“PM 3:20:56
8-11-94
More scenery. My sister’s shaky hand gives the frame an unpleasant edginess–I am reminded of reading newspapers on microfiche at the library, and the vague queasiness that comes from too much of it. There are views of mountain roads seen form the moving car. We pass high cliffs, walls of sediment-layered stone that have been gouged through by the highway. We pass beautiful drop-offs, mountain passes gilded by silver highway railings.
I guess she trains the camera on this because she is moved, awed by the beauty of it. She wants to record it. But it’s odd how little the camera can catch. In our old photo albums, it’s not the background but our faces I notice now–us, as children, eight, eleven, thirteen years old, posed before the Space Needle in Seattle or the Grand Canyon or some cactus we drove by in Arizona. This is us, we seem to be saying. We exist, even in this strange landscape. And the photos that are without people are as anonymous and inexpressive as postcards. No one is capable, at least in my family, of framing a view so that it expresses anything beyond the fact of its obvious grandeur.
Although there is a photograph my sister once took when we were growing up that has something to it. It’s a photo of a train wreck that happened near our house, when I was twelve and she was eleven. She rode her bike over there, our mother’s pocket camera tucked under the waistband of her shorts, the hard plastic casing nudging her bellyy as she pedaled.
It’s not a morbid photograph. At the very center of it, framed perfectly, is a plume of blue-white smoke, rising in a column and spreading out in that familiar cauliflower shape at the top, like a cumulus cloud. At the bottom of the photo, clustered around the trunk of smoke, are the derailed boxcars, piled together as if arranged. It’s a mysteriously calm picture–no hint of melodrama or sensationalism. It’s almost romantic, in it sway, like those solemn and stirring photos of thunderstorms over the prairie that sometimes appear in magazines like Life or National Geographic.
Of course, I don’t know if that’s the way she really saw the thing. But I am one of those who can’t help but see a relationship between style and soul. I can’t avoid imagining this eleven-year-old girl, her bike tipped beside her, her gangly bare legs shifting as she steps back–this child standing before a great disaster and slowly, with a purity of self-possession, arranging the scene in the crosshairs of the camera. That is what she was, what she could have been.”
from Fitting Ends by Dan Chaon, 1995. Read the entire story, beginning on page 1 by clicking HERE.
“In the morning Lenore said, ‘Would you get a tattoo with me? We could do this together. I don’t think it’s creepy,’ she added. ‘I think you’ll be glad later. A pretty one, just small somewhere. What do you think?’ The more she considered it, the more it seemed the perfect thing to do. What else could be done? She’d already given Helen her wedding ring.
‘I’ll get him to come over here, the house. I’ll arrange it,’ Lenore said. Helen couldn’t defend herself against this notion. She still felt sleepy, she was always sleepy. There was something wrong with her mother’s idea but not much.
But Lenore could not arrange it. When Helen returned from school, her mother said, ‘It can’t be done. I’m so upset and I’ve lost interest so I’ll give you the short version. I called…I must have made twenty calls. At last I got someone to speak to me. His name was Smokin’ Joe and he was a hundred miles away but sounded as though he’d do it. And I asked him it there was any place he didn’t tattoo, and he said faces, dicks and hands.’
‘Mom!’ Helen said. Her face reddened.
‘And I asked him if there was anyone he wouldn’t tatoo, and he said drunks and the dying. So that was that.’
‘But you didn’t have to tell him. You won’t have to tell him,’ Helen said.
‘That’s true,’ Lenore said dispiritedly. Then she looked angrily at Helen. ‘Are you crazy? Sometimes I think you’re crazy!’
‘Mom!’ Helen said, crying. ‘I want you to do what you want.’
‘This was my idea, mine!’ Lenore said. The dog gave a high nervous bark. ‘Oh dear,’ Lenore said, ‘I’m speaking too loudly.’ She smiled at him as if to say how clever both of them were to realize this.
from Honored Guest by Joy Williams, 2004. Read the entire story by clicking HERE.
“It was summer, and the camp lay flat under the blistering Texas sun. A generous supply of salt tablets was all that kept us conscious until nightfall; our fatigues were always streaked white from the salt of our sweat and we were always thirsty, but the camp’s supply of drinking water had to be transported from a spring many miles away, so there was a standing order to go easy on it. Most noncoms were thirsty enough themselves to construe the regulation loosely, but Reece took it to heart. ‘If yew men don’t learn nothin’ else about soldierin’,’ he would say, ‘you’re gonna learn water discipline.’ The water hung in Lister bags, fat canvas udders placed at intervals along the roads, and although it was warm and acrid with chemicals, the high point of every morning and every afternoon was the moment when we were authorized a break to fill our canteens with it. Most platoons would attack a Lister bag in a jostling wallowing rush, working its little steal teats until the bag hung limp and wrinkled, and a dark stain of waste lay spreading in the dust beneath it. Not us. Reece felt that half a canteenful at a time was enough for any man, and he would stand by the Lister bag in grim supervision, letting us at in an orderly column of twos. When a man held his canteen too long under the bag, Reece would stop everything, pull the man out of line, and say, ‘Pour that out. All of it.’
‘I’ll be goddamned if I will!’ D’Allesandro shot back at him one day, and we all stood fascinated, watching them glare at each other in the dazzling heat. D’Allesandro was a husky boy with fierce black eyes who had in a few weeks become our spokesman; I guess he was the only one brace enough to stage a scene like this. ‘Whaddya think I am,’ he shouted, ‘a goddamn camel, like you?’ We giggled.
Reece demanded silence from the rest of us, got it, and turned back to D’Allessandro, squinting and licking his dry lips. ‘All right,’ he said quietly, ‘drink it. All of it. The resta yew men keep away from that bag, keep your hands off your canteens. I want y’all to watch this. Go on, drink it.’
D’Allesandro have us a grin a nervous triumph and began to drink, pausing only to catch his breath with the water dribbling on his chest. ‘Drink it,’ Recce would snap each time he stopped. It made us desperately thirsty to watch him, but we were beginning to get the idea. When the canteen was empty Reece told him to fill it up again. He did, still smiling but looking a little worried. ‘Now drink that,’ Reece said. ‘Fast. Faster.’ And when he was finished, gasping, with the empty canteen in his hand, Reece said, ‘Now get your helmet and rifle. See that barracks over there?’ A white building shimmered in the distance, a couple of hundred yards away. ‘You’re gonna proceed on the double to that barracks, go around it and come back on the double. Meantime your buddies’re gonna be waitin’ here; ain’t non of ‘em gonna get nothin’ to drink till yew get back. All right, now, move. Move. On the double.’”
from The Collected Stories of Richard Yates by Richard Yates, 2001. Read the entire story by clicking HERE.
“He was an old man who pushed a white cart through the neighborhood streets ringing a little golden bell. He would stop at each corner, and the children would come with their money to inspect the taffy apples sprinkled with chopped nuts, or the red candy apples on pointed sticks, or the palatski displayed under the glass of the white cart. She had seen taffy apples in the candy stores and even the red apples sold by clowns at circuses, but she had never seen palatski sold anywhere else. It had two crisp wafers stuck together with honey. The taste might have reminded you of an ice-cream cone spread with honey, but it reminded Mary of Holy Communion. It felt like the Eucharist in her mouth, the way it tasted walking back from the communion rail after waiting for Father Mike to stand before her wearing his rustling silk vestments with the organ playing and him saying the Latin prayer over and over faster than she could ever hope to pray and making a sign of the cross with the host just before placing it on someone’s tongue. She knelt at the communion rail close enough to the altar to see the silk curtains drawn inside the open tabernacle and the beeswax candles flickering and to smell the flowers. Father Mike was moving down the line of communications, holding the chalice, with the altar boy, an eighth-grader, sometimes even John, standing beside him in a lace surplice, holding the paten under each chin; and she would close her eyes and open her mouth, sticking her tongue out, and hear the prayer and feel the host placed gently on her tongue. Sometimes Father’s hand brushed her bottom lip, and she would feel a spark from his finger, which Sister said was static electricity, not the Holy Spirit.
The she would walk down the aisle between the lines of communicants, searching through half-shut eyes for her pew, her mind praying Jesus help me find it. And when she found her pew, she would kneel down and shut her eyes and bury her face in her hands praying over and over thank you Jesus for coming to me, feeling the host stuck to the roof of her mouth, melting against her tongue like a warm, wheaty snowflake; and she would turn the tip of her tongue inward and lick the host off the ridges of her mouth till it was loosened by saliva and swallowed into her soul.”
from Childhood and Other Neighborhoods: Stories by Stuart Dybek, 1980. Read the entire story by clicking HERE.
“In the long unfurling of his life, from tight-wound kid hustler in a wool suit riding the train out of Cheyenne to geriatric limper in this spooled-out year, Mero had kicked down thoughts of the place where he began, a so-called ranch on strange ground at the south hinge of the Big Horns. He’d got himself out of there in 1936, had gone to a war and come back, married and married again (and again), made money in boilers and air-duct cleaning and smart investments, retired, got into local politics a and outgain without scandal, never circled back to see the old man and Rollo, bankrupt and ruined, because he knew they were.
They called it a ranch and it had been, but one day the old man said cows couldn’t be run in such tough country, where they fell off cliffs, disappeared into sinkholes, gave up large numbers of calves to marauding lions; where hay couldn’t grow but leafy spurge and Canada thistle throve, and the wind packed enough sand to scour windshields opaque. The old man wangled a job delivering mail, but looked guilty fumbling bills into his neighbors’ mailboxes.
Mero and Rollo saw the mail route as a defection from the work of the ranch, work that consequently fell on them. The breeding herd was down to eighty-two, and a cow wasn’t worth more than fifteen dollars, but they kept mending fence, whittling ears and scorching hides, hauling cows out of mudholes, and hunting lions in the hope that sooner or later the old man would move to Ten Sleep with his woman and his bottle and they could, as had their grandmother Olive when Jacob Corn disappointed her, pull the place taut. That bird didn’t fly, and Mero wound up sixty years later as an octogenarian vegetarian widower pumping an Exercycle in the living room of a colonial house in Woolfoot, Massachusetts.”
published in The Atlantic, 1997 and in favorite short story collection Close Range. Read the entire story by clicking HERE.
