Stories from Critical Quarterly, BBC R4, etc.
- Gravity - A male astronomer (his PoV) in a remote observatory receives a fellow astronomer, Victoria, who sometimes comes to his room at night. When they're both at the top of the structure she slips and dies. He says he didn't push her. The language is lush with scientific imagery (Special Relativity moreso than General) -
- "An night one sees further, more clearly, past the haze of atmosphere and without the distraction of other waking voices. My night vision is very keen and I saw her coming from a long way away, the jeep winding slowly up the road that runs like a thin blue vein on the skin of the mountain"
- "There are some who say that there are gravitational fields in space so strong that they might act as time machines; that could we survive their tremendous compression, we would emerge in ancient space, return to see a hot dust cloud spinning where we look for the blue eye of our home planet. We would find worlds strange and marvellous to us, suspended in the void of space: there would only be the void to recognise" (the ending)
- Stealing - from when she was younger than 11 she started stealing money from her parents, buying candy so that she got fat despite her mother making her do dance classes. Then she more or less stopped eating at home, still not losing weight. The ending is "Some days I wonder if I'll tell her, tell her about the quarters and the bills and the lost afternoons that ate into my life and made my first husband say, Jeannie, I'd stay if you'd lose some weight - but I don't think I will". No.
- Please Don't - When a woman researches in a library about Iceland for someone else, there's a note each time she returns to her desk, telling her not to sigh, etc. At the end she hears a man saying "Please don't cry". It's the librarian - "his eyes as blue as polar drift, the silver at his temple, the roses of colour still bright in his cheeks." She asks "Is it against the rules?" He replies "No. But like bottles of ink - it shouldn't be necessary anymore."
- A Monkey - A married German man, about 30, is with a boy, about 3, in Thailand. They've recently met. The boy was starving. The man (at least) will return to Berlin ("The doubtful legality of his errand assails him"). They've a day to kill. A truck stops. The boy seems interested in a ride. The German, using mime, says he wants to see a church. They get in and are driven away from the city into the hills - "The town disintegrates at its edge: seems to crumble like biscuit into expanses of half-cultivated fields littered with broken cement blocks". They're stopped at a checkpoint with 6 armed soldiers. They get through and reach a temple shrouded in mist. On a statue of Buddha is a monkey with glowing eyes - "When it leaps, skittering across the icy floor and disappearing out into the forest below, it is as if it had never been". I like it.
- How Many There Are, How Fast They Go, The Direction They Go In - The first-person female narrator met Jackson at a rodeo. She recalls them driving drunk through a desert, looking at stars. He died in a car accident. While their 2 little kids were with neighbours, the narrator went with Jackson's mother Janice to the funeral home. The narrator fell asleep. No.
- The Great Leonardo - a priest recalls a woman's first visit to his church. He fantacises. A ringmaster recalls a stranger arriving, wanting to be a lion-tamer. The current lion-tamer is an alcoholic so the ringmaster takes the stranger on as an apprentice. The stranger says he used to be a priest. The apprentice soon takes over, not saying a word during the act though as a priest he'd been praised for his beautiful voice. When woman finally starts confessing, the priest runs from the box and defrocks. The circus act ends by him putting his head into the lion's mouth. One evening the loin closes its jaws. He recalls the stare of the woman in the church. Not bad.
- Haircut - Jim, married 5 years to Linda, sees/overhears in New York 3 people he's not seen before - Sandy (ex art student, now law student), Art and Felicity. Jim suddenly decides to have a haircut. The barber starts using a cut-throat razor. No
- Jamie - "He" dreams of driving in a Grand prix race and crashing. He's not a fan of car racing. Jamie, 19, returns after his first term at uni to parents Ellen (a potter) and Simon. When Simon and Jamie go to the pub, Jamie's drawn to an arcade car racing game. Later, Simon writes Jamie a letter, writing things he'd been too shy to say, "blinking away the prism that threatens to explode the neat black lines of his being". He doesn't send the letter. Simon and Ellen visit Ellen's parents as they do each fortnight. He sees an album of photos that he's not seen for years, of Simon as a toddler. He says "He's doing well. At college. Don't you think?" Jamie was killed by a careless driver before he was two.
- A Simple Question - Suzanne (just separated from her husband of 5 years) is on holiday in France with Freya, a rich friend who she's known since childhood. When they were 9, cycling out together, Suzanne had an accident, losing teeth, making her less of a risk-taker. In France she's being interviewed at 2am - "While we talked, he took my fingerprints. He held my fingers as if they were newts and pressed them down firmly on a pad of ink, then pressed them again on cards that said main gauche and main droite. He talked to me all the while, as if he didn't want me to notice what he was doing.". We learn that they got into an amphitheatre in the night and Freya was climbing high - presumably dying after a fall.
- Pyramid - In the year of her birth, her father's pyramid was started. "On these nights with no moon the light from the stars stops far short of the ground and hangs like a distant celebration at which no one is welcome". After 16 years, building stops. She is offered to the chief mason. She refuses him until building resumes.
- A Few Hours at Home - Her lover's away for a week with others. Will he phone? She misses him. should she phone him? No.
- The Bends - "Songs are like smells, insiduous: they bubble into your blood and stay there like pearls of nitrogen, giving you the bends". The first-person photographer, female with a PhD boyfriend liked "running along the road to Grantchester. I ran every day then, the same route, from my house along the road past the Unicorn, the Green Man, the Red Lion, the Blue Ball" - my nearest pubs! She falls in love at first sight with a thatcher. She drives to Norfolk with him. Together they save a sheep. They hug. The narrator tells us that she wanted to end the story there, but she knew they weren't suited. She will accept the PhD student eventually. No
- Back Home - The female (late middle-age?) narrator returns to her dead mother's plush New York appartment after years away. She recalls how at 9 she saw a dead man in the street and her mother was over-interested. She recalls how later she and her parents played in the snow like a normal family. Her mother's bedroom is like a hospital room. She finds a stash of letters she's sent her parents dating from 1951 when she started boarding school. She leaves, then returns to fetch the letters. No.
- Mysteries of the Ancients - Greg (first-person narrator) is with brother John (12) and dad watching a TV program about ancient wonders. His mum left 6 months before. Dad decides to start car trading. Greg has to stay home from school to deal with phone inquiries. Dad bemoans the lack of greatness in modern society. He takes them to see London Bridge (the one at Lake Havasu). Old cars that he's bought begin to fill their street. Out of the blue his mum briefly phones. Dad sells their truck and quits his factory job. He buys a plot of land and covers it with concrete. His cars arrive in a cavalcade and are winched into the concrete. In time it becomes a tourist attraction. At 35 pages the longest story, and one of the best
Other reviews
- goodreads ('Mysteries of the Ancients', 'A Simple Question', 'Please Don't', 'Pyramid' and 'Stealing' are singled out)
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