#331 Larry’s Place- Michelle Tea

#331 Larry’s Place- Michelle Tea

This was another story out of the San Francisco Noir collection. It’s an interesting read, standard noir feel. A prostitute lives in a shitty run down apartment on Bernal Hill. Her ex girlfriend breaks in and robs her. At the same time, her landlord dies upstairs. She hides the body, lives in his apartment, uses his car, and waits for the inevitable.

Rating: 7-6-6-5 Total= 24

#330 The Neutral Zone- Kate Braverman

#330 The Neutral Zone- Kate Braverman

Zoe and Clarissa are unconventional friends. Once best friends, first loves, and inseparable companions, they have taken different paths in life, but see each other as deep, meaningful soul mates. There is no vocabulary for their connection:

-“They meet episodically. Conventional friendship, with its narrative of consensual commitments and behaviors, has proved too intimate and demanding.”

-“Human perimeters are collective background razor wire. We’re too hip for that shit.”

-“We’ll invent rituals appropriate for our circumstances.”

-“Sporadic moments of illumination in extreme altitudes requiring oxygen masks.”

-“They communicate by email, fax, and newspaper clippings. The telephone is unbearable…it would be too disturbing and intrusive if they could actually perceive one another without artificial mediation.”

Like many passionate relationships during childhood, that fire is never the same. Though the meaning of it may stay strong, paths diverge, and any attempt to go back will lead to resentment and pain.

Notable Passage: “The bay is a liquid representation of fall. It’s in continual transition. It’s a form of treachery. All fluid bodies are autumnal and promise betrayal.”

Rating: 8-7-7-6 Total= 28

# 329 I Clench My Hands Into Fists and They Look Like Someone Else’s- Antonio Ruiz-Camacho

# 329 I Clench My Hands Into Fists and They Look Like Someone Else’s- Antonio Ruiz-Camacho

Homero and Ximena are siblings. They are Mexican teenagers stuck in New York City awaiting word from their parents. If there is a theme running through this collection, it is kids from a wealthy family fleeing the violence of Mexico City. They worry about the fate of their Grandfather and what the future holds for their family.

The whole story is written in dialogue, which makes it a challenge to figure out the context and setting, but it’s a fun challenge, kind of like a puzzle. The conversations run from normal brother-sister talk to the shadow looming over their whole sketchy situation. Being uprooted from their homes and separated from their parents, sometimes the best things to talk about are the normal things.

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

#328 The Key- Eudora Welty

#328 The Key- Eudora Welty

Albert and Ellie are in train station waiting to travel to Niagara Falls. It is a long awaited wedding trip they have worked hard and saved for. Ellie is skeptical that this trip will change what’s wrong with their marriage.

Albert is “too shy for this world.” “He looked homemade, as though his wife had self-consciously knitted or somehow contrived a husband when she sat alone at night.”

Sitting in the station, lost in his shyness, a key suddenly slip on the floor into his vision. Most of the rest of the passengers witnessed the key being dropped by another man, but not Albert. He saw it as a sign, a way to change his life.

“Now you can stop being ashamed of me, for being so cautious and slow all my life, for taking my own time…You can take hope. Because it was I who found the key.”

The Key was happiness, a change for the better, and it was all his. Ellie, at first liked the change, but then resented it, seeing Albert’s love of happiness as a challenge to her, as if she herself wasn’t enough for Albert. To her, Albert’s happiness was selfish unless she also possessed it:

“Happiness…is something that appears to you suddenly, that it is meant for you, a thing for which you reach for and pick up and hide at your breast, a shiny thing that reminds you of something alive and leaping.”

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

#327 For Love of Trains- David Dante Troutt

#327 For Love of Trains- David Dante Troutt

The Patterson’s learned of a horrible event. Their 19 year old son, Haywood had been falsely arrested for murder and rape aboard a train. Him and 8 others were convicted and sentenced to death in an Alabama prison. The family became hardened to the hopeless reality that faced their family.

“[He] became like a hopeless kind of iron, just thickening and hardening under flames he couldn’t put out.”

After the ineptitude of the NAACP lawyer, they accepted the help of a white, Jewish, communist group from New York. They won a stay of execution and finally were able to see Haywood in person. He was beaten, and desperate, but he was their son:

“They’d beaten him across the left side of his face, and his eyes swole up. But when you looked deep into them there were the brown, tender eyes of the boy.”

They won a Supreme Court appeal, but didn’t win the re-trial. As the case continued to make its way back and forth, disaster strikes again. Even without hope, you can still have fight, what else is there?

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