Another guest post, this time courtesy of Matt Baker.
Wendy Fox’s “Ten Penny” is one of my favorite stories. I came across it in The Pinch a few years ago. The story is re-printed in its entirety on Wendy Fox’s website. So you can go there and read it now.
The story begins rather routinely. I knew that I was in for a standard drunk-sex-cigarettes story – the ones that tend to begin and end the same way. And this one follows that story template loyally. The narrator is young, reckless and searching. Her short-lived romance is typical. Late night whiskey and “sticky sex.”
Then, the third paragraph sends the story somewhere I wasn’t expecting.
M. was a finish carpenter, though he could also frame. I admired his hands, which were long and slim and splintery and could feel out all the imperfections. There, at my elbow, the rough patch of scar from a decade-ago cycling accident—I remember sun and the dirt road and the deep drop down at my left, and then suddenly I was flying, and then suddenly I was stopped. M. knew nothing about how I laid on the road and bled, how I cried and cried at the falling, how I threw the bicycle into the ditch and walked into the little town nearby, how I never rode again, but he ran his finger around the ruined part of skin like he was a healer. He found the place on the back of my thigh, a puncture wound I got one day when metal collapsed around me; he touched the tiny dent above my eye, a fall onto a concrete step. He held my hand where it is crooked, outlined the asymmetrical ear.
The story progresses with them getting together a few more times and a brief backstory is provided. Even though the story is a reminiscence it is told with an urgency and swiftness that accurately encapsulates this fleeting episode in her life. Then he leaves.
One night I went out with some girlfriends. I wasn’t really looking for M., but I wouldn’t have been opposed to running into him. In fact, I was a little surprised that I didn’t, and I realized I had this idea that he was everywhere all the time, when of course he couldn’t be. He was in one place, and I was in another. I swear I was wearing so much mascara, I could hardly keep my eyes open.
In the end, no otherworldly epiphany or inspirational vision is needed to elucidate this chapter in her life. Her true self is still there, underneath it all, and has been all along, just like the scars. It’s just that sometimes you need someone else to help you remember the stakes and to unleash your limitations.
He didn’t return. Ever. One day, though, I woke up, and I found I had actually woken up, instead of just groggily rolling to the side and opening my eyes. I hadn’t solved much, the dizziness or what happened to M., but the break from insomnia was one damn, precious blessing. I think how M. used to say that I wasn’t much of an optimist, that I was definitely a glass-is-half-empty kind of gal, but he was wrong about me there. The difference between us was not how we understood halves. Maybe people who can build relate to it differently, something about their spatial thinking skills or something, but I think I didn’t tell M. that what he didn’t seem to be catching on to was the glass thing isn’t real. The glass thing is supposed to trick us into believing half could be enough. I would like to tell him now. I would like to tell him, I hope your back stays strong, and the light is good when you work; I would like to tell him, I dream you, and usually I’m not even asleep. Mostly, though, I want to tell him that my optimism is not in question. I want to tell him that I understand the impulse to run, and I want to tell him, No, really, don’t believe that line about the glass—take a full one or nothing at all.
Matt Baker's short fiction has appeared in the Southern Humanities Review, Tampa Review, Texas Review, Cimarron Review, FRiGG, Santa Clara Review, Saint Ann’s Review, Permafrost, and elsewhere.
His non-fiction and book reviews have appeared in The Oxford American, American Book Review, Kansas City Star, and Philadelphia Inquirer.
He is the author of a novel, Drag the Darkness Down.
Matt - thanks for this!
Posted by: WendyJeanFox | May 05, 2011 at 10:52 PM