Emerging Writers Network

Short Story Month - Visiting Hours - The Dead Woman from the Newspaper by Patry Francis

Patry Francis' story, "The Dead Woman from the Newspaper," was probably the only story that upon receiving it I realized I had read it before - in The Ontario Review where it was originally published. 

The story of Johnny Sheehan and his wife, Alice, grabbed me with the opening scene - Alice reading the newspaper to Johnny on the bus (in the past he'd given up private transportation as immoral, and also had glaucoma and couldn't read for himself) and read about a woman found in the trunk of a car, dead.  He wondered aloud about the smell, which brought forth a comment from a man not wanting to hear about rotting corpses so soon after breakfast, which brought another woman into the conversation, stating that we all were interested in murder and that sort of thing.  I believe another three or four bus riders got involved in the conversation before it was over and, again, that scene did it for me. I had to include it in Visiting Hours (Press 53, 2008).

Short Story Month - Visiting Hours - One Moment: 1330 South McLeod

I started to read Kaytie M. Lee's story, "One Moment:  1330 South McLeod," and after reading:

Steven sat in the back seat of a police cruiser, the first time he'd ever seen the view from behind scratched Plexiglas.  He wasn't paying much attention to it except to notice that Midge's blood had dripped onto the dingy, white vinyl seat.  He held Midge's head in his lap, his shaking hands cupping her jaw.  One brown eye gazed intently on him, pupils fully dilated, rims of white where the eyelids pulled back in shock.  He massaged her velvet jowls with his thumbs.  Her pink tongue lolled from her gaping mouth;  blood flecked her canines.

that this was finally a story with an animal patient, or at least I was pretty sure it was.  Then I read:

For whatever reason -- denial, possibly, or simple medical ignorance -- the fact that his dapple-brown greyhound's blood oozed from a gash in her side and onto the police car's upholstery bothered him more than the caved-in appearance of her ribs and the peculiar angle her pelvis jutted out.

Now I was absolutely sure and very excited.  I was hoping for at least one veterinary story.  Though, the seemingly normal, yet odd, human reaction of being more upset about an injured dog than many of the dying people from the other stories kicked in while reading Lee's effort.  While the dog is certainly the patient here, so is the relationship between Steven and his wife, Rebecca, and the story does an excellent job of letting that take center stage.

Short Story Month - Visiting Hours - The Kiss-Me-Quick by Rochelle Distelheim

I visited my friend and we talked about shoes instead of about dying.  I wanted to talk about dying, but she's the one who's dying and she wanted to talk about shoes.  We looked at the three shoe boxes lined up on the carpet next to the couch where she was.  The boxes were open and I saw the tips of three new pairs of shoes.

This is the opening to Rochelle Distelheim's "The Kiss-Me-Quick," a not quite 3 pages long short story originally published in North American Review.  It caught my attention right away as the visiting hours again weren't saddled with being in a hospital, but also because it captured a certain aspect of visiting hours - the people that don't want to talk about the inevitable, even though it seems to be the point of visiting hours some times (not always, this seemed to capture the escapism portion where the visitors do what they can to take the inevitable off of the patient's mind).

Short Story Month - Visiting Hours - The Well-Head by Gabriel Welsch

When I received "The Well-Head" from Gabriel Welsch I was a bit surprised.  To that time I had only known his poetry, and to be honest, not even a ton of that.  And the story plays a little loose with the visiting hours ideas, having at the crux a disabled woman that rides a scooter around her home and especially her garden, and her gardener, that ends up doubling as a caretaker.

This story is more about relationships than it is about visiting hours, and this includes the relationship between the woman, Emeline, and her gardener, Casey, as well as those between each of these women, and Emeline's son (who pays Casey), Paul.  It's a different type of triangle relationship than usual as neither woman seems overly excited to ever hear from Paul.  Welsch captures their scenarios and the feelings each character has perfectly, allowing the reader right into their world as if he/she were the one riding that scooter through the garden.

Short Story Month - Visiting Hours - My Father's Heart by David Abrams

David Abrams' story, "My Father's Heart," was a great one to me for inclusion as it was a story in which the person visiting, the son of the patient, was actually rooting for death.  He'd hated the man his father was, hated how he treated his mother, and was happy to see him there, hoping his father would be afraid of him for once.

When I walk into that hospital room I'm entering a sliver of time when (at last) my father is as weak and powerless as he was fifty-six years earlier cradled in his own father's arms.  I take pleasure in the fact that my father's heart has knocked him flat on his back like a newborn.  I'm also delighted to see he's been rendered speechless.

The combination of this factor, a unique one among stories submitted to me, and David's great writing, made this one a no-brainer for inclusion in Visiting Hours (Press 53, 2008).

Short Story Month - The Goat Variations by Jeff VanderMeer

From the anthology Other Earths (DAW Books, 2009), 11 original stories about the different paths our world might take if certain events never occurred, comes Jeff VanderMeer's "The Goat Variations."  It begins:

It would have been hot and humid in September in that city, and the Secret Service would have gone in first, before him, to scan for hostile minds, even though it was just a middle school in a county he'd won in the elections, far away from the fighting.  He would have emerged from the third black armored vehicle, blinking and looking bewildered as he got his bearings in the sudden sunlight.  His aide and the personal bodyguards, who had grown up protecting him, would have surrounded him by his first step onto the asphalt of the driveway.  They would have entered the school through the front, stopping under the sign for photos and a few words with the principal, the television cameras recording it all from a safe distance.
     He would already be thinking past the event, to the next, and how to prop up sagging public approval ratings, due both to the conflict and his recent "indecision," which he knew was more analogous to "sickness."  He would be thinking about, or around, the secret cavern beneath the Pentagon and the pale, almost grublike face fo the adept in his tank.  He would already be thinking about the machine.

I suppose I should have caught it at this point - any mention of September and "that city" in a book about how the world might have ended up if certain events hadn't occurred should naturally have perked my thoughts toward 9/11.  VanderMeer doesn't take much longer in nailing that idea home for the reader and with this story, creates a fascinating and very unique take on the 9/11 story.  These two paragraphs foreshadow the story very nicely.  It's just one more in what is becoming a long line of work by VanderMeer that is really enjoyable and well done - what more can you ask for?

Short Story Month - Some of the Letters That Were Cut, but That Tell Even More of the Story of Jonathon Bender, Weatherman (b. 1967 - d. 1999) by Michael Kimball

I decided to hit J.A. Tyler's ML Press one more time for my literary journal selection and with this collection of letter from Jonathon Bender that were cut from Dear Everybody, Michael Kimball puts together a helluva short story.

For those of you that haven't read Kimball's fantastic third novel, it is the accumulation of things from Jonathon Bender's life, he a weatherman that took his own life.  One of the major aspects of the book is the collection of letters that Bender has written (though apparently never sent) to just about everybody that ever had a part in his life.  One thing made clear in the novel was the very uncomfortable relationship Bender had with his father.  Two more letters that grace this story:

(1972)

Dear Dad,

I didn't keep my nightlight on because I was afraid of the dark.  I did it to keep the darkness off of me.  I saw how it could make things disappear.  I didn't want that to happen to me.

(1974)

Dear Dad,

Do you remember that time that I couldn't stop hiccupping for almost a whole day?  Do you remember how you kept sneaking up behind me & scaring me because that was supposed to make the hiccups go away?  That was when I really started to become afraid of you.  Sometimes, I still think that you're behind me.

The additional letters within this story do add to the story that Kimball wrote in Dear Everybody and I highly recommend trying to find both.

Short Story Month - The Reading Room by Jen Michalski

"The Reading Room" by Jen Michalski was published last year by Pindeldyboz.  Her writing is very straightforward in this story, starting:

The librarians nudged and nodded at each other. The lady in question sat at a table in the periodicals section reading aloud slowly. She read with an intermediate tone and volume--not loud enough for other patrons to understand what she was saying, but loud and deep enough to affect a range of hums and grunts. Her index finger laboriously followed the words over the page. An hour ago, it had been Ladies Home Journal. Now, it looked to be Cat Fancy. The woman wore reading glasses with chains but otherwise looked indiscriminate.

The older librarian called their supervisor, using on the phone on the check-out desk.

"There's a lady in the periodicals department reading to herself," she said softly but seriously while scanning in the newest Mary Higgins Clark novel.

"I'll be right there," said the voice on the other line.

And I think the fact that it seems so straightforward makes the story that much creepier as it gets to the ending, which I can't justify spilling here.  The story can't be more than 2 pages worth of print and seems like it took a mere few minutes to read.  So click on that link above and enjoy.  Fair warning though, I've been thinking about it for hours since finishing it up earlier today.

Short Story Month - Garker's Aestheticals by Brian Evenson

Has it really been all the way back to the first since I've looked at a Brian Evenson story?  Well, time to rectify that.  From the fantastic anthology, PP/FF (Starcherone Books, 2006), edited by Peter Conners, comes "Garker's Aestheticals."

It were a word.  It name were God.
     It gangled my tongue.  It were crawed up my throat.  Word God were given me the choke.
     Spatted it out all about the crackwood floor.  Luppen and lappen it up all from the crackwood floor.  Gangled it trussed with my mean silvered tongue.
     Pupled it pasty atween my molar teeth.  Gave it the swallow, did I.  Word went down smooth, did it.  There were mouthwater to helpen it down.   There were a swallow of nonesuch to helpen it down.

And that is the first half of section I (of III).  It seems that Evenson has created his own language here, or pulled a medieval language from under the dust.  And as only few can, he makes this language so consistent that a reader can determine what he's trying to get across.  To me, this is akin to my picking up a book written in a foreign language and understanding it.

This is a unique little story in a fantastic anthology - Starcherone knew what they were doing when they let Peter Conners put together this book of Prose Poetry/Flash Fictions.  Just find it.  And this whole post reminds me that Blake Butler is doing detailed reviews of every story to be found in Evenson's forthcoming story collection, Fugue State (Coffee House Press, 2009).  The first can be found here; I can't wait to read the rest.

Short Story Month - Sleeping in Candela by Ryan Habermeyer

Found in issue 35.1 of Black Warrior Review, Ryan Habermeyer's "Sleeping in Candela" starts off odd, and just keeps going further down that path.

Between sunsets, the streets flooded and the women went mad, feigning as eels as they threw themselves from window ledges into the alleys. I watched them drift aimlessly beyond the rooftops until they were nothing more than reflections, their cries for help ignored. The rains did not end. I didn’t leave the house for days. Those of us left behind alternated between heavy sighs of relief and attempts to change our fortunes by kicking dogs.

The whole damn town had been abandoned. Empty beer bottles, guitars, slot machines, juke boxes, and condoms had been washed away by the deluge; dogs, lovers, Mexicans, soothsayers, and sisters had run off to uninhabited deserts. Others stayed behind. A platoon of freaks and cripples—those of us willing to make treasure out of shit. Those of us that couldn’t give a damn for God’s vengeance. There weren’t many men. Nobody wanted to be a second Noah, the cowards. One afternoon I watched a woman hump a cactus out of loneliness. It might have been my wife. When I reached for her my hands filled with needles. I never remembered her again.

The opening reminded me of T.C. Boyle's short story, "Bloodfall," and like the Boyle story, the opening is just the beginning.  Eventually, the narrator is the only person left in town.  Well, until another comes wandering in, looking for the mythical city of Candela, where women lure men from the farthest reaches. 

I scribbled down a list of wants: a large woman, a Ouija board, the mounted head of the boar that had killed my best friend, friends that are not dead, old ladies that coo my name instead of Bingo!, the Styrofoam wig heads my mother once kept in her closet where I practiced first kisses. I painstakingly copied the list. I kept boozing until enough bottles were emptied. Then I filled the bottles with my list of wants and threw them into the flood.

The bottles never returned.

My mother named me Reno Reno. She imagined great things for me. The name was meant to take me beyond the borders of this town. Once I hitchhiked through Wynamucaquam and there was little but herpes and smiles and men getting knifed for their corduroy jackets. They ate mutton that tasted of discarded tires. After that, I never left here. I spent my life avoiding fatal encounters. Some men aren’t made to bleed. Others fear postmen and snow angels and men that whisper they want to toy your collectibles in the Route 44 Diner restroom.

I have tried hard in many accents to fear myself.

After three days I punted Bogotá off the roof and watched him paddle away. I did not weep. I drank a quart of Jim Beam and put a note inside that said if you find Bogotá be sure to put a bullet in that coward. Inside the apartment I took a shit on my girlfriend’s rug, thinking We can make this work, and proceeded to clip from her newspapers the lingerie models, wiping my ass with them as a gesture of fidelity.

There wasn't just that there was crazy stuff going on in this one, Habermeyer's story never really let me pull away from it.  The last line of a paragraph, if not the entire paragraph, just demanded I hit the next one to find out what would happen next.