The last two years, for the month of June, I wrote about a short story that was available online each day of the month… you can see the list for 2014 and 2015 in the comments for this page. 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 sixteen – Cinnamon, by Neil Gaiman
Cinnamon was a princess, a long time ago, in a small hot country, where everything was very old. Her eyes were pearls, which gave her great beauty, but meant she was blind. Her world was the colour of pearls: pale white and pink, and softly glowing.
After yesterday’s story, a tale ancient and local, we come to today’s – written by Neil Gaiman – another writer of local color… but his locality is the postmodern world of the internet and the graphic novel.
Cinnamon is a short work in the form of a fable. The parents of a blind and apparently mute princess offer a great reward to anyone that can find a way to get her to talk. After a few failures the challenge is taken up by the most unlikely of suitors.
It’s a well-written and entertaining read. Gaiman can’t resist an inside or sly joke when one presents itself (the reason for the princess’s quietude can be guessed before even reading the story) and that sometimes hurts the prose and obscures the point. But it does add some extra entertainment to the proceedings.
And in this day and age, nobody can afford to turn down a little extra entertainment.
The last two years, for the month of June, I wrote about a short story that was available online each day of the month… you can see the list for 2014 and 2015 in the comments for this page. 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 fifteen – A White Heron, by Sarah Orne Jewett
Read it online here:
Day fifteen, halfway through. So much to read, so little time.
Today we go back into the past – A White Heron was written in 1886. Its themes, however, of city and country life, of man and nature, and of being faithful to one’s own instincts are as valid today as ever.
Sarah Orne Jewett was best known as a regional writer who produced works of “local color” describing the rural coast of Maine. The finely tuned descriptions of nature and the people of the area are the primary focus of her stories – the plot is secondary.
That’s the best way to read A White Heron – let the language take you to a specific time and place and don’t worry too much about what’s happening there.
Isn’t that among the best that a book can do?
Sylvia’s face was like a pale star, if one had seen it from the ground, when the last thorny bough was past, and she stood trembling and tired but wholly triumphant, high in the tree-top. Yes, there was the sea with the dawning sun making a golden dazzle over it, and toward that glorious east flew two hawks with slow-moving pinions. How low they looked in the air from that height when one had only seen them before far up, and dark against the blue sky. Their gray feathers were as soft as moths; they seemed only a little way from the tree, and Sylvia felt as if she too could go flying away among the clouds. Westward, the woodlands and farms reached miles and miles into the distance; here and there were church steeples, and white villages, truly it was a vast and awesome world.
The last two years, for the month of June, I wrote about a short story that was available online each day of the month… you can see the list for 2014 and 2015 in the comments for this page. 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 fourteen – The Embassy Of Cambodia, by Zadie Smith
I played badminton a lot, for some reason, when I was a kid. When summer came along, the cheap filmy net with its too-delicate poles and always-tangled stays would come out and be pinned into the yard somewhere. We would each get a delicate racket and then the shuttlecock would fly. I never met anyone, among the hundreds that I know I played badminton with, that actually had any idea of what the rules of the game were. It didn’t matter anyway – I always seemed to live in windy climes and the motion of the shuttlecock in the air was always more random than not – no fair game was possible.
I don’t see badminton played in people’s yards anymore – they play washers or cornhole or pool volleyball. Maybe it’s a Texas thing. Sometimes, though, when I’m randomly punching channels into the remote, I see a game taking place in a professional badminton league. Professional badminton players. Professionals.
This is a strange world.
Zadie Smith is a writer, possibly the premier writer, of the immigrant experience. I know her, as you probably do, as the author of White Teeth – a touchstone novel.
Today’s story The Embassy Of Cambodia is a long short story – or a very short novel (complete with numbered chapters) that was actually published in book form after appearing in the New Yorker. It’s the harrowing story of a semi-legal immigrant housekeeper in London. She is doing the best she can to maintain a life of her own.
In a discarded Metro found on the floor of the Derawal kitchen, Fatou read with interest a story about a Sudanese “slave” living in a rich man’s house in London. It was not the first time that Fatou had wondered if she herself was a slave, but this story, brief as it was, confirmed in her own mind that she was not. After all, it was her father, and not a kidnapper, who had taken her from Ivory Coast to Ghana, and when they reached Accra they had both found employment in the same hotel. Two years later, when she was eighteen, it was her father again who had organized her difficult passage to Libya and then on to Italy—a not insignificant financial sacrifice on his part. Also, Fatou could read English—and speak a little Italian—and this girl in the paper could not read or speak anything except the language of her tribe. And nobody beat Fatou, although Mrs. Derawal had twice slapped her in the face, and the two older children spoke to her with no respect at all and thanked her for nothing. (Sometimes she heard her name used as a term of abuse between them. “You’re as black as Fatou.” Or “You’re as stupid as Fatou.”) On the other hand, just like the girl in the newspaper, she had not seen her passport with her own eyes since she arrived at the Derawals’, and she had been told from the start that her wages were to be retained by the Derawals to pay for the food and water and heat she would require during her stay, as well as to cover the rent for the room she slept in. In the final analysis, however, Fatou was not confined to the house. She had an Oyster Card, given to her by the Derawals, and was trusted to do the food shopping and other outside tasks for which she was given cash and told to return with change and receipts for everything. If she did not go out in the evenings that was only because she had no money with which to go out, and anyway knew very few people in London. Whereas the girl in the paper was not allowed to leave her employers’ premises, not ever—she was a prisoner.
On Sunday mornings, for example, Fatou regularly left the house to meet her church friend Andrew Okonkwo at the 98 bus stop and go with him to worship at the Sacred Heart of Jesus, just off the Kilburn High Road. Afterward Andrew always took her to a Tunisian café, where they had coffee and cake, which Andrew, who worked as a night guard in the City, always paid for. And on Mondays Fatou swam. In very warm water, and thankful for the semi-darkness in which the health club, for some reason, kept its clientele, as if the place were a night club, or a midnight Mass. The darkness helped disguise the fact that her swimming costume was in fact a sturdy black bra and a pair of plain black cotton knickers. No, on balance she did not think she was a slave.
On the way to her illicit swim every Monday she passes the Cambodian Embassy where she notices two people playing badminton beyond the high brick walls. They are unseen – only the shuttlecock is visible as it arcs above the barrier. In one direction it is smashed – in the other it is returned in a high, graceful arc.
And then Fatou does something terrible – she saves the life of one of her employer’s children. That upsets the whole thing – the power doesn’t work anymore. Fatou is sent packing – though somehow we feel that she will make it through OK, depending, of course, on what your definition of OK is. Yours is probably different that Fatou’s.
The last two years, for the month of June, I wrote about a short story that was available online each day of the month… you can see the list for 2014 and 2015 in the comments for this page. 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 thirteen – The Largesse Of the Sea Maiden, by Denis Johnson
Today’s story The Largesse Of the Sea Maiden is not a part of a larger work. As a matter of fact, it is a stand alone longer story made up of a series of tiny little flash fiction scenes – each with their own one-word titles: SILENCES, ACCOMPLICES, ADMAN, FAREWELL… – which could, in part, stand alone.
This is really cool. It’s like fractal storytelling or a fictional set of Russian nesting dolls. Stories within stories, all collapsing down into paragraphs, sentences, words….
And really well done. I had to pause after each mini-tale in The Largesse Of the Sea Maiden to think about what I had just read, how it fit into the whole, and how it taught me something or showed me something I had never seen before.
Like what I had read from Denis Johnson before, it’s about deeply flawed but ultimately decent people trying to make the best of a confounding world.
The way I do these entries is that I copy the text from the linked pages and paste it into a text file which I read (usually at lunch) on my Kindle. After I write an entry I delete the file to save space and confusion in my tablet. But this one… I think I’ll leave the copy there. I might not read the whole story again – but those little scenes, I suspect there are lessons there that I haven’t learned yet and I know there are some I’ll forget if I don’t read them again.
This morning I was assailed by such sadness at the velocity of life—the distance I’ve travelled from my own youth, the persistence of the old regrets, the new regrets, the ability of failure to freshen itself in novel forms—that I almost crashed the car.
The last two years, for the month of June, I wrote about a short story that was available online each day of the month… you can see the list for 2014 and 2015 in the comments for this page. 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 twelve – Town of Cats, by Haruki Murakami
As I go through the stories this year I notice that almost all of them are by some of my favorite writers – people that I have read before. Today is no exception – I’ve been a fan of Haruki Murakami for years. Well, I guess there’s nothing wrong with revisiting what I know is genius – and I have a few more – but I need to work harder to find some new stuff.
Murakami is known for his surreal style and very odd plots. This story is an exception – it’s a prosaic tale of a son visiting his elderly father in a care home. The surreal aspect is supplied by a story within a story – about a mysterious city occupied only by nocturnal cats.
This tale is interwoven into the story of the man and his son. Their relationship has been strained… well, forever. The son is on a quest to find a solution to the mystery of his past, what has happened to him, and where he is really from.
He finds less than he expected and more than he hoped.
Tengo folded his hands in his lap and looked straight into his father’s face. This man is no empty shell, he thought. He is a flesh-and-blood human being with a narrow, stubborn soul, surviving in fits and starts on this patch of land by the sea. He has no choice but to coexist with the vacuum that is slowly spreading inside him. Eventually, that vacuum will swallow up whatever memories are left. It is only a matter of time.
The last two years, for the month of June, I wrote about a short story that was available online each day of the month… you can see the list for 2014 and 2015 in the comments for this page. 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 eleven – Safari, by Jennifer Egan
I wasn’t very far into reading today’s story when I realized I had read it before. The story Safari is one section of Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit From the Goon Squad. I read the book about three years ago and wrote a blog entry about it.
A Visit From the Goon Squad is as much a collection of linked short stories as it is a singular novel. I wanted to read the story in isolation – to see if it would work. The collection is very good but it is so complicated that it helps to have a timeline and a 3D interactive character map to get through it. Safari is pretty much one arm of that 3D map – the one gathered around Lou.
I have always enjoyed linked short stories and think it is a crackerjack way to structure a novel or longer work. The best of both worlds – so to speak.
And Safari works very well on its own. Even in this piece of the whole – Jennifer Egan throws a surprisingly complex and extensive batch of characters against the page. Most of them stick. The setting is unique, a kaleidoscope of Hollywood weirdos is transported to the African Wilderness, where their weaknesses are allowed to fester.
The Samburu warriors have arrived—four of them, two holding drums, and a child in the shadows minding a yellow long-horned cow. They came yesterday, too, after the morning game run, when Lou and Mindy were “napping.” That was when Charlie exchanged shy glances with the most beautiful warrior, who has scar-tissue designs coiled like railroad tracks over the rigorous architecture of his chest and shoulders and back.
Most short stories are told from a single point of view. In Safari the author jumps around and plays fast and loose – everything is told from almost everyone’s perspective. That adds a richness to the proceedings and reveals truths that would otherwise go hidden. The only characters that don’t take a turn are the two bird watching ladies. It’s interesting how that their motivations are never revealed, yet the ending… the last sentence… revolves around what their true motivations are.
The last two years, for the month of June, I wrote about a short story that was available online each day of the month… you can see the list for 2014 and 2015 in the comments for this page. 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 ten – Hollow, by Breece D’J Pancake
So again today we have a story about work – about work under desperate conditions. Like yesterday‘s The Zero Meter Diving Team we have young men working in the energy industry. It is costing them their lives.
Hollow is the story of a West Virginia coal miner, Buddy. Things aren’t going very well for Buddy, he drinks too much, his lungs are shot, and his girl is looking to leave him and go back to life as a prostitute. The only thing he has going good is that the coal seam is unexpectedly thickening, promising some extra cash.
At the end of Hollow – Buddy tries for a mental escape from his inescapable troubles by going on a hunt. He kills and skins his prey in an expert, methodical fashion. But there is something watching him that he is unaware of.
The last two years, for the month of June, I wrote about a short story that was available online each day of the month… you can see the list for 2014 and 2015 in the comments for this page. 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 nine – The Zero Meter Diving Team, by Jim Shepard
Mendacity. That’s a word I’ve thought about a lot ever since I first heard it as a kid – from the movie version of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” of course.
Mendacity means lying. But to me it has always meant something a little different – a little more. Mendacity is that kind of lying that is so central to the way you live your life that you actually come to believe what you are lying about.
Sort of like The Emperor’s New Clothes. I always thought that the people wanted so badly to believe that they are deserving that they actually came to believe the emperor was clothed. The part of the story they never tell you is that after the little kid spilled the news that the emperor was naked, he, and his entire family, were arrested, tortured, and executed – then every evidence that they ever existed was destroyed.
Today’s story, The Zero Meter Diving Team tells of a society full of mendacity. Mendacity, toadyism, nepotism, and incompetence. The result of all this dysfunction is something a lot more terrible that a naked emperor.
We all lived under the doctrine of ubiquitous success. Negative information was reserved for the most senior leaders, with censored versions available for those lower down. Nothing instructive about precautions or emergency procedures could be organized, since such initiatives undermined the official position concerning the complete safety of the nuclear industry. For thirty years, accidents went unreported, so the lessons derived from these accidents remained with those who’d experienced them. It was as if no accidents had occurred.
I’m glad I found this story – I have discovered an author that I want to read some more. In The Zero Meter Diving Team he has done more than his share of historical research and it feels real. Placing a fictional story in a setting where well-known events are occurring has the challenge to make sure the horrific crisis doesn’t overshadow the human drama.
The last two years, for the month of June, I wrote about a short story that was available online each day of the month… you can see the list for 2014 and 2015 in the comments for this page. 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 eight – Tiny Smiling Daddy, by Mary Gaitskill
Mary Gaitskill is a polarizing writer. Either you like her or you don’t – but you can’t say she lacks courage.
Today’s story, Tiny Smiling Daddy is from her second collection of short stories – Because They Wanted To.
It isn’t as “out there” as a lot of her work – even though her favorite theme – female characters dealing with sexuality and fitting in somewhere – is here. What makes it different is the point of view. It’s told by a father that has had a phone call from a friend to tell him that his grown daughter has published a confessional piece about him in Self Magazine.
The father then goes on a quest, first to find a copy of the magazine, and then to think back over the years and his turbulent relationship with his daughter. He is clueless, he doesn’t understand how much damage his lack of acceptance of her has done… for everybody.
Even though the story is told through him, and by him, mostly in remembering, his daughter is the most memorable character in the story. You can feel her, through her father’s eyes, in her struggle to find herself and her place in the world.
Instead, he watched her, puzzling at the metamorphosis she had undergone. First she had been a beautiful, happy child turned homely, snotty, miserable adolescent. From there she had become a martinet girl with the eyes of a stifled pervert. Now she was a vibrant imp, living, it seemed, in a world constructed of topsy-turvy junk pasted with rhinestones. Where had these three different people come from? Not even Marsha, who had spent so much time with her as a child, could trace the genesis of the new Kitty from the old one. Sometimes he bitterly reflected that he and Marsha weren’t even real parents anymore but bereft old people rattling around in a house, connected not to a real child who was going to college, or who at least had some kind of understandable life, but to a changeling who was the product of only their most obscure quirks, a being who came from recesses that neither of them suspected they’d had.
There is real life in this story. I read it on my Kindle, stretched out under a tree in the park and it was able to pull me in from the warm, pleasant surroundings around me.
The last two years, for the month of June, I wrote about a short story that was available online each day of the month… you can see the list for 2014 and 2015 in the comments for this page. 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 xx – Forty-Four Goats, by Simon Harris
Flash Fiction. Longer than 140 characters – more than a tweet, but something that only takes about two minutes or so to read. Something impossibly short that still tells a story.
The only way to tell a complete story, with a beginning, middle, and end in that short of a time – in those few words – is to tell a story with mystery. The author has to use what’s not there as a storytelling tool, because when there isn’t much – there is a lot that isn’t there.
Today’s little snippet, Forty-Four Goats tells a story, complete with several unsolved mysteries at the end. It’s a good use of a precious two minutes.
Bill Chance 