and fascination, the inspiration and the wonder of death—of death near, unavoidable and unseen, soothed the unrest of his race and stirred the most indistinct, the most intimate of his thoughts.”

Notable Passage: “In the stillness of the air every tree, every leaf, every bough, every tendril of creeper, and every petal of minute blossoms seemed to have bewitched into an immobility perfect and final.”

Rating: 10-7-8-8 Total= 33