The Figure of the Author in the Short Story Conference--Issues

It is my honor to have been invited to be the plenary speaker at the conference, “The Figure of the Author in the Short Story in English,” April 8 and 9, 2011, in Angers, France. The conference will be co-hosted by the CRILA short story research group (Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaires en Langue Anglaise) of the Université d’Angers and Edge Hill University, England. Primary organizers for each group are: Michelle Ryan-Sautor, of The Journal of the Short Story in English at Angers, and Ailsa Cox, of Short Story in Theory and Practice at Edge Hill. The website address for the conference is:
http://www.univ-angers.fr/ACTUALITE.asp?ID=1087&langue=1

I will be speaking on the topic of why writers like short stories better than readers do. I will be posting my progress on this keynote presentation over the next two months, focusing on issues involving the relationship of the author to the short story form.

The first two issues I intend to explore were suggested to me by two of my readers—Cathy and Dex.

Issue 1. Do young writers write short stories rather than novels, not because they like the form, but because the workshop format of universities compels them to write short stories? If university workshops disappeared, would the short story disappear also? Do writers move away from the short story to the novel as soon as possible because (a) they like novels better or (b) because novels are the only fiction that makes money? Why didn’t Anton Chekhov, Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor, or Andre Dubus write novels? Why do Alice Munro and David Means not write novels? Why does William Trevor keep writing short stories?

Cathy has posted a piece on The Millions at http://www.themillions.com/2011/01/the-story-problem-10-thoughts-on-academias-novel-crisis.html in which she argues that most fiction workshop instructors use the short story rather than the novel as the primary pedagogical tool because it is a more manageable form for both student and instructor: The student gets an immediate reward for a completed job, and it is easier for the instructor to critique a short work than a long one. The result, Cathy says, is that a lot of what comes out of creative writing programs are stories that really want to be novels, but novels are discouraged from being writing, for the rhythm of school semesters and quarters encourages writing small things, not large things. She concludes: “Do students write stories because they really want to or because the workshop model all but demands that they do? If workshops are bad for big things, why do we continue to use them?”

It’s an interesting argument and has received a number of responses on The Millions. I recommend it to you. I responded to Cathy as follows:

“I agree with you, of course, that fiction workshops in MFA programs are more conducive to the short story than to the novel. But I am sure you would agree that the short story does not differ from the novel merely, or even primarily, in terms of length, but rather in terms of technique--i.e. language use, thematic focus, emphasis on the ending, importance of unity, etc. etc. all that familiar stuff. I tend to think that a writer trained in the writing of the short story has a better chance of writing a good novel than a writer trained in the writing of a novel has of writing a good short story. What do you think? I am working on a keynote presentation at a short story conference in Angers, France in April on the topic of why I think short story writers like short stories more than readers do. Sometimes I think writers write short stories because they love the form, but write novels because they have a better chance of publishing them, because readers (and therefore publishers) like novels better than they do short stories.

Cathy kindly replied:

Questions I'm asking myself:

--Some people are saying the short story is a better pedagogical tool, better way to teach craft, because young writers aren't "ready" or mature enough to attempt a novel. Well, then does that mean George Saunders and Alice Munro and Andre Dubus are immature?
--What would happen if the taxonomy of creative writing programs (undergrad and grad) with regards to prose was governed not by genre but by form? Short-form Prose WORKSHOPS (where the essay and short story are studied and emulated) and Long-Form Prose STUDIOS, where process is emphasized over product.
And, rightly, you ask about the practicalities of the publishing market, where novels are preferred, how much that is driving this discussion. As someone who is working on her first novel (not a novel in stories, not a nonfiction novel), I ask myself that question often. Am I writing this book for the right reasons?

I hope Cathy and I can talk more about these issues. I certainly do not think that such writers as George Saunders, Alice Munro, and Andre Dubus (not to mention Raymond Carver, William Trevor, David Means, and many others) wrote short stories because they were not “mature” enough to write novels. Indeed, why they continued to write short stories when their publishers probably begged them to write novels is something I intend to explore as I prepare my Angers presentation during the next two months.

Issue 2: Craft vs. Passion—Are these contradictory characteristics in fiction? Can you have messiness and careful control at the same time in fiction? Are short stories too often too well crafted? Is the messiness of many novels more like “real life”? Is it the task of fiction to mirror “real life” with all its messiness?
My friend Dex sent me a recent review of Charles Baxter’s collection Gryphon: New and Selected Stories. The review, by Bart Schneider, was laudatory, but ended with this paragraph:

“Readers will find much to admire in this collection by one of our best storytellers. If I have one criticism, it’s that the stories often wind down in tasteful denouements that come across more as elegant triumphs of craft than satisfying conclusions. The fact that a generation of MFA students have mastered that method inevitably colors my view. As many of the stories drew to a close, I found myself wishing for a bit more messiness, a bit more passion.”

Dex asked me what I thought about Schneider’s comments about passion, messiness, and the MFA story.
As everyone who is kind enough to read this blog well knows, I cannot resist it when someone asks me “what do you think about….?” And I have thought about the issue of craft vs. passion, tight control vs. messiness, and whether the short story can be taught in an MFA program ever since I have been teaching the form. The issue has a history as long as the reach of Edgar Allan Poe, who was the first champion of the short story as a form and the first champion of tight artistic control. I will be coming back to this issue in the next couple of months as I prepare my Angers presentation.

And speaking of a writer who insists on continuing to write short stories, in spite of the accusation that short stories are for the beginning, immature writer, the January 31 issue of The New Yorker has a new story by Alice Munro, entitled “Axis.” I have read it once and plan to read it twice more before posting something about it next week. I guess by this time, Munro’s book publishers have given up trying to talk her into writing a novel.

Huckleberry Finn, the word "nigger," and The Importance of Teaching Reading

What, you might ask, does the current flap about an English professor’s replacing the word “nigger” with the word “slave” in a new edition of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn have to do with the subject of this blog—The Short Story? Because, it seems to me, the controversy has to do with the other word in the title of this blog—“Reading.” And the importance of careful and attentive reading is what this blog has always been about.

According to various newspaper reports (and practically every newspaper in America, Ireland, England, and Canada has weighed in on this issue), Alan Gribben, chairman of the English department at Alabama's Auburn University, had become so frustrated teaching Huckleberry Finn because the word “nigger” is used over 200 times in it that he went to a small publisher, NewSouth, with the idea of replacing the word. Gribben told Publishers Weekly, "I was sought out by local teachers, and to a person, they said we would love to teach ... 'Huckleberry Finn,' but we feel we can't do it anymore. In the new classroom, it's really not acceptable."

The founder of the press immediately saw she could sell a lot of copies with this idea, admitting that “if we can get [Twain’s] book back into American schools, that would be really great for a small publishing company like ours.” Honest enough. However, Gribben’s justification for his decision is more than a little suspicious. He has said that Mark Twain was a notoriously commercial and populist author. “If he was alive today and all he had to do was change one word to get his book into every schoolhouse in America, he couldn’t change it fast enough.” That’s pretty damned presumptuous, it seems to me.

A few days ago, David Ulin of The Los Angeles Times (which is the paper I read every day) commented: “On its website, NewSouth notes that this new edition of "Huckleberry Finn" will not supersede previous editions of the novel: "If the publication sparks good debate about how language impacts learning or about the nature of censorship or the way in which racial slurs exercise their baneful influence, then our mission in publishing this new edition of Twain's works will be more emphatically fulfilled," the publisher declares.

“I don't know how that happens,” Ulin declared, “how debate is stirred by sweeping what disturbs us under the rug. Gribben ought to understand this; it's supposed to be in the nature of his academic work. As for NewSouth, with its politically correct agenda, it might be useful to go back to Twain.” It seems to me publicity and profit is more on NewSouth’s agenda than political correctness.

I grant you that “nigger” is a powerful word that refers to a shameful era in society’s past, not just in America, but in other parts of the world. There is no way to justify the treatment of an entire race that the word reminds us of. And we should be reminded. However, it is not just that horrible treatment the word references, but the taboo nature of the utterance itself.

Several years ago at the university where I taught, an older woman had returned to school to get her elementary teaching credential after the death of her husband, because she said she always wanted to teach. One day while doing her student teaching, she was engaged in a classroom activity in which one student had to be picked out of a group. To pick the student, she used the old counting rhyme, which goes:

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe,
Catch a (many variations here, e.g. tiger, monkey, baby) by the toe.
If it hollers, let him go,
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, you are it!

Without even thinking about it, she used the phrase she had heard in her own childhood, “catch a nigger by his toe.” When this was reported to the principal by an outraged parent, the woman was not only jerked from the classroom, but also forced out of the teaching program at my university. I often wonder what happened to her.

Recently, one of my favorite high school teachers, who writes a regular column for my hometown newspaper, which she sends to me, was reminiscing about childhood Christmases, and mentioned that one of her favorite stocking stuffers among the oranges and apples were large chocolate drops, which were referred to as, she could not say it, “nigger toes.” Growing up in Eastern Kentucky, I admit to using the same terrible term. My only excuse is the one folks I grew up with often used: "I just didn't know any better." I am sorry for it. We all know better now. But I am not sure it is helpful to be so frightened to admit our past mistakes that it seems as though we are trying to deny that they occurred. We should no more try to change history than to change literature to fit our current notions of what is "correct."

The fact that you cannot even use the word when you are talking about whether you should use the word is illustrated in a recent court case, in which a U.S. District Court judge has ruled that Tom Burlington, a former Philadelphia television news anchorman, can proceed with a lawsuit against WTXF-Philadelphia, Fox29, claiming he was a victim of reverse racial discrimination when he was fired in 2007 for uttering the word "nigger" during a newsroom editorial meeting.

U.S. District Judge Barclay Surrick wrote: "Plaintiff portrays himself as a victim of political correctness run amok, while defendants portray themselves as employers who made the only choice they could in response to an employee who repeatedly uttered 'the most noxious racial epithet in the contemporary American lexicon. Whether plaintiff was a victim of discrimination or his own poor judgment is for a jury to decide."

According to a newspaper account, here’s what happened: A Fox journalist was preparing a report on a local high school chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People holding a mock funeral to bury the word "nigger." Participants at the demonstration reportedly uttered the word "at least a hundred times or more." During the meeting to discuss the story, Mr. Burlington asked: "Does this mean we can finally say the word 'nigger'?"

The reporter said she wasn't going to use the word in her report and one of the three African-American journalists in the eight-person meeting objected to Mr. Burlington's use of the word. In his lawsuit, Mr. Burlington said he argued using the word would add credence to the news report. He said he "wanted to make the point that I felt if we're going to refer to the word 'nigger,' we should either say the word 'nigger' or refer to it as a racial epithet or a slur instead of using the phrase the 'n-word'. "

He later became involved in a heated discussion with Joyce Evans, his African-American co-anchor, who was not at the news meeting. She allegedly told him he could not use the word because he was white. Over the next few days, Mr. Burlington tried to discuss the issue with employees who were at the initial news meeting and repeated the word about a dozen times. In his lawsuit, the TV anchor said he did not use the word in its pejorative sense and had no intention of belittling or hurting anyone. But when he used the word again, when called in by the station's managers to explain himself, he was immediately suspended and ordered to take sensitivity training.

I have taught Huckleberry Finn many times. (N.B.: I wrote an article about the novel several yeas ago in which I tried to defend what critics call the weak ending when Tom Sawyer comes back on scene and trivializes the book’s social message, and I will be happy to send it to anyone of my readers who is interested; it was fun to write because it argues for the fantasy nature of the novel, citing a crypto-masturbation scene that Twain must have known he was creating) Anyone who has read Huckleberry Finn knows that Huck’s central conflict in the book is between his personal loyalty with Jim and his cultural and religious heritage that a slave is the property of his or her owner and that to protect Jim from being captured would not only mean he would be socially outcast himself, but that he would risk eternal damnation. In the most powerful scene in the book, Huck wrestles with this issue, but his friendship with Jim is more powerful than his cultural heritage, so in a declaration, the power of which must be understood in all its Bible Belt force, Huck decides in favor of the person rather than the policy and says: "All right, then, I'll go to hell,"

Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times this morning (January 8, 2011) called Professor Gribben’s replacing the word “nigger” with the word “slave” and the word “Injun” in the name Injun Joe with “Indian” an “offensive idiocy of vandalism masquerading as sensitivity” and said it was one of those ideas “utterly breathtakingly off the mark.”

Rutten then cited a Twain scholar, Judith Lee, who was this week quoted as saying she found nothing objectionable about the change, arguing that Twain’s use of the term was meant to be read ironically, but that an appreciation of irony was an advanced interpretative skill, and that for a general audience a bowdlerized versions would do just fine. To which Rutten rightly replied: “In other words, reserve the classics for sophisticated readers and give the masses Twain-lite. If you can’t imagine what Mark Twain would made of that dichotomy, you’ve never read him.”

Rutten also discussed a similar censorship issue at Monrovia high school, which has a highly regarded drama department, directed by a professional actor and teacher Marc Segal. This year Segal proposed the students put on Jonathan Larson’s Pulitzer Prize winning “Rent” as their spring musical. Last month, the school’s principal asked to see the script and then consulted with the district’s superintendent, after which she told Segal that “Rent” would have to be cancelled because: the play was not “family friendly” because it features “characters who have some dark issues they were dealing with.” Rutten, of course, pointed out that such a criteria would eliminate just about every play from “Oedipus Rex” (incest) to “Romeo and Juliet” (teenage sexuality). We can’t have students reading literature that deals with “dark issues.” Let them read about Lindsay Lohan and watch reality TV.

In the kind of newspaper serendipity that I love, The Los Angeles Times also ran a story this morning on the current meeting of the Modern Language Association (MLA) the largest professional association of literature and foreign language teachers in the world, 8000 in attendance this year). Rosemary Feal, executive director of the MLA noted that the humanities are under greater pressure right now than they would be in economically better times. The problem may partly be the result of the misconception, she added, that English and foreign language studies do no prepare students for a range of careers, arguing that humanities are just as practical as any other major, especially during hard times when people need to be nimble about switching jobs. Well and good, but I agree with a Dartmouth American literature professor at the conference who argued that literature classes should not be justified only with arguments about student employability. “If you don’t begin with the assumption that literature itself is a repository of human values that human beings need, then we lose everything.” I would add to that, if we don’t begin with the knowledge that reading literature is a powerful skill that enables us to see through the superficiality and silliness of much of modern culture, then, yes, we could lose everything.

And then one more bit of serendipity, A few days ago, the LA Times ran a review of John Lithgow’s one-man show currently running in Los Angeles entitled “Stories by Heart.” In the show, Lithgow reads and “acts out” two stories: P.G. Wodehouse's funny bit of fluff, "Uncle Fred Flits By" and Ring Lardner’s darker satire “Haircut.” I discussed “Haircut” many times in my classes by way of teaching the concept of irony, a concept that critics of Twain’s use of the word “nigger” should be aware of. I wrote a short article about “Haircut” several years ago in which I tried to argue for the importance of a careful reading of the deeper irony in the story. I suggested that Lardner’s story is even more savage than we have heretofore thought, that his attack is not just on the horrible practical joker Jim Kendall and a small town’s lack of moral sense (as represented by the narrator, the barber), but even more on the reader’s willingness to approve of the extreme penalty for Jim as his just deserts for his practical jokes. The reader becomes as morally implicated in the death as the barber and the townspeople by accepting what was obviously their own use of the feeble-minded Paul to rid themselves of a troublemaker and prankster that they hated and feared. It is unfortunate that so many high school teachers fear they do not have the ability to teach irony to students, it is doubly unfortunate that a university professor would be willing to cater to that fear.

In my opinion, reading good literature is not easy, nor was it meant to be. Because literature is not life, but an artificial construct that makes use of language conventions to create some understanding of life, reading it carefully and correctly requires some training and knowledge of how language and literature work. To change a great work of literature because it makes some people uncomfortable is, of course, absurd. Literature should make people uncomfortable, and if high-school teachers are afraid to teach a great work of literature, then we should change the teachers, not change the work.

Haruki Murakami's After the Quake

One of my readers, who just happens to be my daughter-in-law, Ean, asked me if I had read Haruki Murakami and, if so, what I thought of him. She also asked me about a Colorado science fiction writer, whose work I have not read. I am always happy to respond when readers ask me, "what do you think about....?" So here is a post of a review I wrote several years ago of Murakami's collection of stories After the Quake.

AFTER THE QUAKE: STORIES
First Published: Kami no kodomo-tachi wa mina odoru, 2000
Translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin

In the early morning hours of January 16, 1995, a 7.2 earthquake hit the port city of Kobe, Japan, killing over five thousand people, causing billions of dollars worth of damage, and putting 300,000 out of their homes, including the parents of Haruki Murakami. Two months later, the radical Aum Shinrikyo cult carried out a gas attack on the subway system in Tokyo, killing eleven and crippling many others for life. Because of these twin terrors, Murakami, who had lived in the United States for several years, returned to Japan to research and write a nonfiction book entitled Underground: The Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche (2001) on the terrorist attack, filled with accounts of the lives of both survivors and cult members. In Murakami’s book, after the quake, (the small case letters of the titles of the book and the stories) are intentional) six stories explore the seemingly tangential, yet very real, effect of the earthquake on several Japanese characters in February, 1995, the month between the two disasters.

The first story, “ufo in kushiro,” begins with a woman who has spent five days after the quake in front of the television. On the sixth day, when her husband Komura, a salesman at a hi-fi-equipment store in Tokyo, comes home, she has disappeared, leaving him a note saying that although he is good, kind and handsome, living with him is like living with a “chunk of air.” As usual with Murakami’s characters, Komura does not make any emotional reactions to his wife’s departure. When he takes a week off from work, one of his colleagues says that if he will deliver a small package for him to his younger sister in the city of Kushiro he will pay for his airfare and hotel.

When the sister, Keiko, along with a friend Shimao, meet Komura at the airport, he has the strange impression that he is witnessing some moment from the past. He also feels he has not come far even though it was a long journey. These impressions create a transition from everyday life into a mysterious realm of reality typical of many of these stories. When Kieko says he does not think his wife’s departure had anything to do with the earthquake, Shimao says she wonders if things like that aren’t connected somehow. When Komura and Shimao try to have sex, he fails several times because he has been seeing images of the earthquake. He tells her about his wife’s note, and she asks if it is true that there is “nothing” inside him. When he asks what “something” inside of him could be, she tells him that the box he brought contains the “something” inside of him and that he will never get it back. At the end of the story, the most pessimistic in the collection, Kieko understands the emptiness inside himself.

The second story, “landscape with flatiron,” focuses on Junko, a young woman and an older man named Miyake building bonfires on the beach. As Junko watches, she thinks of Jack London’s story “To Build a Fire,” about a man traveling alone in the Alaskan wilderness who cannot get a fire started and freezes to death. She is convinced that the man actually wanted death, even though he had to fight to stay alive. Junko has always felt a “certain something deep down” as she watches the bonfires. Miyake, who is obsessed with the fires, tells her that if you get such a feeling while looking at a fire, it shows the deep, quiet kind of feeling inside you.

Like Komura in the first story, Junko says she is empty, to which Miyake replies that he is an expert on emptiness. After talking about committing suicide together when the fire goes out, Junko goes to sleep and Miyake tells her that when the fire goes out she will feel the cold and wake up whether she wants to or not. In spite of the sense of emptiness, characteristic of other stories in this book, there is also a sense of communion, between the two characters at the end. This mutual understanding thus suggests that it is possible that when the fire goes out, the two will still have each other.

“all god’s children can dance” begins with a man named Yoshiya following a mysterious man with a missing earlobe. Interspersed with accounts of Yoshiya following the man are flashbacks to his childhood, when his mother told him that his father was the Lord, and that one day he will show himself to him if he keeps his faith. Yoshiya is convinced the man with a missing earlobe must be his biological father. When the man gets off the train in an industrial area, he walks like a mechanical doll being drawn by a magnet. The fact that there is no sign of human life and the place looks like an imaginary stage set in a dream is another indication typical of these stories that the main character has entered some alternate dream reality. When Yoshiya follows the man into an empty baseball field, he disappears, and Yoshiya’s acts seem to have no meaning to him; in fact, meaning itself seems to have broken down, never to be the same again. Kneeling on the pitcher’s mound, Yoshiya gives himself up to the flow of time, saying aloud, “Oh God.” Once again, Murakami’s story ends with a sense of emptiness and loneliness; however, because Yoshiya calls out the name of his absent father at the end, there is some ambiguity about whether his discovery is positive or negative.

In “thailand,” a woman named Satsuki goes to a professional conference in Bangkok, Thailand and decides to vacation there for a week with the help of a limo driver and guide named Nimit. The alternate reality theme is introduced when the limo arrives, looking like an object from another world, as if it had dropped from someone’s fantasy. When Nimit asks Satsuki if her hometown of Kyoto, which is not far from Kobe, was much damaged by the quake, she thinks that an unnamed “he” lives in Kobe.” Nimit takes Satsuki to a poor village to meet an eighty-year-old woman fortune-teller who tells Satsuki that there is a stone inside her body and that she must dream of a snake that will remove it or she will die. The old woman also tells Satsuki that the unnamed man in Kobe, obviously a man who has jilted Satsuki in the past, is not dead. Satsuki now recognizes that it is she who is headed toward death. She even thinks that the earthquake may be her fault because she wished for it to kill the man who. As she flies away, she sits in the plane wishing for sleep so her dream will come. Once again, a character is reminded of the emptiness inside the self, but once again also there is some ambiguity about the implications of this realization. If Satsuki has her dream, will she be saved from the hardness of her heart?

The most surreal story in the collection is “super-frog saves tokyo,” which begins Kafka-like with a man named Katagiri finding a giant frog in his apartment who tells him he has come to save Tokyo from destruction from an earthquake. Frog says that he and Katagiri must go underground to do mortal combat with a creature named Worm that gets larger as he absorbs hatred. Frog, quoting Nietzsche, says Katagiri must cheer him on, for fighting is not something he likes to do. When Katagiri tells Frog that he is even less than ordinary and does not see how he can help save Tokyo, Frog says he is trying to save Tokyo for good, ordinary people just like him. However, on the day they are to go underground Katagiri is shot by a man in the street and wakes up in a hospital only to find out there has been no earthquake and that he was not shot at all. Like other characters in these stories, Katagiri has no idea of what is true anymore. When Frog comes to the hospital and tells Katagiri that he did a great job in his dreams, the strange creature begins to break out in boils, out of which come maggots, centipedes, worms and bugs, which fill the room and crawl all over Katagiri. When he wakes up, he knows that Frog saved Tokyo at the cost of his life, for he went back to the mud and will never come again. Then Katagiri falls into a restful, dreamless sleep. Although this is certainly the most Kafkaesque story in the book, it is also one of the most optimistic, for it ends with Katagiri no longer troubled by strange dreams, peaceful in his very ordinariness.

“honey pie,” perhaps the most hopeful story in the book, begins with a man named Junpei telling a story to a child named Sala about a bear named Masakichi, who has no friends and is especially hated by a tough bear named Tonkichi. The child’s mother Sayoko has called Junpei, a writer and a friend, to come and help her because Sala has had another hysterical fits because she believes someone called the Earthquake Man is trying to put her in a little box.

When Junpei, Sayoko, and her husband Takatsuki were close friends at university, Junpei felt that Sayoko was the girl he had been looking for, but because he could never bring himself to express his feelings to her, Takatsuki was the first one to declare his love. After graduation, Junpei becomes a successful short story writer, while Takatsuki gets a job with a newspaper and marries Sayoko. Just before Sala’s second birthday, Takatsuki and Sayoko get a divorce, and Junpei thinks about asking Sayoko to marry him but cannot make up his mind. When Junpei and Sayoko take Sala to a zoo to see the bears, he tells her a story about Tonkichi who trades salmon with Masakichi for his honey, eventually making them best friends. When the salmon disappear, Tonkichi ends up being sent to the zoo.

That evening after dinner Junpei and Sayoko embrace as if nothing has changed since they were nineteen. During the night Sala comes into the bedroom and says the Earthquake Man came and told her that he has a box for everyone. Junpei sleeps on the sofa and looks at the TV, thinking they were inside the TV waiting for the box to open. He thinks that as soon as Sayoko wakes up he will ask her to marry him. He also thinks of a conclusion for the story for Sala; he has Tonkichi bake honey pies, which Masakichi takes to town and sells so they can live as best friends forever. Thinking he now will keep watch over this woman and little girl and never let anyone put them in that crazy box, not even if the earth should crack open, Junpei decides he wants to write stories different from what he has written so far; he wants to write about people who dream and wait. And indeed, this final story in Murakami’s collection is precisely that kind of story--a story that ends with fullness and unity instead of emptiness and separation. Thus, although these stories seem distinct entities, they are interconnected not only by the effect of the Kobe earthquake, but also because they move from meaninglessness to final hope.

A Peculiar Constitutional

Here it is, my twelfth short story of 2010.  I'll be back soon with another.  I'm almost done with my second novel, so hopefully you'll start hearing about that in the near future, too.





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Enjoy this one, it was quite fun to write:

            My wife and I often take a constitutional with our feline companion, Chester, most evenings after I arrive home from work.  This particular evening in question, I was intrigued by an invitation my wife received from our mutual friend, Miss Harriet P. Stander. Miss Stander had requested our presence this evening for a rendezvous on her front porch for beverages in order that we might behold a marvel in her possession that she assured us simply couldn't be described in words. 

            The sojourn to Miss Stander's house was perhaps a mile on foot and as Chester, my wife, and I walked, we had a lovely conversation abut assorted things of various natures.

            My wife marveled at the weather and the sorts of flowers in bloom.  I myself pondered aloud about the status of politics and the upcoming election.  Chester, meanwhile, offered us a fascinating epiphany he'd had regarding the meaningless of life and the ever-expanding nature of the universe and cosmos.  It was all a bit over my head, but the sciences had never been my strongest suit.

            Chester was a devilishly intelligent cat that often confounded me with the depth of his learned philosophy. 

It was no wonder I enjoyed his company.

My wife enjoyed him for altogether different reasons.  She was barren, you see, and Chester tolerated quite admirably her predilection to groom and pamper a child-sized creature of intelligence.  It was her life's goal it seemed to always make sure that at all times Chester had tied snugly around his neck an ornately ribboned bowtie.

Were I a jealous man, I might be upset about the time spent gossiping between the pair while my wife manicured his hands and pedicured his feet. But he was a cat and such notions were absolute poppycock.  He was a handsome cat, to be sure, but still just a cat.

We arrived promptly at Miss Stander's to find that she'd been waiting for us on her porch with mint juleps and iced tea.

"Mister Book, Missus Book."  She greeted us politely, but considered Chester and a look of consternation arrived on her face like a train pulling into a station.  "Chester," she added with coldness.

Chester and I both tipped our hats politely at Miss Stander and my wife offered a doubly polite curtsy. 

"Mister Book, might you and your feline companion care to sit while I have a private word inside with Missus Book for a moment?"

I nodded to Chester and he bowed low, answering for us both, "We'd be most delighted, Ma'am."

"Wonderful." 

She and Missus Book awayed through the front door.  Chester began to speak as soon as he was confident they were out of ear-shot.  "I'm not quite sure she likes me, James."

"Pish posh.  I wouldn't say that, Chester.  She's had us all over before."

"True, to be sure, but something in her demeanor was indeed disconcerting."

"In all truth, she did seem at least modestly discombobulated by your presence."

"Discombobulated indeed." 

"Perhaps she has guest over with an allergy to cats?"

"Hardly likely."

It was then that my wife and Miss Stander came from within her lovely abode.  Chester and I stood up quickly and remained standing until they took their seats on the porch to either side of us.

"I do hope everything is all correct, Ma'am."

"All correct, indeed, Mister Cat.  I have spoken things over with Missus Book and she has promised me that you will be on your best behaviour."

"You wound me, madame.  Have you know my behaviour to ever be less than best?"

"No, Mister Cat, which is why I've agreed to let you stay for this exhibition."

"I appreciate your honesty, Ma'am.  I assure you that my behaviour will never have been better."

"Would you all like a drink before we begin?"

We all agreed that beverages would be delightful and she passed around cold, sweating cups.  Chester and I opted for the mint juleps while the ladies opted for the iced tea, though Miss Stander assured my wife that there was a healthy dose of bourbon in the tea.

The four of us sat there, fanning ourselves in the heat, sipping our libations and discussing nothing in particular until Missus Book politely asked what it was the invitation to come over was all about.

"Well," Miss Stander answered, "The oddity I've come across is so amazing I just had to show it to you.  Merely telling you about it would not do it one bit of justice.  And it's so adorable it just makes my heart melt."

"You've certainly piqued my curiosity, and I'm sure Missus Book's as well."

"Mine is aroused to no end," Chester added.

"Of that, I have no doubt, Mister Cat."

"Well what is it, then, Miss Stander?"

"Best just to show you."

Miss Stander rose from her chair and went inside her house to retrieve her unspeakable curiosity while the three of us remained outside, sipping our drinks.  I could tell by the crooked smile on my wife's face that she had at the very least some inkling about what we were about to behold.

Chester licked his lips and speculated, "I'm wondering if it has anything to do with a natural enemy of the Felis Catus."

"And why would that be, Chester?"

Chester put his drink down on the table and rested his furry paws on his rounded belly.  "Well, James, why else would my presence which is normally welcomed with open arms be met with such incredulous apprehension?"

            "And you think some manner of fish or bird or rat might be the object of her mystery?"

            "What else could it be?"

            "But there's nothing inherently spectacular or marvelous about any of those things.  Perhaps it's something else.  Those are much too mundane to be wondrous."

            "Maybe a new style of Nepeta cataria she's cultivated?"

            "Anything is more logical than a simple animal."

            "We'll see, James.  We'll see."

            "Oh, would you two stop arguing?  Whatever it is, no matter how mundane or stupendous, we'll all smile and nod and treat it with a healthy and polite sense of awe as befits Miss Stander's hospitality."

            "Yes, love."

            "I can agree to that, Lilly."

            It was another moment or two before Miss Stander appeared back on the porch, her hands cupped around the item of our intense mental acquisitiveness.

            "It's certainly smaller than a bread box..."

            She sat down in her chair and placed the oddity on the table.

            It was indeed truly wondrous and words fail me.  Chester was right to a degree in his initial conjecture of a natural enemy of a feline.  The small animal running about on the tabletop was indeed mouse-like, but it was a natural aberration, a mutated variant on a standard mouse that made it bizarre and worthy of a circus sideshow, but was at the same time alluring and awe-inspiring.

            The mouse, if you could call it that, had soft white fur all around and a pink tail.  Clearly it was albino, but that wasn't the most astounding thing about it.  It had three legs but two heads and two sets of pink little eyes.  Its hind legs were proper, but its heads were propped up beneath a lone leg centered beneath them.  As it scurried around the table, every other step would cause it to pop up as though it were an acrobat.

            It was indeed a sight to behold.  The mouse was adorable, unique, and an amazing bit of nature brought to the civilization of Miss Stander's home.  Our proverbial jaws dropped.

            Except for Chester. 

            I had to admire the cat.  His claws were dug into the side of the chair as though he was being propelled by automobile at great speed.  His mouth was wired shut and he was perfectly still save for the even breathing in his chest and his eyes darting back and forth, following each and every movement of the two-headed mouse like a predator.

            It was no wonder Miss Stander was wary of Chester's presence.  This twilight visitation would sap him of any and all willpower for weeks to come.  Self-restraint was a difficult skill to master, and as intelligent and well mannered as Chester was, he was still very much a slave to his own instinct.

            "You all right Chester?"

            Through clenched teeth he made a sound in the affirmative.

            I was very proud of him.

            "Isn't this just the cutest, most amazing little thing you've ever seen?"

            "Very much, so," my wife replied. 

            "Where did you find him?"  I asked

            "Well, I was out in town and was doing some shopping for trinkets and knick-knacks as I often do on my Saturday afternoons, you know, just to get out of the house and there was a Chinese street vendor in front of my favorite store selling odds and ends.  And Manfred here, that's what I call him, Manfred, was in a cage and for sale."

            "Fascinating.  He truly is an amazing creature.  I can see why you'd want to purchase him."

            "Are you sure you're all right, Chester?"

            He hadn't moved an inch since Miss Stander revealed Manfred.

            "Mm-hmm."

            I didn't believe him.  Though felines don't sweat, I could have sworn that Chester had water beading at his brow from his concentrated effort to remain calm and civil.

            Missus Book thought it better to keep the conversation going while the wily little thing bounced about on the table.  Perhaps by engaging in conversation, Chester might have an easier time keeping his thoughts away from murder. "He is amazing, to be sure.  Is he a talking mouse?"

            "I must say I don't know.  He hasn't said a peep, but that's not to say he's not a talking mouse."

            It was then I thought to interject my comments, "I've met many a talking animal and many that never utter a word, but it's my considered opinion that all the animals in the world are talking animals, some of them are just too shy to say so.  What do you think Chester?"

            Chester eased up a bit.  He was always pleased when he was asked for his opinion and this time was no exception.  "Well...  It's a well-known fact that all animals, human or otherwise, have the cerebral capacity for speech.  But are there not humans that can't speak also?  Is it a matter of choice?  Or is there an underlying biological problem there?  Who really knows?"

            Chester gave us that food for thought and as I was about to offer another point, we were all distracted by an eruptive sound reminiscent of a cannon from my years in the trenches.

            The sound startled poor Miss Stander so much that most of her iced tea ended up on the front of her dress and the wooden slats of the porch.  "My heavens!"

            Missus Book stood with a kerchief, doing her best to sop up the mess on Miss Stander's dress.  

            The sound rang out again and it was a trifle easier to pinpoint the direction of it.  It was clearly coming for a northeasterly direction and for a moment I wondered if the city proper had come under attack by some unknown force.  "Dear Lord.  I wonder if we really are under attack."

            We stood there for a full minute, waiting for the thunderous booming to come again, but it seemed to have subsided and things calmed down a bit.  We all took our chairs once more and grabbed our drinks for sipping.  The mint julep was quite refreshing.

            "I wonder what it was," Miss Stander stated in a voice that matched her rattled demeanor.

            "I'm sure it was nothing.  The factory is in town in that direction, perhaps there was a problem there."

            Another long draught of my mint julep was just what I needed to settle down from all the excitement and speculation, but Miss Stander's level of arousal shot right back up again.  "Where did he...  Where has it gone to?"

            "What?  Where has what gone to, Miss Stander?"  I looked about and for the life of me couldn't imagine what she was missing. 

She ducked her head beneath the table and got low to the floor, looking beneath the chairs.   That's when I noticed what was missing from the table.  It was her marvelous, two-headed, three-legged mouse Manfred that was gone. 

Miss Stander stood then and it seemed obvious.  Her face turned beet red and from her throat came a sound like a teapot boiling over.  Her eyes rolled into the back of her head and she fainted, collapsing to the floor of her porch.  There was the tinkling of broken glass as her iced tea shattered over the ground.

It was then that Missus Book and I looked over to our feline companion.  Chester's cheeks pulled back and he flashed us a sly, sharp-toothed grin that dripped with guilt.

"What did you expect?  I might be a talking cat, but I'm still just a cat."

Best Short Story Collections of 2010

It is New Year’s Eve, 2010. I have have looked over the “Best Books of 2010” lists of the major newspapers, networks, and magazines and list below the short story collections chosen for those lists, along with my own comments on those I have read.

The Washington Post listed only “Best Novels” in their fiction category, as if short stories did not exist.

The Village Voice listed no short story collections in their fiction list.

The San Francisco Chronicle listed only one: Selected Stories by William Trevor.

Publishers Weekly listed only one: Sourland by Joyce Carol Oates.

Los Angeles Times’ David Ulin listed only The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg.

The New Yorker listed only Barry Hannah’s Long, Last, Happy.

Slate listed only The New Yorker Stories by Ann Beattie

Atlantic chose Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg & What Becomes by A. L. Kennedy

National Public Radio listed Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li & The Collected Stories Of Deborah Eisenberg. They listed Patricia Engel’s Vida as one of their “best debut collections.”

The Guardian asked individual reviewers to list their favorites:
A. S. Byatt picked Yiyun Li's Gold Boy, Emerald Girl
Roddy Doyle picked Amy Bloom's collection Where the God of Love Hangs Out
Pankij Mishra, who asked: “Is short fiction with its necessarily fragmentary form and brisk epiphanies, better placed than the panoramic novel to capture the weird disjointedness and partial visions of modern life?” adding he was more captivated this year by short stories than long novels. Mishra chose: David Means's The Spot; Yiyun Li's Gold Boy, Emerald Girl; and The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg.

The New York Times’ 100 Notable books included ten short story collections:

Double Happiness by Mary-Beth Hughes
Fun with Problems by Robert Stone
Memory Wall by Anthony Doerr.
The New Yorker Stories by Ann Beattie
Selected Stories by William Trevor.
Sourland by Joyce Carol Oates.
What Becomes by A. L. Kennedy.
Wild Child by T. Coraghessan Boyle
The Spot by David Means.
Vida by Patricia Engel.

Of all those listed above, here are the ones that I have read, with a brief comment on each:

The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg
The short story’s lack of room to ruminate about so-called “big” socio-political issues is one reason the form is not popular with so-called “serious” critics who prefer genres that generalize. The kind of complexity that fascinates masters of the short story is not captured by using more and more words but by using just the right ones. Good stories, like good poems, don’t pontificate. The best stories f Deborah Eisenberg, who has been called a master of the form, reflect her continuing conscientious effort to provide a structure and a syntax for feelings unspeakable until just the right rhythm makes what was loose and lying around inside clench and cluster into a meaningful pattern. Eisenberg is indeed a master of the short story. She succeeds much more often than she fails because she brilliantly exploits what the form does best. It’s only when she seems to be seduced by the public demand for the novelistic that she breaks faith with the great masters who have preceded her.

Selected Stories by William Trevor
This is an anthology of stories from Trevor’s most recent collections. As in all great short stories, from Chekhov to Carver, there is mystery and not a little menace in the stories of William Trevor—secrets so tangled and inexplicable that efforts to explain them with the language of psychology or sociology or history are either futile or absurd. Trevor’s stories are not cultural examinations of either the old Ireland of legend or the new Ireland of the European Union, but rather profoundly wise explorations of individual, yet universal, secrets and mysteries of the heart. These are luminous, restrained stories. Every one of them deserves to be read and reread, their motivations marveled at, their sentences savored. They fill the reader with awe at the complexity of the human experience and the genius of William Trevor.

The New Yorker Stories by Ann Beattie
Ann Beattie ranks second only to Raymond Carver as being responsible for the renaissance of the American short story in the 1970s and 80s. Seen as the spokesperson for her generation, Beattie has been alternately praised for her satiric view of that era's passivity and criticized for presenting sophisticated New Yorker magazine characters unable to understand themselves or others. Beattie's people seldom know what makes them do the things they do and have no real sense of purpose or destiny; thus instead of engaging in deliberate action, they more often seem acted upon. Beattie's characters seldom experience the kind of epiphany of awareness we have been accustomed to in twentieth century short fiction from James Joyce and Sherwood Anderson up through Eudora Welty and Bernard Malamud. Moreover, since many of her stories are told in present tense, her characters seldom engage in meditation or attempt a search for meaning, and there is little cause for her narrators to indulge in exposition or exploration. Beattie, especially in her early stories, seems to follow the Chekhovian-inspired dictum in one of her own stories: "Any life will seem dramatic if you omit mention of most of it."

Wild Child by T. Coraghessan Boyle
Since the appearance of his first collection The Descent of Man and Other Stories (1979), T. Coraghessan Boyle has published over a hundred stories, and, as this new collection is ample evidence, he is still the consummate showman—an old-fashioned yarn spinner who can mesmerize an auditorium audience of several hundred as though they were hunched wide-eyed around a campfire. Like the true professional he is, Boyle seems compelled to convert everything he experiences, reads, sees on television, or hears about into a story by the transformative process of “what if.” What if the California La Conchita earth slide of 2005 got in the way of a guy trying to get a liver transplant to Santa Barbara? What if a man bought a boa constrictor for a pet and then became so fond of the rats he bought to feed it that he got rid of the snake and let the rats take over? What if a rich couple’s dog died and they reincarnated it by cloning? What if a poor Mexican kid could feel no pain and his father exploited him like a sideshow freak? Of the fourteen new stories in this collection, some, especially those dealing with children, such as “Balto,” “Sin Dolor,” and the title story, are wisely and carefully controlled and thus emotionally irresistible. Others, such as “Admiral,” “Bulletproof,” and “Ash Monday,” exemplify a significant satiric point. Still others, such as “La Conchita,” “The Unlucky Mother of Aquiles Maldonado,” and “Thirteen Hundred Rats” are just clever excuses for stories. All in all, it’s a good mix of the meaningful and the merely amusing.

Fun with Problems by Robert Stone
One of the most critical differences between the novel and the short story is that whereas in the former the plot can wander and the writer can ramble almost aimlessly, in the latter, the action has to have some end-oriented intention on which the writer must focus scrupulously to give the story a unified thematic significance. The reader can perceive this difference immediately when reading a short story by a writer who is more comfortable writing novels. Such is the case with several stories in Robert Stone’s Fun With Problems. Stone has written some impressive novels in his career, e.g. Dog Soldiers (1975), but only one decent short story, “Helping” from his only other story collection Bear and His Daughter (1997). It’s not just that most of the stories in Fun With Problems are peopled by unpleasant drinking and drug-taking male throwbacks to the old days when Stone hung out with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters in the 1960s—“Wine Dark Sea” about a free-lance journalist who gets drunk by six and often overlooks deadlines and entire assignments, “The Archer,” about an artist and university professor who goes after his wife and her lover with a crossbow while dressed in jockey shorts, and the title story wherein an aging attorney seduces a young woman trying to stay sober into drinking again--it’s that they are so haphazardly and indifferently written.

The Spot by David Means.
This is David Means’ fourth collection of short stories, and his publishers are probably tired of trying to get him to plunk down on their desks the manuscript of a novel. In an interview after the publication of his award-winning second collection, Assorted Fire Events (2000), Means said he feels that if you're really good at something you should keep doing it. The Spot, a collection of thirteen new stories, which originally appeared in The New Yorker, Zoetrope, Harper’s, and other places, is just one more piece of evidence that Means is very good at what he does. Since his first collection, A Quick Kiss of Redemption (1993), Means has largely moved away from Chekhovian realism, taking more chances with experimental narrative structure. Pursuing tactics begun in Assorted Fire Events and made more evident in his last collection, The Secret Goldfish (2004), Means takes increasing liberties in The Spot with storytelling techniques to explore the nature and importance of storytelling itself. David Means’ unerring ability to transform the seemingly casual into the meaningful causal is what makes him a master of the short story, placing him in the ranks of other great short story writers such as Andre Dubus, Raymond Carver, and Alice Munro, who stubbornly resisted pressure to desert their chosen form for the more highly prized novel.

Here are the ones I have not read, but will order:

Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li
Vida by Patricia Engel.
Double Happiness by Mary-Beth Hughes
What Becomes by A. L. Kennedy
Memory Wall by Anthony Doerr
Where the God of Love Hangs Out by Amy Bloom

I will probably not buy Long, Last, Happy by Barry Hannah, because I have read all of Hannah's early stories, and this collection only contains four new oness. I will probably not buy Sourland because I have already read several of these stories in periodical publication, and because I just do not care for Oates.

Happy New Year to my readers!

Hatchet

I'm sorry it's been a while.  I've been swamped at work and working on the new novel.  This was written and ready to go in November but I never had a chance to type it up until tonight.  December's is already written, too.  I'm hoping to type it up tomorrow so it's up in 2010.  I've already got an idea for January, so this might be a great couple of weeks for short story reading.





I don't even know how to feel about it at the end.  I was having very weird dreams that led to writing this.  



And don't forget to check out my collections available for the Kindle. 

            It had been a full night and most of a day since we'd been trapped in the basement of my mother's house.  There was one door leading up and out and bars over windows to small to escape from.

            We had to barricade our one escape route to keep my mother and sister out.

            "I don't know long we'll be able to stay here."  Leave it to my little brother to state the obvious.

            "I know.  But what else can we do?"

            "I don't know."

            I shouldn't have come here.  He called me and asked me to come check on our mother and sister.  They'd come home from a shipping trip with a fever that put them both down in bed with a vengeance.

            "They're not responsive.  I know you're busy, but I want to know if you think I should take them to a doctor."

            Without observing them firsthand I could tell they needed to see a doctor, but I think my little brother needed me more than they did.  I could hear it in his voice.  It was long after I came over that everything went to hell.  Whatever infection they'd contracted gave them a bloodlust that made them kill our middle brother and forced us to take refuge in the basement with our five-year-old sister. 

            And for the last twelve hours we'd been left through a sleepless night, trying to come up with a plan in an unfinished basement with a constant banging and rattling on the door.  We knew the gurgling and screaming was what was left of our loved ones, but that only made it that much more unsettling. 

            What had happened had gone down so fast that I'm not even clear about what did happen.  I know if I had to do it all again, I certainly wouldn't have left my cell phone in the car.  There were no means of communication in the basement, in or our.  No TV.  No phone.  Nothing.  We had no way of knowing how widespread this was, I had no idea how to call my wife and children to make sure they were okay, I had no way to do much of anything. 

            My best guess was that this fever hit a lot of people, otherwise my wife would have sent the police here to bail us out.  But who knows.

            On the plus side, we had plenty of food and water if it came to that.  The food storage and water heater were secure in the basement.  My mind had come up with plenty of long term survival ideas (for example, we could cook with an open flame on the concrete floor as long as we were careful and the windows were cracked to let out the smoke), but I wanted to get out of there as soon as I possibly could. 

            I also had a hatchet.  It was a holdover from a campout my Dad had taken us on when he was still around.  It was rusted and had spent the last two decades in a tool box next to the furnace.

            The hardest part was reassuring Leigh, our little sister, that everything was going to be okay.  Thankfully, she was sleeping at the moment.  The time she was awake was spent going through boxes of old family photos and wondering out loud what had happened to her mother.

            Anthony checked Leigh once more and put a blanket on her, an old cotton one from my childhood with E.T. and Elliot on it.  Then he came over to me, sitting down and wondering aloud what we were ever going to do.

            "You know what we have to do."

            "You really think no one's coming?"

            "I have no idea.  But I'm sure someone would have come by now."

            "It's only been since yesterday."

            "I know.  I think if anyone was coming it would have happened by now."

            "Then why are we still here?"

            "I don't know.  I'm going crazy.  I haven't even talked to Jenny or the kids since before I came here, since before all this..."

            "You really think this is happening everywhere?"

            "I can't think of any other reason we haven't been bailed out of this."

            "And you really think...?"

            "Yes, Tony.  I do.  Will you stop asking me fucking questions?  You've seen as many movies that start just like this as I have."

            "So you don't think there's another way?"

            "No."

            "I can't do it."

            "And you think I can?"

            We'd had the same argument over and over again for the last few hours.  He couldn't do what needed to happen.  Obviously Leigh couldn't.  And if I ever wanted to get to my wife and children again and have my remaining siblings survive, I was going have to do it myself.  I would have to bludgeon what was left of my mother and sister to death with a dull hatchet.

            I alternated between finding the resolve to do it and wanting to wait it out because I wasn't sure if I was capable of the violence that the situation required.

            "How long do you think they'll keep on that door?"

            "I don't know, Anthony.  I have no idea.  I have no answers.  You know as much as I do."

            On cue, the scratching at the door grew louder.  I looked up the stairway and tried to remember times I had down here that were less horrific... 

...Reading a comic book atop that old bean bag, only to be interrupted for my mother's call to dinner...

...Skipping school with friends and sneaking down here to play Mario Kart on the old big screen we used to have down here...

Perhaps the most poignant and sweet memory of this basement was sneaking down here with my wife before we were married and making love, silently in the dark.

All of those memories and a hundred more would be shattered into tiny pieces.  After the end of this ordeal, all of it would be eclipsed by this terror.  It would turn all of my memories here into a horror film.

In the end, it wouldn't be a choice at all.  If I wanted to get my brother and baby sister out of this, if I ever wanted to see my wife and infant children again, I would have to find the strength.

Never in my wildest imagination did I ever dream that my life would depend on my ability to warm up to the idea of chopping my beloved mother and little sister into hamburger with an axe.

"And you won't?"

Vehemently, Anthony shook his head.  He was always much more of a momma's boy than I was.  It was no surprise that he'd leave me to do the dirty work. 

It was then that the scratching at the door stopped.  Anthony and I shared a scared look and listened hard to find a clue as to what was going on.

"Maybe they collapsed," Anthony whispered to me.

I shrugged.

Knowing full well he wouldn't volunteer and forcing him would be the same as sending him to his death, I hefted the hatchet, taking on the responsibility myself.  "I'll go first.   You grab Leigh and stay close behind.  If there's a problem, I'll take care of it, but you get to my car."

I handed him the keys. 

"Okay."

"You get her in the car and you wait for me."

He seemed in shock.

"Anthony?"

He took a breath and finally nodded his head in the affirmative.  I could only imagine what was running through his mind.  None of it was pretty.

"It's just like that game we used to play with the NERF guns."

Anthony scooped Leigh up in his arms, stirring her awake.  "What's going on?"

I kissed her on the forehead, "We're leaving, sweetie."

Looking down, I considered the axe in my hand and looked back to Leigh, and then to Anthony, "You keep her eyes covered."

He nodded again.

"We have everything we need?"

Once more he nodded.

I paused to give them both a hug, both to bolster their strength and mine.

With that, I took the lead, creeping slowly up the stairs as quietly as possible, Leigh heavy Anthony's arms behind me doing the same.

As quietly as I could, I pulled the boards we'd used to barricade the door and lay them down on the stairs.  Each squeak and squawk of a nail or the wood giving made my hair raise, my teeth clench, and my blood boil.  Once the boards were removed, I delicately put my ear to the door, trying hard to hear what might be happening on the other side. 

It was of no use.

We'd be going into this situation blind.  How could we be sure our family members were still even out there?  What if some other band of wandering undead stumbled into our house and...and...?

I was grasping at straws.  I didn't want my mother or my sister to be out there.  It was just wishful thinking.  If it were strangers behind that door, there wouldn't be any issue and my heart would not be so heavy.  Bludgeoning an anonymous zombie would be infinitely easier than what I was likely to face.

Behind the door was dark.  It was twilight outside and the different swaths of orange and blue light painted the living room with an eerie glow.  The only thing more unsettling than the light was the lack of sound.  It was as though the world was on mute. 

Anthony crept up behind me, Leigh in his arms, staying close. 

Step after careful step we came out into a room we'd both spent too much time in, watching television, playing games, spending family time together...  But now everything was dead quiet.

I knew there was something wrong when I felt my foot slip beneath me.  I'd stepped into a puddle of thick tar that I realized was a collection of infected, coagulated blood the color of midnight.  Reducing my voice to a whisper, I pointed down at the mess and told Anthony to watch out.

Leading away from the sludge was a trail of the dark liquid, heading in the direction of the front door.  "I think they're gone.  Let's get to the car."

Each step we took toward the door doubled the anxiety welling in my stomach.  Every bit of me wanted to cry and be done with all of this all at the same time. 

At long last, we reached the threshold of the front door and I turned the knob, pulling the door open. 

The car was there, just like I'd left it, but that didn't matter because there was a horrible screeching and gurgling coming from the kitchen and heading our way fast...

I shoved Anthony and Leigh out the door toward the car, shoving the keys into his hands.  "Go!"

Sending him on his way, I turned around and blocked the doorway with my body.  What was left of my mother and sister wouldn't get what was left of my family without killing me to do it.

Seeing them was harder than I thought it would be.  Huge chunks of their hair was missing, their mouths were oozing the thick blood like drool.  I couldn't be sure if it was their blood or if they'd eaten some other rotted thing.  They limped and hobbled toward me just like you'd expect them to.  Their eyes were a pale, milky white all the way through and all the love they once held were gone.

Their pace quickened and the noises they made grew louder.  It was low in the throat, like the growl of a cat.

I decided I didn't want to be around for much longer so I made a dash for the car. 

Anthony had made it inside with Leigh, but had locked the doors.  I pulled up on the handle at the same time he tried unlocking the door for me twice in a row, dooming me to my fate.

"Open the fucking door!"

But the cat growling had grown into screeching and they were on directly behind me.  I couldn't open the door to the car while they were this close and risk exposing the others.

The axe must have weighed a hundred pounds at that moment.

Knowing I had to do it, I tried to banish every thought of love and caring I'd ever had for my mother and sister.  My only chance was to summon every ounce of hate and loathing that I could muster.

But I loved them.  Hate and loathing weren't something I had just laying around for these people. 

By this time I'm sure I must have been crying like a baby.

The blade went into my sister's temple and all I could think of was all the times she tattled on me as a child, but it wasn't good enough.

I needed something worse than that.

My sister fell backward and it was my mother's turn.

Her hands were raised, coming for me, I tried to dodge and the hatchet connected with her neck limply.  The rage I could muster was in trade for all the times I'd been grounded. 

But it wasn't enough.

Her forward momentum brought her into the car where Leigh was seeing this, shrieking and crying like any five year old in this situation would be expected to do.  Anthony tried his hardest to shush her and cover her eyes, but she was hysterical.

I found the anger to finish my sister by the fury of what I'd been forced to do.  I connected the full force of the axe into her forehead, cleaving her head in two.  She dropped to the ground, down for the count.  I hoped, anyway.

My mother and I turned for each other.

And I hit her with every bit of hurt I could muster for every embarrassment I ever suffered at her hands.

But she still kept at me.

Once more I hit her.  In the bloody, flailing arm, I got her.  This time, it was with the anguish I felt when I thought of losing her.

But it wasn't enough.

I hard to reach.  Deep down.  There was something still holding me back, but then it came...  Like a flood, washing over me, letting it all go.

I hit her with the pain I felt every time I watched her do nothing when my father would attack me senselessly, viciously, before she left him.

With the force of every injury she ever watched him inflict upon me I smashed the axe through her.  And again.  And again and again and again.

I was a wild animal.  A caged jungle cat who'd finally been let free and lashed out at the keeper keeping him.

It wasn't until I looked up to see Anthony and Leigh crying, still locked in the car that I thought to stop.  My hands were covered in the thick tar to my forearms and my face was bleeding tears.  

            "I'm sorry," I said aloud, softly.  "I'm sorry."

            Like a fool, I dropped the axe and was finally able to get into the car.

            Leigh crawled into my lap.  I held her and we cried and cried and cried.

            It would have been an understatement to say that this might have been the worst day of my life.  But things would get better as soon as I found my wife and children safe...

            They'd have to, right?

            

Christmas Stories: "A Christmas Memory" and "The Dead"

It’s Christmas Eve, 2010. I wish every one who celebrates Christmas or any other winter festival a most happy holiday.

I will post one more blog before the end of the year: my usual survey and commentary on the annual “Best of 2010” “Notable,” “Favorite” Books listed by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, etc. etc. etc. I will comment why I agree or disagree with the short story choices and note with mea culpas those short story collections I have somehow failed to read so far.

Now, my Christmas blog:

There are basically two types of Christmas stories, it seems to me: stories of nostalgia and stories of conversion. The nostalgia stories, best represented by Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory,” and Jean Shepherd’s “A Christmas Story,” are, of course, memories, memoirs, anecdotes, recollections--most often told by an adult recalling childhood.

The conversion stories include Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” Dr. Seuss’s “How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and such film favorites as “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street.” They focus on some spiritual event that causes someone who is bitter or skeptical to be transformed into a selfless believer in the human community.

Nostalgia Christmas Stories: “A Christmas Memory”

Dylan Thomas once said, “I like very much people telling me about their childhood, but they’ll have to be quick or else I’ll be telling them about mine.” I know what he means. I have written many recollections of my own childhood, several of them about Christmas. (There’s no stopping me when I have a possible audience; here I go):

I was the oldest of the family, with two brothers and two sisters. We grew up in a beat-up little old house in a valley known as “The Nars,” a corruption of the word “Narrows.” The house perched precariously on the hillside above U.S. 23, which was just above the C&O Railroad tracks, which was just above the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River—all about two rural miles southeast of the small town (pop. 4,200) of Paintsville, Kentucky.

We were poor, but Christmas, of course, was always rich. My favorite gifts on three different Christmases were an erector set, a Red Ryder Daisy air rifle, and a portable phonograph. In the late fall, my brothers and I always nervously gathered black walnuts from a huge tree in a neighboring pasture (occupied by a very mean and very large bull); we would split open the green husks, getting our fingers black from stain, and array them on the roof to dry out. On Christmas Eve, we would crack them on the hearth of the small fireplace, and when we awoke the next morning, mom and dad, (who had stayed up all night making mysterious preparations) had set out on the mantle plates of fudge full of the walnuts. Lord, Lord, I could go on and on. But I won’t.

Although I like Dylan Thomas’s recollection of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” my favorite nostalgia story (and as his comment on the previous blog indicates, also the favorite of my son Alex) is Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory.” What makes the story hard to resist is the present-tense voice of the boy describing his elderly friend” “I am seven; she is sixty-something. We are cousins…. She calls me Buddy, in memory of a boy who was formerly her best friend. The other Buddy died in the 1880’s, when she was still a child. She is still a child.”

The story begins: “Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago…A woman with shorn white hair is standing at the kitchen window…’Oh my,’ she exclaims, her breath smoking the windowpane, ‘It’s fruitcake weather!’”

As much as I love the story—the voice and the relationship between the boy and the woman as they gather the ingredients (especially the bootleg whiskey from the Indian, Mr. Haha Jones) and prepare the fruitcakes to send to “people who’ve struck our fancy,” including President Roosevelt—this may be a rare case in which a film adaptation is even better than the written story. I cannot read this story any more without hearing the high pitched twang of Truman Capote doing the voiceover, and I cannot visualize the characters without seeing the wonderfully expressive face of Geraldine Page playing the boy’s “best friend.” The way she presses her lips together, squeezes her eyes close, and cocks her head coyly to the side breaks my heart every time.

And like my son, I cannot read the story or see the film, without my eyes tearing up. I know it is sentimental, but I don’t care. When the two of them fly those kites at the end of the story, and the voice tells us it is their last Christmas together, I choke up quite pleasurably. When the boy walks across a school campus in an early November twenty years later, he can hear her voice saying “Oh, my, it’s fruitcake weather.” And he looks up, searching the sky. “As if I expected to see, rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven.” Oh, my! Like all good nostalgia Christmas stories, “A Christmas Memory” recalls a time when life was simple and good, and filled with love.

Conversion Christmas Stories: “The Dead”

Conversion Christmas stories are, of course, also about love—about an old Scrooge or an old Grinch, filled with bitterness and bile, undergoing a spiritual transformation to understand the central message of Christmas--love, charity, selflessness. I very much enjoy Dickens’s "Christmas Carol." My favorite of the many film versions is the 1950s black and white version with Alastair Sim as Scrooge. I have an old VHS tape version that I watched with my family the other day.

However, the most complex Christmas conversion story, as my friend Dex correctly identified in a comment on my previous blog, is James Joyce’s “The Dead.” The events of the story do not take place on Christmas, but probably on January 6, which marks the Feast of The Epiphany, or the Twelfth Day of Christmas--the day the three Wise Men visited the Christ child. Joyce, who had already formulated his theory of epiphany from Aquinas in his first novel, Stephen Hero, perhaps purposely centered his final story in Dubliners on the day of the epiphany. The story combines both the nostalgia Christmas story and the conversion Christmas story.

The first section, which centers on the party given by the Morkan sisters in their dwelling on Usher’s Island, centers to a large extent on the past—the tradition of the party, the old singers from the past. The final section, when Gretta tells Gabriel that Michael Furey died for her, he comes to see the significance of the ultimate act of love—to die for the other. When Gretta says, “I think he died for me,” the Christ story is evoked. In practical, profane terms, for the young Michael Furey to stand out in the rain and die of pneumonia seems childishly absurd. However, it is precisely acting like a little child rather than a practical adult that marks the radical difference between the everyday world and the world of the spiritual.

Anyone reading “The Dead” for the first time might be hard pressed to understand its fame and influence. The narrative and description in the first two thirds of the story suggests that the story will end naturalistically with the end of the party. However, it is with the end of the party, of course that the lyrical nature of the story begins to emerge. Thematically, the conflict in "The Dead" that reflects its realistic/lyrical split is the difference revealed to both Gabriel and the reader between public life and private life, between life as it is in everyday experience and life perceived as the objectification of desire.

The party portion of "The Dead" is the story of Gabriel's public life, and his only psychic interest is what kind of figure he is going to cut publicly. However, throughout the party period of the story, there are moments--particularly those moments that focus on the past, on music, and on marital union--when reality is not presented as here and now, but as a mixture of memory and desire. Joyce's achievement in this story, its contribution to the development of the short story as a genre, can be best understood if we see its most basic theme as the difference between the kind of reality that realistic prose imitates and the kind of reality that romantic prose reveals.

Thematically, the basic issue the story poses is: In which one of these realms does true reality reside? Gabriel's discovery at the end of the story is not only that his wife has an inner life inaccessible to him but that his own life has been an outer life only. This is all the more devastating to him because on the journey to the hotel, he has indulged in his own self-delusion about their relationship: "moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory.... Like the tender fires of stars moments of their life together that no one knew of or would ever know of, broke upon and illuminated his memory. He longed to recall to her those moments, to make her forget the years of their dull existence together and remember only their moments of ecstasy."

Filled with desire and the memory of intimacy, wishing Gretta to at one with him, Gabriel is annoyed that she seems so distracted. When he discovers that she has a secret life that has nothing to do with him, he tries to use his typical public devices of irony, but the very simplicity of her story undercuts the effort, and he sees the inadequacy of his public self. Michael Furey, who has romantically been willing to give his life for love of another, challenges Gabriel's own smug safety much the same way that Bartleby challenges the narrator in Melville's famous story “Bartleby the Scrivener.”

In the much-discussed lyrical ending of "The Dead," Gabriel confronts the irony that the dead Michael is more alive than he is. "Generous tears" fill his eyes because he knows that he has never lived the life of desire, only the untransformed life of the everyday. The ending, in which Gabriel, awake and alone while his wife sleeps beside him, allows himself to lose self and imaginatively merge into a mythic lyrical sense of oneness, makes it possible for the reader to begin the story over again with this end in mind. "The Dead" is not a story that can be understood the way most novels are read--one thing after another--but the way the modern short story must be read--aesthetically patterned in such a way that only the end makes the rest of the story meaningful.

There are two basic modes of experience in prose fiction: one that involves the development and acceptance of the everyday world of phenomenon, sensate, and logical relation--a realm that the novel has always taken for its own--and the other that involves an experience that challenge the acceptance of the real world as simply sensate and reasonable—an experience that has dominated the short story since its beginnings. The novel involves an active quest for reality, a search for identity that is actually a reconciliation of the self with the social and experiential world—a reconciliation that is finally conceptually accepted, based on the experience one has undergone. The short story more often focus on a character who is confronted with the world of spirit, which then challenges his or her conceptual framework of reason and social experience.

“The Dead” is my favorite Christmas story, for it is a great short story, a classic short story that delicately and definitively does what all great short stories do.

As a postscript, I must share a personal note about “The Dead.” Fifteen years ago, my wife, her Irish mother (who had just lost her husband to a heart attack), my pre-teen daughter, and I spent a year living in a suburb just south of Dublin. I had a Fulbright Senior Fellowship and taught courses in short story theory and the American short story at University College, Dublin, and Trinity College. It was a sad year in some ways (I lost my mother to a lung infection at Easter that year), but it was also a wonderful year in many other ways. It was a fine experience for my daughter, attending an International school with children from Ireland and countries all over the world. It was good for my mother-in-law to spend the year in her home country after the death of her husband. It was good for my wife to get in touch with her Irish family and her heritage of Irish culture. And it was good for me in too many ways to enumerate here.

However, one of my most memorable experiences was walking down along the Liffy and looking up to the second storey of the house at Usher’s Island, and from there walking to O’Connell Street and down to the Grisham Hotel, where Gabriel stood and looked out the window at the snow, which was general all over Ireland, falling softly upon all the living and the dead.