Tag Archives: Short Story

A Month of Short Stories 2015, Day Eighteen – In the Penal Colony

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 eighteen – In the Penal Colony, by Franz Kafka
Read it online here:

In the Penal Colony

Today we have another story that I have read before – I’ve read everything by Kafka I can get my grimy paws on – long ago. It is worth a re-visit, the story is more subtle and complex than it seems at first.

Kafka is considered one of the literary giants – though he barely published anything while he was alive. On his deathbed he made his best friend promise to destroy all his unpublished work. Thank goodness he didn’t. So Kafka’s fame is directly due to the betrayal of the person he trusted most.

I could not be any other way.

In the Penal Colony is about as horrific a tale as you are going to come across. Some backwater third-world tropical colony has a megalomaniacal tinpot ruler (the Old Commandant) that devises a complex and gruesome means of torture and execution. With the aid of his faithful lackey (The Officer) he goes ahead and, with great fanfare, orchestrates a reign of terror across the land.

Now, we don’t get to visit this horror in its heyday – it’s years later and the Old Commandant is long gone. However, aided by The Officer, still faithful to the abominable vision, the plague of pain and fear continues to stumble along of its own accord. None of the characters is even given a name. The central character is offended by the torture and system of rude justice – but he is so numbed it’s hard for him to do anything concrete about it. Even the intended victim doesn’t seem to care much about what is going to happen to him.

The Officer recognized that he was in danger of having his explanation of the apparatus held up for a long time. So he went to the Traveler, took him by the arm, pointed with his hand at the Condemned Man, who stood there stiffly now that the attention was so clearly directed at him—the Soldier was also pulling on his chain—and said, “The matter stands like this. Here in the penal colony I have been appointed judge. In spite of my youth. For I stood at the side of our previous Commandant in all matters of punishment, and I also know the most about the apparatus. The basic principle I use for my decisions is this: Guilt is always beyond a doubt. Other courts could not follow this principle, for they are made up of many heads and, in addition, have even higher courts above them. But that is not the case here, or at least it was not that way with the previous Commandant.

On reading the story again, despite the detailed description of the ghastly apparatus, the most horrible impression is of the bureaucratic, inhuman, machinery of abuse careening forward on its own floundering momentum. Only the degeneration of time can stop it, like it stops everything.

It’s all so….

Kafkaesque

A Month of Short Stories 2015, Day Seventeen – The Veldt

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 seventeen – The Veldt, by Ray Bradbury
Read it online here:

The Veldt

Today’s is a story I have read before – but it was so long ago I don’t remember it – so it counts as fresh. “The Veldt” was first published as “The World the Children Made” in 1950 – but it was later included in the anthology “The Illustrated Man” in 1951. I read that book as a child (and saw the movie – which “The Veldt” is in also) – so I know I’ve read it before. I do have a memory of the movie version – maybe that wiped out the written word.

At any rate, even though the story is almost seventy years old (wow!) it could be written today. The only thing that dates it are the prices – a state of the art luxury automated home cost thirty thousand dollars – the author obviously intended that to seem like a lot of money.

The story is about the evils that can befall you if you buy into luxury too much and lose sight of the real world. For these parents, the real world gets in through the artificial luxury and bites them on the ass (literally). Oh, and it’s no coincidence that the kid’s names are Peter and Wendy (as in Pan and Darling).

“Everything. Where before they had a Santa Claus now they have a Scrooge. Children prefer Santas. You’ve let this room and this house replace you and your wife in your children’s affections. This room is their mother and father, far more important in their lives than their real parents. And now you come along and want to shut it off. No wonder there’s hatred here. You can feel it coming out of the sky. Feel that sun. George, you’ll have to change your life. Like too many others, you’ve built it around creature comforts. Why, you’d starve tomorrow if something went wrong in your kitchen. You wouldn’t know how to tap an egg. Nevertheless, turn everything off. Start new. It’ll take time. But we’ll make good children out of bad in a year, wait and see.”

It’s interesting to compare and contrast this story to the one from day six, The Semplica-Girl Diaries. Both are the stories of parents trying to give their children the best the world has to offer, and failing terribly. Both are brought down by their children (one set on purpose, the other as an unintended consequence) as a result of an extravagant purchase – a present – done with the best of intentions.

And we all know what road those pave.

A Month of Short Stories 2015, Day Sixteen – Cinnamon

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 sixteen – Cinnamon, by Neil Gaiman

Read it online here:

Cinnamon

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.

A Month of Short Stories 2015, Day Fifteen – A White Heron

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 fifteen – A White Heron, by Sarah Orne Jewett
Read it online here:

A White Heron

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.

A Month of Short Stories 2015, Day Fourteen – The Embassy Of Cambodia

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 fourteen – The Embassy Of Cambodia, by Zadie Smith

Read it online here:

The Embassy Of Cambodia

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.

And these are the days of our lives.

A Month of Short Stories 2015, Day Thirteen – The Largesse Of the Sea Maiden

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 thirteen – The Largesse Of the Sea Maiden, by Denis Johnson

Read it online here:

The Largesse Of the Sea Maiden

Today, another story by one of my favorite authors, Denis Johnson. I like this puppy better than the others for this month, at least so far.

Two days ago I wrote about Jennifer Egan and how her novel A Visit From the Goon Squad was a set of linked short stories. Another excellent and notable book written in this form is Jesus’ Son, by today’s author 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.

A Month of Short Stories 2015, Day Twelve – Town of Cats

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 twelve – Town of Cats, by Haruki Murakami

Read it online here:

Town of Cats

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.

A Month of Short Stories 2015, Day eleven – Safari

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 eleven – Safari, by Jennifer Egan

Read it online here:

Safari

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.

And they might not even be aware of it.

A Month of Short Stories 2015, Day ten – Hollow

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 ten – Hollow, by Breece D’J Pancake

Read it online here:

Hollow

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.

The author of the story, Breece D’J Pancake, grew up in the doom of the Appalachian coal mines. He shot himself at the age of twenty-six, at the time his first stories were being published.

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.

Something deadly… something waiting.

A Month of Short Stories 2015, Day nine – The Zero Meter Diving Team

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 nine – The Zero Meter Diving Team, by Jim Shepard

Read it online here:

The Zero Meter Diving Team

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.

And it doesn’t.