Freight Stories has done some amazing work in this past year, only on issue four and already they're publishing well known names like Lee Martin (just a Pulitzer finalist). The other people they're publishing are well on their way to becoming well known (if they're not already there), including Andrew Roe, who has also seen stories published by One Story, Glimmer Train, Tin House and The Cincinnati Review.
Roe's long-ass titled "Why We Came to Target at 9:58 on a Monday Night" is a great story and really a nice length for online (not that I'm adverse to reading really short, flash, stories, or even really long stories online) publication. It starts off at an incredible pace:
Donnie remembers just in time. So we run practically every stop sign and red light in town, and get there just before they close. They’re about to lock the front doors but we burst on in like we own the place, the goddamn heirs to the Target fortune, telling the puny Rent-a-Cop Guy, It’s cool, it’s cool, we’ll be real quick, no worries T.J. Hooker. Then we prowl the aisles, through Home and Living, then Outdoors, then Sporting Goods, and we’re laughing, laughing like pirates, and Donnie is still drunk from the Vodka Dews, and I probably am too, though it’s starting to wear off, it’s that time where you’re crashing faster than you’d like and that feeling of you can’t touch me is slipping away and you’re starting to realize you can be touched, you can be touched, no one can escape that sad, basic fact. The puny Rent-A-Cop Guy has one of those mustaches that looks like it’s been drawn on. And he’s shorter than me almost, and Donnie is big, beefy, an all-state wrestler his senior year and capable of lifting a keg like it’s a six-pack. So what’s the guy gonna do? He doesn’t even follow us.
The pace of the writing never really slows down, an impressive feat all on its own, but it also ramps up the emotional scale quite a bit until by the end you might, as reader, find yourself holding your breath reading the last few paragraphs.
<This next bit has a bit of a spoiler to it - I'd go read the story first and then come back>
That first paragraph messed me up a bit, and I think Roe did it on purpose, but I obviously can't state that for sure. I read this and assumed that the narrator was a male. It just seemed like two pals out drinking and having fun - the comment about the Rent-A-Cop Guy being "shorter than me almost," just added to my belief that it was a he, and not a she, telling the story.
Suffice to say, I was wrong, and when the realization hit, it hit hard and with good reason (a spoiler aspect I won't give away, but one that might be guessed by now). It's why I think Roe did hide the narrator's sex on purpose, and not by by accident, or by my mis-reading of the story - there was a big added kick to the story when the big light bulb went on.
Either way - intended or not, mis-read or not, this story has me once again remembering why I hold Freight Stories up so highly, and also has me digging out old issues of One Story to find the Roe.
For another great read of this story (actually, this one IS great).
I LOVE this one. Good pick.
Posted by: Katrina Denza | May 25, 2009 at 03:53 PM