#859 Runs Girl- Chinelo Okparanta

#859 Runs Girl- Chinelo Okparanta

Ada is a young Nigerian woman whose mother is having serious health problems. Because of money, they don’t go to the hospital soon enough, so her mother suffers. Because of money, they don’t get the care they need that could save her mother’s life. Because of money, Ada will turn to a night of prostitution to try to raise enough money to save her mother’s life. Because of money, Ada’s mother will die soon after hearing of her daughters sacrifice. Because of money, Ada, already ashamed of herself, will think her mother died disappointed in her as well.

Notable Passage: “And so there were silences, as if we no longer valued spoken words, as if spoken words were gaudy finishes on a delicate piece of art, unnecessary distractions from the masterpiece, whose substance was more meaningfully experienced if left unornamented.”

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

#758 The Foundations of the Earth- Randall Kenan

#758 The Foundations of the Earth- Randall Kenan

Maggie was a seventy-year old matriarch of a southern sharecropping family. The joy of her life was her grandson Edward who left some years ago to go to college in Boston. He never came back. She is left lonely and confused.

“Her [spiritual weight] born not of the sun but of profound loneliness, an oppressive emptiness, a stabbing guilt. Sometimes she even wished she was a drinking woman.”

Some years later, Edward dies and she learns that he had been living with another man, afraid to tell her of his homosexuality. God comes to her in a dream and tells her to avoid judgment and hate. She invites her son’s lover—a white man—to come south to visit her and tell her about the real Edward. She is open, albeit confronted with her upbringing, and finds peace in the life she sees. After all, she knows discrimination, and she knows respect.

Notable Passage: “Healing sleep, soothing sleep, sleep to make the world go away, sleep like death. Her mama had told her that sleep was the best medicine God ever made. When things get too rough—go to bed.”

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

#703 Driving Without a License- Fatima Shaik

#703 Driving Without a License- Fatima Shaik

A dead beat mother abandons her daughter, even after the child was already abandoned by her father. She just leaves her in a cradle on the steps of someone she knows, and takes off out of town. She has someone keeping tabs on her over the years, through grade school and High School graduation. Now her daughter contacts her and asks her to come to North Carolina to visit her. 

She reflects on her choices and rationalizes leaving the child in more capable hands. She is thinking about her bad choices as she twice gets pulled over speeding in a stolen car with a loaded gun visibly sitting on the floor next to her. She won’t get to see her daughter today. That’s probably for the best.

“She’ll never see me. Hopefully, she’ll never want to see me again. That’s how much I love her.”

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

#650 Bobcat- Rebecca Lee

#650 Bobcat- Rebecca Lee

The narrator is a woman, late in pregnancy. Her and her husband are having a dinner party. She is surrounded by people in the writing world, authors and literary agents. She feels both inadequate and superior to her guests, judging them at times harshly. She knows that the husband of one the couples invited has been having an affair with her colleague. 

An author at the party has written a recent acclaimed memoir accounting her harrowing experience of losing her arm to a bobcat while being stuck in the mountains. She wonders if the story is made up and later hears the author say that the bobcat is both real and a metaphor. The bobcat is the things we fear ready to pull us apart when we are at our weakest. It is just like the story about woman creating civilization to create safety around themselves after pregnancy, again at their most vulnerable. 

This dinner party is that type of nesting or civilization building for the narrator. But she spends too much time worrying about her guests and their problems, not seeing the bobcat lurking in her shadows waiting to attack her at her most vulnerable moment.

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

#462 The First Day- Edward P. Jones

#462 The First Day- Edward P. Jones

This is a touching first day of school story. A mother takes her daughter to kindergarten for the first time. She takes her to the wrong school though. She wanted her daughter to go to the older school that is across from her church. That’s the school she knows about and that’s where she has thoughts of her daughter learning all the things she hasn’t.

When they arrive at the correct school we see that the mother herself can’t read. This is why her daughter’s education is so important. Her mother is proud but a little out of her element. We see new vs. old as a symbol here, the new school, her new shoes, etc. When her mother leaves her in the hands of her new teacher, we see her old socks have been torn, and the sound of her fleeting footsteps echo like the sound of time marching on.

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

#404 The North London Book of the Dead- Will Self

#404 The North London Book of the Dead- Will Self

The first few pages feel like a sad, touching story about a son losing his mother to cancer, and perhaps that is what the whole story is, but then it takes a sharp left turn. It turns out that when you die in London you don’t really go anywhere.

“When you die, you move to another part of London.”

“The dead community are self-administering and there are dead people in most of the major enterprises, organizations and institutions. There are some autonomous services for dead people, but on the whole dead services operate alongside live ones. Most dead people have jobs, some work for live companies. Mother for example, was working for a live publishing company.”

Either a work of pure fantasy, or a man unwilling to let go of a loved one. Either way, this is a pretty typical style and quirkiness of Will Self.

Word of the Day: Eschatology- a branch of theology concerned with the final events in the history of the world or of humankind

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

#372 Better Latitude- Antonio Ruiz-Camacho

#372 Better Latitude- Antonio Ruiz-Camacho

A single mother is raising her child and trying to make sense of his father’s disappearance. The whole story is written like a letter that will never be sent. Laureano, used to his father’s sparse company, only believes his father has taken a long trip and will soon come back. His mother knows better, although she herself is in some denial:

“I realized you had a capacity for disposing of people like they were ziplock bags, but I considered this trait of yours the same way I did tragedy or bad luck, only affecting other people, never myself.”

There is something both noble and tragic about this delusional mother, hanging on to any thread of hope, her son in a state of suspended emotional development. The end will not be good, no matter how hard she works as a mother, something is missing. Maybe it’s not just his father, maybe the missing truth is more damaging.

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

#280 Mojave Rats- Kirsten Valdez Quade

#280 Mojave Rats- Kirsten Valdez Quade

In a trailer near the salt flats of the Mojave, Monica and her two daughters, Cordelia and Beatrice are freezing cold. The heater of their trailer has broke and Eliot, who can fix it, is gone until nightfall. They live in the trailer while Elliot gathers rock samples to finish his PhD in geology. Monica does not like living in a trailer park:

“Monica couldn’t help imagining sordid stories for them: mental illness, violent crime, shattering personal tragedy. The place caught people like trash in a wire fence, damaged, discarded people…Mojave rats…denizens of the dust.”

Despite knowing that they are educated people, with value and worth, she can’t help judging the rest of the park’s denizens harshly. “He could have been anything: a child molester, gambling addict, harmless kook. Why not a NASA engineer?”

“Monica wasn’t proud of her pretensions. But it was so easy to feel disdain for these people, so vital she not be mistaken for one of them.”

In the cold, Monica struggles with her past marriage and the daughter she had with her previous husband. She resents her presence, and then hates herself for feeling anything but love for Cordelia…then blames Cordelia for feeling guilty.

“Cordelia would forever feel on the outside, Monica saw, and Monica herself had put her there, because a person couldn’t live with that kind of reproach. It would only get harder between them…Cordelia’s judgments would become more pointed.”

Jeez, that’s a lot to put on a kid that’s been through a divorce and dragged out to live in the salt flats to live in a cold temporary trailer.

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

#268 Mines- Susan Straight

#268 Mines- Susan Straight

Clarette works at the juvenile prison. She sees her community locked up in there, she sees her family locked up in there. But she works there anyway, because somebody has to and she needs a job. She needs a job so she can keep her own son out of prison. She’s there so he won't be.

She resents the people outside with opinions about here working there. She resents her family telling her to look out for her nephew who’s inside. They had 17 years to look out for him, and now it’s her responsibility?

For some, the issue of prisons and the racial realities of the prison system is an abstract talking point, for some it’s more personal, and Clarette doesn’t care about the concepts, she cares about keeping her son safe. She does what she has to. As her nephew points out, “I’ve got to get mines.”

Notable Passage: “The old days, the men go off to the army. Hard time, let me tell you. They go off to die, or they come back. But if they die, we get some money from the army. If they come back, they get a job on the base. Now them little boys, they go off to the prison just like the army. Like they have to. To be a man. They go off to die, or to come back. But they aint got nothing. Nothing either way.”

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

#255 A Happy Meal- Sandip Roy

#255 A Happy Meal- Sandip Roy

Don’t Let Him Know is called a "Novel in Stories", with each chapter being a snapshop or a vignette all linked into one tale. I’m not sure if each will work as a true short story, but I’m intrigued with the concept and so I will give it a shot.

The first chapter, Happy Meal introduces Romola, a widow recently moved to California from Calcutta. Her son Amit, the man of the family since his dad died brought her here to be easier to take care of.  On his trip back to Calcutta to finish his father’s affairs, he found a letter address to Romola, from a family friend he recognized as his Uncle. It was written before his parent’s marriage, and showed that his mother was in love with another man. He confronts his mother, but is quick to understanding.

“The past she thought could always be wiped clean like a kitchen counter if you were careful enough.”

But if you weren’t, “…the past seemed too complicated to explain now, full of serated edges that could rip everything to shreds.”

This realization that her past is done, and her son is no longer a boy in need of protection throws her for a loop. “She was tired, so tired of always being the one who had to smooth things over, the one who had to keep things running.”

She is confused in this new place, bot geographically and metaphysically, she has a sudden urge to indulge herself is something forbidden, something new, something truly American…a McDonalds Hamburger.

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