The fourth story from Colin Fleming's Between Cloud and Horizon, "Dare Me to Breathe" is labelled an 'occasional friends' story. It's the story of Motts (so named by his occasional friend due to the apple juice boxes he packed in his lunches) and Blaine (I'm just leaving it at that--the name sticks as the main one used), told from Motts' point of view and essentially about how his life is affected by Blaine.
It's almost as if Motts is living vicariously through Blaine, but not quite. The story begins with a bit of description:
I used to think Blaine's main ambition in life was to be a magician. Not the proper Houdini kind, but someone that made an absolute mockery of the truth, without anyone having a clue what was going on. I admired him for this.
We'll come to realize just how well Motts understood Blaine, no matter what occurs through the story, when we recall this opening salvo. It turns out that Blaine is a damn good con man. Even though the two of them, late 20's single guys, are making good coin working in a financial district of Boston, it's not enough for Blaine. It takes awhile for Motts to truly catch on--or maybe more like it takes awhile for him to believe it's really going on--but Blaine's hustling what he calls Beamers, or BBWs, Big Beautiful Women. He has the capacity, as well as the nerve for it, to play them, to get them to support his "unemployed," "waifish" self. He does this through his own confidence, his own peculiarities (a fondness for Wales, another for taxidermy), and their insecurities. And the story moves toward a surprise ending that probably should not have been a surprise and one that shows just how good Blaine was at that mocker of the truth that nobody had a clue about.
Last time around I compared an aspect of Fleming's writing, that knowing that the protagonist or narrator is in absolute control and understanding of their story, to TC Boyle, especially his early stories. I think maybe a better comparison is to the stories of Steven Gillis. Both Fleming and Gillis write stories that cover wide ranging territories (again, this time we dipped into Wales and taxidermy). A similarity between the two authors is that they write about all of these varying topics, not as the main focus of the stories, but necessary, and do so dropping knowledge left and right, but never ever seeming to have had to do any research. It's dropped in a way that makes me absolutely sure that they know what they're talking about and always did. And they do so in as unobtrusive a manner as possible--the information is useful, it's necessary to the story's advancement, but it never hinders the writing, the characters, or harm the story in any way. Truly two writers to keep your eye on after you've finished up their back lists.
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