In her excellent What the Thunder Said: A Novella and Stories, Janet Peery's story "Garden of the Gods" has a great bit of contradiction to it. Marlene Delaney is lying in a hospital bed, her husband of 30 years sitting at her side doing a crossword puzzle, her two nearly grown sons hovering over her bed and less than two pages in she thinks to herself:
Even if she had the breath or strength to speak, she would keep her silence to the end; it was the price for bartering her old life for the new.
Delaney then proceeds to tell the reader of the life of Mary Etta Spoon, and the daughter she had, while letting the reader know early on that Mary Etta Spoon was indeed Marlene Delaney in her younger years.
Where I think Peery really shines in this story is the seamless re-emergence for the reader, that is, the reminder that the story they're reading, of Mary Etta Spoon, will eventually lead them to Marlene Delaney:
A year went by, then another. No one came. Often she thought of writing them in Baton Rouge, but the telephone book had no listing for a Vaughn and Nita Richard. And even if it had, what would she say? That she'd changed her mind, she didn't mean it, it was all a big misunderstanding? By the time she met Del, another exile, a South Dakota boy fleeing the plains, in one word, Gone, she had erased her past.
"Marlene," he was saying now, his voice hesitant, uncertain,on the cusp of his desire, as if he didn't know whether to try to speak her name to bring her back or release her. His crossword puzzle was finished; the folded newspaper lay on the try beside her water pitcher.
And that easily she has the reader remembering the hospital room, the fact that she's married to Del, and, oh yeah, that other little thing, dying.
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