Monthly Archives: June 2014

A Month of Short Stories 2014, Day 30 – A Horseman in the Sky

Posted on by Bill Chance

A year ago, for the month of June, I wrote about an online short story each day for the month. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.

Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.

Today’s story, for day thirty – A Horseman in the Sky, by Ambrose Bierce

Read it online here:

A Horseman in the Sky

When I think of Ambrose Bierce, I think of carefully written, exquisitely detailed military stories – with the wild addition of fanciful magic realism. I suppose that, today, well over a century after he lived and wrote, his most well-known tale, An Occurence at Owl Street Bridge, fits that description.

He also wrote The Devil’s Dictionary – which is a little dated today – but is still valid in its bitter satire on life and its foibles.

To wit:
From The Devil’s Dictionary”

LIFE, n. A spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay. We live in daily apprehension of its loss; yet when lost it is not missed. The question, “Is life worth living?” has been much discussed; particularly by those who think it is not, many of whom have written at great length in support of their view and by careful observance of the laws of health enjoyed for long terms of years the honors of successful controversy.

“Life’s not worth living, and that’s the truth,”
Carelessly caroled the golden youth.
In manhood still he maintained that view
And held it more strongly the older he grew.
When kicked by a jackass at eighty-three,
“Go fetch me a surgeon at once!” cried he.
—Han Soper

or, from the “S”:

SAUCE, n. The one infallible sign of civilization and enlightenment. A people with no sauces has one thousand vices; a people with one sauce has only nine hundred and ninety-nine. For every sauce invented and accepted a vice is renounced and forgiven.

(this is a fact that I agree with)

There is much to say about today’s short and simple story… but I want to point out one simple aspect. The story has, among other things, a surprise or twist ending.

This sort of story is hard to pull off. A successful surprise ending really has to be no surprise at all – at least no surprise after you have read it. Though you should not be able to see it coming, after it has passed you have to realize that things could not be any other way.

Bierce does all this in today’s. Through careful manipulation of point of view, time shifting, and judicious information release by the omniscient narrator the ending is concealed until the end, yet is foreshadowed to the extent that the reader knows that no other plot direction would be possible.

That’s especially tricky because this is the most common and hoary of all twist endings, still being done to this day.

Hope I didn’t ruin it for you. It’s still a cool story.

For an instant Druse had a strange, half-defined feeling that he had slept to the end of the war and was looking upon a noble work of art reared upon that eminence to commemorate the deeds of an heroic past of which he had been an inglorious part. The feeling was dispelled by a slight movement of the group: the horse, without moving its feet, had drawn its body slightly backward from the verge; the man remained immobile as before. Broad awake and keenly alive to the significance of the situation, Druse now brought the butt of his rifle against his cheek by cautiously pushing the barrel forward through the bushes, cocked the piece, and glancing through the sights covered a vital spot of the horseman’s breast. A touch upon the trigger and all would have been well with Carter Druse. At that instant the horseman turned his head and looked in the direction of his concealed foeman–seemed to look into his very face, into his eyes, into his brave, compassionate heart.

A Month of Short Stories 2014, Day 29 – Catskin

Posted on by Bill Chance

A year ago, for the month of June, I wrote about an online short story each day for the month. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.

Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.

Today’s story, for day twenty-nine – Catskin, by Kelly Link

Read it online here:

Catskin

I have been a big fan of Kelly Link for most of this century after discovering a glowing review of her collection Stranger Things Happen in Salon Magazine.

She writes in a style of updated, modern fairy tales – swimming in tides of shifting reality. These are not children’s stories, however, they are unremittingly shocking, violent, and sometimes surprisingly sexually explicit.

But like all the best fairy tales and ancient folk stories they are emotionally true and tell of longing and loss that we all feel, even if we aren’t aware of it (until we read the story).

Today’s story, Catskin, is from her second collection Magic for Beginners. It is a long tale of what happens when you poison a witch (which, by the way, you should never do).

Go out right now and buy her books. And while you are looking or waiting for them to come to you in the mail, you can go and download Stranger Things Happen (and some other stuff) for your device. I love the fact that she does this – and love even more that it doesn’t seem to hurt her sales.

Now, since witches cannot have children in the usual way — their wombs are full of straw or bricks or stones, and when they give birth, they give birth to rabbits, kittens, tadpoles, houses, silk dresses, and yet even witches must have heirs, even witches wish to be mothers — the witch had acquired her children by other means: she had stolen or bought or made them.

She’d had a passion for children with a certain color of red hair. Twins she had never been able to abide (they were the wrong kind of magic) although she’d sometimes attempted to match up sets of children, as though she had been putting together a chess set, and not a family. If you were to say a witch’s chess set, instead of a witch’s family, there would be some truth in that. Perhaps this is true of other families as well.

One girl she had grown like a cyst, upon her thigh. Other children she had made out of things in her garden, or bits of trash that the cats brought her: aluminum foil with strings of chicken fat still crusted to it, broken television sets, cardboard boxes that the neighbors had thrown out. She had always been a thrifty witch.

Some of these children had run away and others had died. Some of them she had simply misplaced, or accidentally left behind on buses. It is to be hoped that these children were later adopted into good homes, or reunited with their natural parents. If you are looking for a happy ending in this story, then perhaps you should stop reading here and picture these children, these parents, their reunions.

A Month of Short Stories 2014, Day 28 – The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis

Posted on by Bill Chance

A year ago, for the month of June, I wrote about an online short story each day for the month. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.

Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.

Today’s story, for day twemtu eight – The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis, by Karen Russell
Read it online here:

The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis

I have written about a movie I saw once, in the theater… Limbo, directed by John Sayles. An excellent film, and one you have to see – but I have a warning. At the end, most of the (few) people in the theater stood up and screamed at the screen. They were furious at the ending of the movie. I chuckled a bit – there is no other way the movie could end… and there is that title, what do they expect?

Today’s story The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis, shares one characteristic with Limbo. It sets up a mystery – and then sort of refuses to solve it. It’s frustrating if you are used to popular pleasing paint-by-number fiction, but there is really no other way for it to tell its story.

It’s a long-form short story, bordering on a novella. It needs this space to set up the characters of four urban bullies – a gang of thugs that, seen from their own points of view, aren’t as awful as they seem to everybody else. Though inside their own heads… at least the narrator, they are beginning to suspect that their place in the universe isn’t as inevitable or necessary as they had convinced themselves.

Then a mysterious scarecrow shows up tied to a tree in their own private universe, a wooded spot inside a run-down park in their urban wasteland of Anthem, New Jersey. Something about the scarecrow looks familiar… and when they figure that out a series of discoveries, unveilings, and violent reactions pull the four down a frightening path to… something.

Really good, worth the work to read.

Enjoy.

The central acres of Friendship Park were filled with pines and spruce and squirrels that chittered some charming bullshit at you, up on their hind legs begging for a handout. They lived in the trash cans and had the wide-eyed, innocent look and threadbare fur of child junkies. Had they wised up, our squirrels might have mugged us and used our wallets to buy train tickets to the national park an hour north of Anthem’s depressed downtown.

What I learned this week, June 27, 2014

Posted on by Bill Chance

Fit to be tied

After over five decades – I learn that I have been doing it wrong. Why didn’t someone tell me sooner? BTW – it works.

The Best Way To Tie Your Running Shoes

Magazine Street, New Orleans

Magazine Street, New Orleans

How the Bicycle Paved the Way for Women’s Rights

Stylish bike rider, French Quarter, New Orleans

Stylish bike rider, French Quarter, New Orleans

Time Exposure, Night, Downtown Dallas, Ross and Olive

Time Exposure, Night, Downtown Dallas, Ross and Olive

The Speed Of Light Might Be Wrong

Time Exposure, Night, Downtown Dallas, Ross and Pearl

Time Exposure, Night, Downtown Dallas, Ross and Pearl

Kindle

Call Me Ishmael

No Passport Required: 5 Reads to Take You Around the World

Two Shark Tacos on the left, and two Mystery (Iguana) tacos on the right.

Two Shark Tacos on the left, and two Mystery (Iguana) tacos on the right.

Dallas’ 9 Best Tacos

Deep Ellum Brewing Company - Dallas Blonde

Deep Ellum Brewing Company – Dallas Blonde

25 Of The Most Amazing Craft Beer Names You’ll Ever See

Spring Creek Natural Area.

Spring Creek Natural Area.

Photos: Coffee by bike

I-345 near downtown Dallas

I-345 near downtown Dallas

Why the fate of a Dallas highway matters to Texas

Bike Friendly Cedars and Aurora Ciclovia

Bike Friendly Cedars and Aurora Ciclovia

Dallas neighbors open small urban park

Jordan-Gonzalez-Image

Daily Discovery: Jordan Gonzalez, “Vagabond”

A Month of Short Stories 2014, Day 27 – Cathay

Posted on by Bill Chance

A year ago, for the month of June, I wrote about an online short story each day for the month. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.

Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.

Today’s story, for day twenty-seven – Cathay, by Steven Millhauser

Read it online here:

Cathay

After I read the story I found that Cathay is an alternate name for China in English. I wish I hadn’t learned that – the amazing world of the story should remain mysterious and shrouded – to tie it to a real place seems to dull the gleaming magic a little.

But this is a minor thing. It is still a place where golden mechanical birds sing as beautifully as real, where women have tiny paintings on their eyelids and elsewhere, and floating islands might be breeding.

In Millhauser’s Cathay the emperor’s concubines are so beautiful and artfully decked out they can’t even be gazed upon by normal men. All that do spend the rest of their lives wracked by tormented longing… which, I suppose puts them in the same state as the rest of us.

It’s an enchanted travelog to a plane of the imagination that ends with a battle of magicians and living statues.

A place of pure fancy.

So much the sadness.

YEARNING

There are Fifty-four Steps of Love, of which the fifth is Yearning. There are seventeen degrees of Yearning, through all of which the lover must pass before reaching the sixth step, which is Restlessness.

A Month of Short Stories 2014, Day 26 – In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried

Posted on by Bill Chance

A year ago, for the month of June, I wrote about an online short story each day for the month. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.

Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.

Today’s story, for day twenty-six – In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried, by Amy Hempel.

Read it online here:

In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried

Amy Hempel is one of only a few writers that work exclusively in short stories or other minimalist pieces. I like that. There is truth in brevity. There is efficiency in conciseness. There is power in knowing you don’t have the space to wander around.

In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried is the very first story she ever wrote. It came from Gordon Lish’s famous writing workshop – apparently in response to the prompt, write about “the ineffable, the despicable, the thing you will never live down.”

I don’t know about writing workshops (I suppose you can learn a lot – but it doesn’t take away the need to write for ten thousand hours) or about writing prompts (an icebreaker or maybe a handy crutch at best) – but this is one hell of a first story.

It’s definitely something that would be impossible to live down (although it’s something any of us would be capable of doing). How do you ask forgiveness of someone that isn’t alive any more? And who else would your really have to ask?

“Tell me things I won’t mind forgetting,” she said. “Make it useless stuff or skip it.”

I began. I told her insects fly through rain, missing every drop, never getting wet. I told her no one in America owned a tape recorder before Bing Crosby did. I told her the shape of the moon is like a banana—you see it looking full, you’re seeing it end-on.

The camera made me self-conscious and I stopped. It was trained on us from a ceiling mount—the kind of camera banks use to photograph robbers. It played us to the nurses down the hall in Intensive Care.

“Go on, girl,” she said. “You get used to it.”

I had my audience. I went on. Did she know that Tammy Wynette had changed her tune? Really. That now she sings “Stand by Your Friends”? That Paul Anka did it too, I said. Does “You’re Having Our Baby.” That he got sick of all that feminist bitching.

“What else?” she said. “Have you got something else?”

Oh, yes.

For her I would always have something else.

A Month of Short Stories 2014, Day 25 – The Half-Skinned Steer

Posted on by Bill Chance

A year ago, for the month of June, I wrote about an online short story each day for the month. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.

Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.

Today’s story, for day twenty five – The Half-Skinned Steer, by E. Annie Proulx

Read it online here:

The Half-Skinned Steer

I know Annie Proulx from The Shipping News – that wonderful novel about icy cold and family history. I knew that she wrote about the West, though. I knew that she wrote about Wyoming. Once I had a book of her stories – Close Range… I think it was, checked out but never was able to crack the cover.

So I was happy to find The Half-Skinned Steer online and an excuse to take the time to read it. It’s the lead story in the Close Range collection (which includes the better known Brokeback Mountain).

The Half-Skinned Steer is a story smeared across a long swath of time that winds around a timeless country. It is an illustration that you can take the boy off the ranch (a life so isolated and strange that the young man’s introduction to the mysteries of sex are from finding anatomically symbolic rock paintings done by ancient natives) but even after eighty years and a life riding an exercise bicycle in Massachusetts – you can’t take the ranch out of the boy.

It’s a rough, horrific story – about a rough and horrific life on a rough and beautiful land. But it’s told in language so languid and exacting that the snow, blood, and rock jump right off the page.

Pretty good stuff.

He dreamed that he was in the ranch house but all the furniture had been removed from the rooms and in the yard troops in dirty white uniforms fought. The concussive reports of huge guns were breaking the window glass and forcing the floorboards apart, so that he had to walk on the joists. Below the disintegrating floors he saw galvanized tubs filled with dark, coagulated fluid.

A Month of Short Stories 2014, Day 24 – A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

Posted on by Bill Chance

A year ago, for the month of June, I wrote about an online short story each day for the month. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.

Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.

Today’s story, for day twenty four – A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Read it online here:

A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

Magical Realism is a tricky and mysterious thing. When done badly it is horrific. When done well, it is a thing of wonder. And, of course, nobody does it better than Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

I remember reading A Hundred Years of Solitude for the first time. It is a massive tome – but I was so enthralled at the text I never wanted it to end.

Reading magical realism in a short story is different than reading it in a long novel. If you spend enough time in that colorful world you get used to it and wonder why every day isn’t like that. But in a short story it comes as a shock – like gazing through a peephole into another universe.

Though you never find out who the very old man is or why he has those enormous wings (surely he is an angel – but what a decrepit one) and you never understand his speech – you feel for the poor wretch. Dragged from the mud and exhibited in a chicken coop until the owners become rich from the admission (and finally outshown by a spider woman) he still exhibits patience and understanding. It isn’t until his duty is done that he….

Well, read it and find out.

The curious came from far away. A traveling carnival arrived with a flying acrobat who buzzed over the crowd several times, but no one paid any attention to him because his wings were not those of an angel but, rather, those of a sidereal bat. The most unfortunate invalids on earth came in search of health: a poor woman who since childhood has been counting her heartbeats and had run out of numbers; a Portuguese man who couldn’t sleep because the noise of the stars disturbed him; a sleepwalker who got up at night to undo the things he had done while awake; and many others with less serious ailments. In the midst of that shipwreck disorder that made the earth tremble, Pelayo and Elisenda were happy with fatigue, for in less than a week they had crammed their rooms with money and the line of pilgrims waiting their turn to enter still reached beyond the horizon.

A Month of Short Stories 2014, Day 23 – God of the Razor

Posted on by Bill Chance

A year ago, for the month of June, I wrote about an online short story each day for the month. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.

Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.

Today’s story, for day twenty-three – God of the Razor, by Joe R. Lansdale.

Read it online here:

God of the Razor

I’m feeling bad, down, not in a good mood – so I give you what’s on my mind… unadulterated horror.

At least it’s well-written unadulterated horror.

Looking back, last year I had a story by Joe R. Lansdale… I do seem to be repeating a lot of authors. So be it.

Today’s story was the first thing that I ever read by Joe R. Lansdale – and it’s amazing I read anything else. I stumbled across it one day and read it – I’ve revisited it to see if it was a horrific as I remembered it.

It was. It is. Read it and see.

Joe R. Lansdale’s work spans a number of genres, but he always gives you the feeling that there is something horrible moving underneath… and sometime not so underneath.

At any rate, today’s story is not for the faint of heart. It’s a style of ultra-violence, of ultra-horror… where every sentence is crafted to hit all the things that you are afraid of – especially the scary shit that you don’t even dare to think about in your pitiful daily life.

On the other hand, it’s only words on the page. There’s nothing really there other than the usual twenty-six letters arranged in a certain order. Arranged in an order to bring forth basements of stagnant dark water full of rats feasting on decapitated heads, murderous slash-killers moving in moonlight possessed with the spirit of Jack the Ripper, and a man exploring an old house in search of antiques… that sort of thing.

This might not be the kind of thing you like – and that’s fine. I’m not sure it’s something that I like. But it is there and it’s something to see, and… well, be careful about reading it before you go to bed.

Sweet Dreams.

“I got this from Donny,” the young man said. “He got it in an old shop somewhere. Gladewater, I think. It comes from a barber kit, and the kit originally came from England. Says so in the case. You should see the handle on this baby. Ivory. With a lot of little designs and symbols carved into it. Donny looked the symbols up. They’re geometric patterns used for calling up a demon. Know what else? Jack the Ripper was no surgeon. He was a barber. I know, because Donny got the razor and started having these visions where Jack the Ripper and the God of the Razor came to talk to him. They explained what the razor was for. Donny said the reason they could talk to him was because he tried to shave with the razor and cut himself. The blood on the blade, and those symbols on the handle, they opened the gate. Opened it so the God of the Razor could come and live inside Donny’s head. The Ripper told him that the metal in the blade goes all the way back to a sacrificial altar the Druids used.”

A Month of Short Stories 2014, Day 22 – The Nightingale and the Rose

Posted on by Bill Chance

A year ago, for the month of June, I wrote about an online short story each day for the month. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.

Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.

Today’s story, for day Twenty Two – The Nightingale and the Rose, by Oscar Wilde

Read it online here:

The Nightingale and the Rose

There is no wittier writer in the history of the world than Oscar Wilde. I remember reading The Portrait of Dorian Gray as a kid and staring in wonder across the pages at the pithy quotes and aphorisms sprinkled throughout the text. These nuggets of wisdom and bile were a second story concealed within the main book – I had a feeling that Wilde was pouring his real beliefs and feelings into these witticisms as much as into the events of the main text.

The novel feels like it was written by compiling a long, long list of witty barbs – and only then constructing a story as a framework or trellis to display them on.

  • there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about
  • But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins.
  • You seem to forget that I am married, and the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.
  • Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.
  • As for believing things, I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.
  • Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
  • I can’t help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.
  • genius lasts longer than beauty.
  • The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
  • The bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself.
  • It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.
  • I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.
  • Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.
  • He was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.
  • I never talk during music–at least, during good music. If one hears bad music, it is one’s duty to drown it in conversation.
  • Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
  • Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.
  • She was free in her prison of passion.
  • Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
  • To be in love is to surpass one’s self.
  • Women … inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces, and always prevent us from carrying them out.
  • There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating — people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
  • There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.
  • We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.
  • One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.
  • It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him.
  • Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.
  • Each of us has heaven and hell in him.
  • I love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself don’t interest me. They have not got the charm of novelty.
  • Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face. It cannot be concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices. There are no such things. If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even.
  • Each of us has heaven and hell in him.
  • Nobody ever commits a crime without doing something stupid.
  • The husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes.
  • It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one’s back that are absolutely and entirely true.
  • Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects.
  • A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.
  • I like men who have a future and woman who have a past.
  • Moderation is a fatal thing. Enough is as bad as a meal. More than enough is as good as a feast.
  • I admit that I think that it is better to be beautiful than to be good. But on the other hand, no one is more ready than I am to acknowledge that it is better to be good than to be ugly.
  • Scepticism is the beginning of faith.
  • The only horrible thing in the world is ennui,
  • To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
  • The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.

Over the years I have become a big fan of quotations. Oscar Wilde is the never ending fount of the pithy quote. For that, if nothing else, I am grateful.

Today’s story is very short and simple tale – not enough room for any extraneous worlds of wisdom. Alas.

But it starts out as a romantic fairy tale and appears to be so until you reach the final, dying words. Never fear, though – Wilde’s bitter cynicism will not be denied.

“No red rose in all my garden!” he cried, and his beautiful eyes filled with tears. “Ah, on what little things does happiness depend! I have read all that the wise men have written, and all the secrets of philosophy are mine, yet for want of a red rose is my life made wretched.”