#207 The Wheat from the Tares- Jabari Asim

#207 The Wheat from the Tares- Jabari Asim

Rose is Pristine’s next door neighbor. She has had a rough winter, sick and friendless. Her husband is abusive, physically and verbally and doesn’t like her going outside the house for any reason. The whole neighborhood knows about the situation, but what does one do? Her meekness aside, her one defining trait is her singing voice.

“Roses voice was an extraordinary thing, an effortless blend of longing, power, and love.”

“When the feeling overtook Rose, she’s shuck her customary shyness, stand an grab the porch railings. Her voice would pour out over the garage roofs, garbage cans, and backyards of Sullivan Avenue. Pristine would later swear that the entire neighborhood grew quiet to give Rose center stage. Gone was the sound of trucks and buses belching exhaust…Into thin air went the leonine roars of the Dobermans standing guard behind Hudson’s Package Liquor. Everything that had made the world teeming with noise just moments before vanished.”

“She sang only when her husband wasn’t home. The silence that followed his arrival was not a kind that encouraged peaceful contemplation; it was troubling and electric, like calm before a storm.”

There are few secrets in communities that live so close, pretenses maybe, but there is nowhere to hide, even if you sit inside and close the blinds. People will see, and people will talk. Friends are good to have if you are just willing to come outside.

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

#203 The Swimmer- John Cheever

#203 The Swimmer- John Cheever

Neddy Merril like many in this affluent community was hungover today but happy and lazing about in the sun and wading in the water. Neddy felt like a suburban explorer and decided to “swim home” making his way from pool to pool through his neighbors back yards.

One by one he hopped hedges, skirted fences and swam each pool, coming upon afternoon parties and handed several drinks. He avoided long conversation and decided to name this string of waterways after his wife…Lucinda River. When he came across an empty pool, he was baffled.

“This breach in his chain of water disappointed him absurdly, and he felt like some explorer who seeks a torrential headwater and finds a dead stream.”

What seems at first like a fools errand, a drunken prank, a rich man’s folly turns out to be something much sadder. He has deluded himself into thinking its just another beautiful day in his perfect life, but it is not, He is not the man he used to be, he is no longer among the wealthy and envied population he fancies himself to be. He had lost his wealth, his lover, and some friends.

This swim is proof that he can lo longer be that man, he cant even climb out of the pool without a ladder. “Believing as he did, that all human obduracy was susceptible to common sense, was he unable to turn back?”

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

#139 Beach Town- Amy Hempel

#139 Beach Town- Amy Hempel

It’s summer and the woman’s house next door has been rented to a young couple. They’re a little loud, their friends a little disrespectful of her property and she’s worried that the gardener isn’t taking proper care of the orchids.

She hears things and sees things of this couple, private things, things she probably shouldn’t know about them. Perhaps she shouldn’t eavesdrop on them? The again:

“Nobody thinks about the way sound carries across water. Even the water of a swimming pool.”

She witnesses the husband cheat on his wife, and then hears the wife’s friends console her when she finds out.

“The woman advised long walks. They told the wife to watch the sun rise and set, to look for solace in the natural world, though they admitted there was no comfort to be found in the world and they would be all fools to expect it.”

Hempel has a way of making you feel like you’re watching her stories quietly from near-by. This story is almost the same thing, like we’re watching someone watch the story take place.

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