Tag Archives: short stories

A Month of Short Stories 2017, Day 4 – Attitude Adjustment, by Tim Gautreaux

Posted on by Bill Chance

Big Boy 4018

Over several years, for the month of June, I wrote about a short story that was available online each day of 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 – In September this time… because it is September.

Today’s story, for day 4 – Attitude Adjustment, by Tim Gautreaux

Read it online here:
Attitude Adjustment, by Tim Gautreaux

Sometimes he would close his eyes tight and try to remember what had happened—how, in the heavy forest south of Passion Gap, a train had been trumpeting a monstrous chord of warning through the snow, but Father Jim, driving toward his church, creating a new homily in his head, had failed to hear it. He was proud of his sermons and wanted to get this latest one just right. The road twisted through a railway crossing, but with no crossing arms or blinking signals, Father Jim never saw the locomotive of a 100-car coal train explode into his vehicle, shoving it a quarter mile in a veil of flames and coppery sparks. The impact thrust the priest through a million diamonds of windshield and he landed in the middle of Highway 16, his skull fractured like a dropped melon, his hands tracked with cuts, both legs broken and bleeding. He lay in the snowy road for an hour while an ambulance crew came up the mountain through the developing blizzard, the engineer and brakeman crouching over his body, trying to stop the bleeding with shop rags.

—-Tim Gautreaux, Attitude Adjustment

A long time ago, I worked for the EPA as a consultant on a technical assistance team. My job was to provide my expertise on various technical subjects (emergency response, chemical cleanups, analytical chemistry, safety plans… that sort of thing) to oil spills, chemical accidents, and Superfund Emergency Removals. In 1982 I was sent to Livingston, Louisiana to help after the derailment of a train carrying a large amount of chemicals in the center of town. I spent about a month there working on various parts of the response and cleanup.

If you really want to know, I’m visible in the video at the 8:57 point, wearing blue coveralls and a blue cap leaning on the door of the van.

Years later, at a Writing Marathon in New Orleans, I told the story of the derailment and cleanup. Someone said that a local well-known writer Tim Gautreaux had written a fictional short story based on the Livingston train derailment called Waiting for the Evening News. I had read Gautreaux before and enjoyed his short stories. I dug around and found the collection with Waiting for the Evening News in it and eagerly read the story. Though his point of view on the accident was very different than mine – it was pretty cool.

I think I sent the author an email… maybe not. At any rate, I never met or talked to him, but still felt some sort of a connection.

Today’s story, Attitude Adjustment is a simple tale of a Catholic Priest that survives a horrific car accident – a collision with a coal train. He comes out the other side severely damaged, both physically and mentally. It becomes almost impossible for him to deliver a proper sermon or confession. He resorts to a lot of little tricks simply to help his mind get through a normal day.

This leads to a misunderstanding with the Federal Government, specifically the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms… and things don’t go very well for him.

Or maybe they do. He is a good man after all, and a tough man, and it looks like he might make it through after all.

Tim Gautreaux Interviews:

I’m not interested in labels; I’m interested in storytelling. And nobody even knows what a Cajun is. I put a redneck character in one of my stories in Welding with Children, and a lot of people have called him a Cajun, and he’s from Alexandria, which is the most un-Cajun place on the face of the earth. And he’s not Catholic, and he doesn’t have an Acadian surname. Anybody from the region understands who that fellow is, but people out of the region will read other things into it. I just can’t worry about that.
—-An Interview with Tim Gautreaux: “Cartographer of Louisiana Back Roads”, from Southern Spaces

I think most little towns in America present a mixture of all sorts of cultures, and this makes me suspicious of stereotypes based on the assumption that a certain region is peopled by one type of person. Back in the 1950s I thought Texas was all cowboys and oil men listening to Hank Williams or Bob Wills, yet traveling by train through Texas with my transistor radio I picked up Mexican polka music played on German accordions. This marriage of musical cultures introduced me to the idea that no region is one thing only. A writer has to keep this in mind when he deals with setting. Don’t oversimplify, and pay attention to what’s around you culturally. Awareness of class and culture is money in the bank for a fiction writer.
—-A Conversation with Tim Gautreaux, from Image

Three generations. The smoking diesel pulling the steam Big Boy, while the electric DART train zooms by overhead.

A Month of Short Stories 2017, Day 3 – The Ambush, by Donna Tartt

Posted on by Bill Chance

M41 Walker Bulldog
Liberty Park
Plano, Texas

Over several years, for the month of June, I wrote about a short story that was available online each day of 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 – In September this time… because it is September.

Today’s story, for day 3 – The Ambush, by Donna Tartt

Read it online here:

The Ambush, by Donna Tartt

“Oh my God!” he said. “Stay with me, Hank! You can’t die, you son of a bitch!”

I grimaced and tossed my head from side to side in agony as Tim – in a desperate effort to revive me – pounded on my chest. I was impressed by his profanity, but even more impressed that he had taken the Lord’s name in vain on my behalf.

Far away, from the back porch, Tim’s grandmother called out to us in a thin, irritating voice: “Do you all want lemonade?”

—-Donna Tartt, The Ambush

A while back I read Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and liked it more than I anticipated. The Goldfinch is on my list of books to read – a long list that is, unfortunately, growing rather than shrinking.

Maybe before I die.

Today’s story, The Ambush, is a spectacularly well written tale of childhood and war. The descriptions are all too precise and knowing for a child of eight (the narrator) and you know it is being told from a point far in the future. That the memories are so strong and accurate shows how important the events are to the character, the author, and the reader.

It is a story of the time, a time gone, but of a time I remember. It’s a story of the death of a friend’s father and of the death of a certain kind of life we used to live.

This is something that the novel does better than any other art form: reproducing the inner life and the inner experience of another person, particularly extreme forms of consciousness like grief, dreams, drunkenness, spiritual revelations, even insanity. Unlike movies, where we’re always onlookers, in novels we have the experience of being someone else: knowing another person’s soul from the inside. No other art form does that. And I like dealing with particularly intense inner experiences because I think that in many ways, this is what the novel does best.
—-Donna Tartt

A Month of Short Stories 2017, Day 2 – The Itch, by Don DeLillo

Posted on by Bill Chance

Crow Collection of Asian Art
Sculpture Garden
Dallas, Texas

Over several years, for the month of June, I wrote about a short story that was available online each day of 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 – In September this time… because it is September.

Today’s story, for day 2 – The Itch, by Don DeLillo.

Read it online here:
The Itch, by Don DeLillo

But nobody showed up, so he sat awhile looking at the wall. It was one of those Saturdays that feel like Sunday. He didn’t know how to explain this. It happened intermittently, more often in the warmer months, and it was probably normal, although he’d never discussed it with anyone.
—-Don DeLillo, The Itch, opening lines

I have read some of Don Dellilo’s work… not what I would say a lot of it… not by any means all of it. The most notable absence is the massive novel Underworld which I have been meaning to read for a couple decades. Tomes of that weight and size require a commitment that I have been unable to grant for some time. Maybe soon.

Maybe before I die.

At any rate, I loved his novel White Noise enough that the other things he has written pale in my mind. That novel rotates around a bucolic modern scene that is interrupted by an Airborne Toxic Event of some kind… something that I am sort of familiar with in real life. It is an entertaining and haunting work of fiction.

In modernist fiction, there is an interesting difference between novels and short stories. In a novel, the strange detachment of modern life has to be dealt with and resolved… at least partially. In a short story, the author is free to wallow in the surrealism of daily life in this best of all possible worlds.

In today’s story that surrealism takes the form of an itch. The protagonist bounces from doctor to doctor… getting no help, and towards a possible love interest. But always present, if sometimes latent, is the itch, possessing a strange and fearful symmetry, and a perverse unpredictability. It doesn’t make life unbearable, but it probably makes it less fun. Which seems pretty unbearable.

Interviews:

I’m thinking of two dimensions of a screen or a page on which people read. We hope, writers hope, that in fact their characters are living in a three-dimensional world, first in the writer’s mind, then in the minds of readers.

When I’m conceiving a scene, do I see it in three dimensions? It’s not so easy to answer what appears to be a simple question. I see it — I see characters, I see people, I see streets, cars — and they seem to exist in this special level of mental reality. I could not distinguish the features of a character’s face when I have an idea concerning this character, when I see him or her in a room, and in most cases the room itself is fairly generic — except when I’m actually describing a room — this does happen somewhere in “Zero K” — and then I see a room much more clearly.
—-from an LA Times Interview

INTERVIEWER
Do you have any idea what made you a writer?
DON DeLILLO
I have an idea but I’m not sure I believe it. Maybe I wanted to learn how to think. Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don’t know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them. Maybe I wanted to find more rigorous ways of thinking. We’re talking now about the earliest writing I did and about the power of language to counteract the wallow of late adolescence, to define things, define muddled experience in economical ways. Let’s not forget that writing is convenient. It requires the simplest tools. A young writer sees that with words and sentences on a piece of paper that costs less than a penny he can place himself more clearly in the world. Words on a page, that’s all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions. How much of this did I feel at the time? Maybe just an inkling, an instinct. Writing was mainly an unnameable urge, an urge partly propelled by the writers I was reading at the time.
—-From The Paris Review

Crow Collection of Asian Art
Sculpture Garden
Dallas, Texas

A Month of Short Stories 2017, Day 1 – Love (“Amor”) by Clarice Lispector

Posted on by Bill Chance

(click to enlarge)

Over several years, for the month of June, I wrote about a short story that was available online each day of 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 – In September this time… because it is September.

Today’s story, for day 1 – Love (“Amor”), by Clarice Lispector.

Read it online here:

Love (“Amor”) From The Complete Stories; Translated by Katrina Dodson By CLARICE LISPECTOR

Ana’s children were good, something true and succulent. They were growing up, taking their baths, demanding for themselves, misbehaved, ever more complete moments. The kitchen was after all spacious, the faulty stove gave off small explosions.
—-from Love, by Clarice Lispector

I don’t know where I first heard of Clarice Lispector and her short stories… it was surprisingly recent. She is considered one of the masters of the form from Brazil. I checked out a book of her stories, translated into English, of course, from the library and am working through them.

Her work has that surreal quality that translated stories usually have – especially the ones from Latin America. The emotional knowledge is so subtle, acute, and accurate, it is almost painfully real and exciting fantasy at the same time. It makes me wish I could write like that.

Today’s story, Love, shows that there is nothing more delicate and unbalanced than an ordinary modern family life. Anything can tip the cart over – even something as simple as a blind man chewing gum.

Daily Writing Tip 27 of 100, The Very Very End: The Last Paragraph

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – The Very Very End: The Last Paragraph

Source – Beginnings, Middles & Ends, by Nancy Kress

Because the last paragraph of a short story is the power position – and within that position, the last sentence is the most powerful of all. Often – not infallibly, but often – the last sentence or paragraph evokes the theme of the entire story.

My favorite example of the power of the final paragraph and final sentence in a short story is in one of my favorites – Life After High School, by Joyce Carol Oates.

I wrote a blog entry about it years ago – you can read that here. You can read a PDF of the story here.

It is an example of a fantastically well-written work that manipulates the reader into thinking it’s one type of story – then turns you into thinking it’s another. And then the final sentence – and you realize (if you are reading carefully to the end) that it’s something completely different again – full of unexpected horror and meaning.

Read it. All the way through. I dare you.

A Month of Short Stories 2015, Day Thirty – The Omnibus

Posted on by Bill Chance

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 thirty – The Omnibus, by Arthur Quiller-Couch

Read it online here:

The Omnibus

Now we come to the last short story of the month…. I still have a massive list of stories – of course I will still read. I do try to average a short story a day and have for most of my life. That’s a lot of stories. So much to read, so little time.

I’ll still write about the ones that seem to have special meaning for me, personally, like A&P or Life After High School. I do need to put together a permanent page with links to all the short stories – weed out the ones that are no longer available online. Otherwise, that’s it ’til next June… I guess.

Today’s story Omnibus is a familiar scene to all of us that ride public transport regularly. In the story it’s a vehicle pulled by horses – but it’s all the same whether it’s this or an electric train, a diesel bus, or a jet plane. Somebody gets on in obvious emotional turmoil… everyone knows they should do something, say something, offer help… but it is rare that the connection is made.

Public places are sometimes the hardest to actually relate to the public.

The last line of the story used the term Whittingtons. I had no idea what that meant. After some research – I think it refers to Richard Whittington and the legend that grew around him – Dick Whittington and His Cat.

A Month of Short Stories 2015, Day Twenty Nine – The Untold Lie

Posted on by Bill Chance

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 – The Untold Lie, by Sherwood Anderson

Read it online here:

The Untold Lie

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”

—- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Today’s story is a chapter from Sherwood Anderson’s longer work – a short story cycle, Winesburg, Ohio.

It’s a tale of quiet desperation from two men – one that has earned it and one that hasn’t. There is an amazing scene early on – a flashback of sorts – of how the father of one of the two died.

When the train struck and killed him and his two horses a farmer and his wife who were driving home along a nearby road saw the accident. They said that old Windpeter stood upon the seat of his wagon, raving and swearing at the onrushing locomotive, and that he fairly screamed with delight when the team, maddened by his incessant slashing at them, rushed straight ahead to certain death. Boys like young George Willard and Seth Richmond will remember the incident quite vividly because, although everyone in our town said that the old man would go straight to hell and that the community was better off without him, they had a secret conviction that he knew what he was doing and admired his foolish courage. Most boys have seasons of wishing they could die gloriously instead of just being grocery clerks and going on with their humdrum lives.

Though the time, setting, and overall tone could not be more different, it reminds me somehow of Updike’s A&P – how easy it is to fall into habits and how little decisions can reverberate through time, to the end of life.

In the end, the story does not say who is right and who is wrong – it does not dare to take sides concerning what is the correct road taken. The title says it all – no matter what decision is made, no matter what advice is given – it will be… everything is lies.

A Month of Short Stories 2015, Day Twenty Eight – The Destructors

Posted on by Bill Chance

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 twenty eight – The Destructors, by Graham Greene

Read it online here:

The Destructors

I looked up, read, and used today’s story The Destructors by Graham Greene for one reason… it’s mentioned in Donnie Darko. What better reason can there be?

There would be headlines in the papers. Even the grown-up gangs who ran the betting at the all-in wrestling and the barrow-boys would hear with respect of how Old Misery’s house had been destroyed. Driven by the pure, simple, and altruistic ambition of fame for the gang, Blackie came back to where T. stood in the shadow of Misery’s wall.

T. was giving his orders with decision: It was as though this plan had been with him all his life, pondered through the seasons, now in his fifteenth year crystallized with the pain of puberty.

The first important thing to think about in this story is that it isn’t called “The Destroyers” but “The Destructors.”

Read through modern eyes, the actions of the gang are horrible and wasteful. But think about the area around Old Misery’s house – it was destroyed by the blitz. These young boys are raised in the quick aftermath of destruction – and are given an opportunity to do one better than the random violence of war.

And then, in the most haunting part of the story, there’s another passage that reminds me of a modern pop-fiction film reference. The boys come across Old Misery’s life savings, but they don’t steal anything, they burn. Like The Joker in The Dark Knight – they just want to watch the world burn.

“We aren’t thieves,” T. said. “Nobody’s going to steal anything from this house. I kept these for you and me—a celebration.” He knelt down on the floor and counted them out—there were seventy in all. “We’ll burn them,” he said, “one by one,” and taking it in turns they held a note upward and lit the top corner, so that the flame burnt slowly toward their fingers. The gray ash floated above them and fell on their heads like age. “I’d like to see Old Misery’s face when we are through,” T. said.

“You hate him a lot?” Blackie asked.

“Of course I don’t hate him,” T. said. “There’d be no fun if I hated him.” The last burning note illuminated his brooding face. “All this hate and love,” he said, “it’s soft, it’s hooey. There’s only things, Blackie,” and he looked round the room crowded with the unfamiliar shadows of half things, broken things, former things. “I’ll race you home, Blackie,” he said

A Month of Short Stories 2015, Day Twenty Seven – The Boarded Window

Posted on by Bill Chance

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 twenty seven – The Boarded Window, by Ambrose Bierce

Read it online here:

The Boarded Window

Ambrose Bierce… I guess you can say is a witty writer. Born in a log cabin – like the one in today’s story – all his life he was a sardonic observer of society and the human condition. I know him from the story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and his odd and bitter lexicon The Devil’s Dictionary. He published extensive fiction and journalism – always at the center of controversy because of his biting satire. Although the details are fuzzy – he died, probably in front of a firing squad, in Mexico while following Pancho Villa and his army.

Today’s selection is a typical tale – the language is a bit stilted and old – but there is surprising complexity in the way it is told. For example, take a close look at how the narration jumps around in time and how different sources are used – without changing the point of view. It gives a subtle indication of an unreliable narrator and the impression that everything is not quite what it seems.

The little log house, with its chimney of sticks, its roof of warping clapboards weighted with traversing poles and its “chinking” of clay, had a single door and, directly opposite, a window. The latter, however, was boarded up–nobody could remember a time when it was not. And none knew why it was so closed; certainly not because of the occupant’s dislike of light and air, for on those rare occasions when a hunter had passed that lonely spot the recluse had commonly been seen sunning himself on his doorstep if heaven had provided sunshine for his need. I fancy there are few persons living today who ever knew the secret of that window, but I am one, as you shall see.

And then, at the end, the twist ending. Not too surprising, nothing you don’t see… but that doesn’t lessen the impact, does it.

A Month of Short Stories 2015, Day Twenty Six – Light and Light

Posted on by Bill Chance

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 twenty six – Light and Light, by Chikodili Emelumadu

Read it online here:

Light and Light

Today we have a short, heartbreaking epistolary story.

This technique, of telling a story through a series of letters, is surprisingly common. Here it works well, emphasizing the gulf between the life that Angela leads and the actions of those that prey on her. Angela’s voice is never heard directly, but you can’t help but feel for the doom that she and her daughter are careening towards.

Eight years is the right age that the devil likes. In fact we usually say between six and ten. What number is in the middle of that? Eight. So you see, your daughter’s age is at peak ripeness for letting the devil wear her like glove.

It’s another story of sexual abuse, and of blaming the victim… of power used in the purpose of evil while proclaiming the good.

An all too common and universal tale.