"Potting shed murder" by Paula Sutton

An audio book. Cozy.

Prologue: James and Daphne are in a car in London, battling over parking spaces when they see a balaclava'd man with a shotgun.

James are Daphne moved 10 months ago from London to Pudding Corner, a village near Kings Lynn. Their kids Archie, Finn and Immie, went to fee-paying schools. They're struggling financially. They live in Cranberry Farmhouse. Dr Oakes is their closest neighbour - he gives them home-grown veg and knows the local lore. Centuries ago, Matthew Hopkins, witch-finder general, roamed the area. Daphne's about the only black in the area, but that's not a problem. The locals don't like second-home owners and travellers. They're suspicious of Minerva who lives in the woods with a few others. Her son Silvanus is avoided by the other kids. Daphne has sympathy for them.

Sisters Nancy and Patsy Warburton run the local shop.

Maryanne is a friend of Daphne. She's also from London and is strapped for cash. She wants her child to get a scholarship, but Charles, the head of the local junior school, dislikes her, so won't give a good reference. He has an allotment. His younger wife Augusta misses intimacy.

Silvanus looks rather like the headmaster. The headmaster's found dead in the allotment having told his wife something. Someone wearing a yellow-lined coat was seen with him in the allotment. A will is found, giving money to Minerva. Minerva and Silvanus disappear.

Minerva returns, revealing that she's Charles' daughter. She's known since Silvanus started school. Charles learnt more recently. Minerva's mother and Charles were together before he married. He died of a drug-induced heart attack - perhaps a natural drug that Minerva and her friends know about?

We learn that Patsy and Charles were childhood friends who played with commune friends. Nancy seemed to like Charles too, but actually she loved Serafina, a commune girl. Charles got Clover, another commune girl, pregnant. She didn't want to tie brilliant Charles down.

Daphne goes to Dr Oates house. She knows that he's an expert in poisonous plants. She sees a photo and realises that he went to Medical School with Augusta. He doesn't let her leave. He says that Augusta was top of the class - a catch. When he brought her to the village she saw Charles' lack of interest as a challenge, seduced him, said she was pregnant and married him, Dr Oates as best man. She gave up her career, carrying on with Dr Oates.

Witnesses' assumptions confused their notions about what happened on the night of the murder (for instance, people thought Charles and Minerva were having an affair). We learn that Dr Oates killed Charles, thinking that was what Augusta wanted. He tries to kill Daphne, but her London self-defence lessons prove useful.

Augusta's the least believable person, but the book chugs along well enough. Eyes can show "sadness, shame, and regret". A woman can cry "miserably to herself" and think to herself.

"Magma (No.84, 2022)"

Theme: Physics. Some of the poets are way more qualified in science/medicine than I am, others (I suspect) know a lot less. I most like "One by One" by Peter Daniels (not a physicist) and "Never leave the ship" by Rebecca Watts. There are many poems that I don't understand. When forms are used, I find them obscure. I think I've missed something

• "It might just" has 17 long-lined couplets, all ending in "bless" or "blessing". It's not a strict contraint, nor a difficult one to satisfy if padding and lack of variety of the words' usage is allowed. Why bother?
• "Aerodynamics of a Domestic" is 18 lines long. The number of times the word "geese" is used in each line is 1,0,2,1,2,0,1,0,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0,0,1. The pattern for the use of "argument[s]" is 1,1,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,1,1,2,1,1,0,1,0. There are other repetitions too. I don't think labelling the text "poetry" makes the repetition any less tedious.
• "How to be 2-D" might be shaped. A table-leg cut in half? The content gives me too few clues. Linebreaks include "de-/pth", "ba-/lloon", and "f-ormless" so some device is being used. An acrostic? Syllabics? No.

In a prose piece, the redundancy in "a redshift toward/ the red end of the spectrum" (p.60) would be criticised.

Some of the reviews include phrases I don't understand, or don't see the point of, or are needlessly fancy -

• "Words, like the mind, are allowed to roam where the mind is perhaps not"
• "The language is descriptive and located, astutely coppiced at times to disrupt socially constructed narratives of viewing plant life"
• The poems "mime the undoing of human centrality"
• "This is a quiet and unassuming collection that at times can seem obscure and cryptic"

Reviewers, even if they think that readers might find poems "puzzling and inaccessible" or if they "want a narrative that isn't there" don't blame the poet.

"Forgetting is how we survive" by David Frankel (Salt, 2023)

Stories from The Bristol Short Short Prize Anthology, Structo, London Magazine, etc. The shortest is about a page long. Most are about a dozen pages.

• Ghost story - 1 page.
• Sink rate - A woman on a beach watches a plane crash, one that she could have been on. I first saw this in the Bristol competition anthology, then in BBSS 2022 and liked it there too. It reminds me of Mark Haddon's "The Pier Falls". It's online at Barcelona Review
• Shooting season - Wayne is driving the estate's tractor to where he's mending a bridge. Niall, the owner's son, is hosting university friends for a shooting party. One guest, Lara, has caught Wayne's eye - tattoos, blazing hair. While he's working, she appears with Niall's 12 y.o. brother Lucas. She asks if he could give her car a tow, then leaves. Lucas tells him that Lara is his brother's girlfriend. Lucas takes the tractor keys and mucks about. He falls in the river. Wayne pulls him out and tried desperately, vainly, to revive him. The shooting party gather around him. Lara and Niall aren't there. [I like it. Lots of craft.]
• Downstream the water darkens - The first-person is an early teens boy on holiday on a farm with his uncle and aunt's family, including Kristin. Perhaps he has no mother. He's taking photos to show his father what he did (he has a camera with flash-cubes). In the village with Kristin he sees a teenage boy and girl kissing and takes a photo. The boy threatens him. Kristin saves him - she thinks that the "I" is a coward. He shop-lifts a pen-knife. As a dare he follows the river as far as he can. He has to paddle through the river. He sees a fabled 6 ft pike, forgets to photograph it. He sees a floating carrier bag, cuts it open with his pen-knife, photographs the bleeding, broken-boned thing inside. [I like this too. The ending may be a bit of a cop-out.]
• Meadowlands - He works on an estate, drinks (often alone) in the evenings. He finds peace in the tree plantation, a ruined croft. He lives in a caravan with Doyle, an ex-convict. They have a moody friendship. There was a problem at the local pub. He fears a woman's body (she worked at the chippy) will be found in the loch. As the police are about to question them he hopes that Doyle's past will count. Doyle asks him for stories about the townies who go at night to the loch.
• Empty rooms - Andrea's parents are estate agents. When she has keys to an empty house she calls Danny (about 17) and they sneak into it. They explore, drink, have sex, make-believe its their home. In one house the phone rings. When Andrea picks it up a man says her name. There's excitement about being caught. He suggests to her that she's having the same sort of fun with someone else. After that, he never sees her again. He moves away. 30 years later he returns. She's dead. The house they last visited is for sale - she lived there. He visits it, imagines what it was like living there, sees the children's room.
• The memory system - When the narrator was 8 her mother took her to stay with her grandfather at the top of a tower block for 2 months while the mother got better. She'd never seen him before. She didn't need to go to school. They only went out at night. 2 chains and 3 locks on the door. Blackout curtains. She wasn't allowed in his bedroom. There were rumours that he was a pervert. Each night they went out and had a picnic down the road. He's dead now. Her mother died soon after. 25 years later she uses the walk home as the basis of her locii-based memory device. He was scared on the walk back. His bedroom was a darkroom. Big photos of views from his window were on his walls. [I like this too!]
• Sink - A great sink-hole appears just when Jen leaves Roy. He loses his job. The buildings around the growing rim ("Holeside") are evacuated. Squatters, flea-markets and trendy pop-ups appear. He phones Jen when drunk, promising to reform. He meets a women who's interested in him but lets her go [I like the sink-hole-related details more than Roy's storyline.]
• The killing tree - One page. The persona buries criminal condemned to death. The relatives conduct the execution.
• Heaven - Chrissy, 17, lives on a caravan site with her mum. Her brother did 4 years before. Toby and old Annie live in a caravan too. Her boyfriend Arron has a van. When Toby accused Chrissy of killing his dog, Arron protected her. She's working hard at school so that she can leave the place. Her mum tells Chrissy that Annie had to give her kids to Social Services. Annie tells Chrissy that she killed the dogs because Toby treated them so badly. She advices Chrissy to get away and start a new life. Chrissy posts an anonymous letter to Toby. Soon, police and paramedics are outside Toby and Annie's caravan.
• The Unmaking - Christian (UK, backpacking) and Tegan (NZ), both in their early 20s, are walking along a beach after a storm. They met at a beach party weeks before. Their relationship has become a bit tense. They see a small stranded whale. While he tries to keep it alive, she runs for help. She returns with a group for people who cut the whale up. They offer him the most valuable part - the penis. Years later he remembers the incident. He's forgotten why they broke up, but he recalls for firelit face that first night, and the way she said his name. [I don't like the paragraph where he dreams he's in a commuter bus on a rainy day dreaming he's on a remote sunny beach.]
• Stay - Hollins is looking for his dog. His wife is Helen. "The boy" used to spoil the dog. The dog strays onto the neighbour's land. The neighbour goes around with a shotgun. He's tied the dog up. He warns Hollins that next time he'll protect his animals by shooting the dog. Hollins says sorry, it was the boy's dog. The neighbour lets him off. Hollins feels humiliated having to use that excuse.
• Hitler was an artist too - The narrator works in an old warehouse with Alan and Wayne. When their dictatorial boss Bert discovered that the narrator drew, he was less strict, telling the narrator that he painted. Bert tells the narrator's colleagues that it's the narrator's last day - he's been there a year. The narrator had been keeping the news secret. The narrator likes Claire. He protects her from Bert's gropes. She has a psycho boyfriend otherwise she'd be with the narrator. They've talked about a future together. But her boyfriend picks her up in his BNW. The narrator's going to start at Art College. Bert thinks it's a waste of time, full of hippies, and suggests that the narrator might one day take over his job.

Cold rivers. Watching lovers. Living in caravans. Dogs.

I much prefer this to (for example) the latest A.L.Kennedy collection.

"The awkward black man" by Walter Mosley (Wiedenfield & Nicolson, 2020)

• The good news is - He's fat, divorced from Blythe, now with Lana though he's started seeing Rachel. He starts losing weight at last. It's operable cancer. Blythe distances herself, scared of cancer, later asking for more money from him. Lana finds out about Rachel. He falls in love with his nurse Maura and asks her to marry him. He discovers she's stolen from him but that doesn't matter.
• Pet fly - Rufus Coombs works in the postroom of "Carter's Home" with other blacks, though he has a degree. He delivers mail to Lana (the quiet one) and Mona, identical white twins. Ernie, black, has been promoted out of the group. The bosses are white. Getting home one night he decides not to kill a fly that he'd normally squash. He starts confiding in it. He starts chatting up Lana, leaving gifts on her desk. He's about to give her a $347 bonsai tree when she formally complains of sexual harassment. He's going to be sacked. When he has a meeting with a manager, the manager says that Ernie's spoken up for him, and the manager wants to put Rufus on a trainee management course. On the way home Rufus finds some vials of crack. He puts the dead fly in a vial and buries it in the roots of the bonsai tree
• Almost Alyce -1979. Albert was doing ok at college until he fell in love with brown-skinned Alyce who left him for Roald. His father Thyme left his wife Georgia for Betty. Albert moved back in with his mother, became a labourer. His mother died, his father sold the house. For 20+ years he drank, lived in the streets, did casual labour. At 53 he stopped working. In New York, a girl nothing like Alyce except for style asked him to distract security guards while she shoplifted. He invited him to live in her smart squat. When 2 thugs tried to attacked her, he got in their way. She shot the thugs dead. He woke up in hospital, his sister at his bedside. She invited him home. He said yes - he'd amassed $83,297.
• Starting over - Now he's 60, each day is like a new start for Jared. He had 3 kids and a wife Marguerite. She left him for Gary then soon returned. A son married an Alaskan and had a child [why do we would to know this?]. When Holly, an intern, says that he should live life, he smokes outside their house. She wants a divorce. He has a kid with Holly who then found a boyfriend. His wife's cancer returns. He helps her.
• Leading from the affair - Lassiter, 59, asks his girfriend Jool about Jon Silver. She leaves him. Lassister sees a therapist because he feels his life is going nowhere. He's been going to another therapist for 30 years. Jool keeps phoning Lassiter. She says she's not seen Jon for 6 months. Lassiter asks Kara, 29, a waitress, out. They start sleeping together. Kara visits Lassiter. They make love. She tells him the Jim has returned to her and they're getting married. Kara breaks up with Lassister - he's too intense. He tells the therapists about each other. They both stop seeing him. He starts a "Broken Hearts" online magazine which is so successful he has no time for a social life.
• Cut, cut, cut - Martin (a plastic surgeon) and Marlee meet on a blind date and sleep together. He's not much to look at, but he's considerate. When his wife disappeared with a friend of his who was researching gene modification, the police thought he might be to blame. There's a flash-forward - "Years later, after Martin had been sentenced to 117 years in prison ...". She keeps seeing him, taking on other lovers too. The police interview her, saying he's still a suspect. This excited her. She sees him daily. He invites her to his lab. A superbeing is there. He says that there were many failed attempts, and 12,306 successes that were living in secret. He's already given her the treatment. She's growing taller and wiser. She leaves and tells the police. She hides away in Australia, evolving.
• Between storms - Michael uses the excuse of a brewing storm to isolate himself in his flat. He becomes famous, telling his fans that they should do the same.
• The black woman in the Chinese hat - Rufus (20) sees a pretty, older woman sunbathing in New York. They start talking, have a meal. She has 2 boyfriends - a cop and an ex-con. They go on Statin Island Ferry - all they can afford. He climaxes while she pets him.
• Local hero - There's a lot of family tree info on the first page. The main character, Stewart is nothing special. His cousin Sherman is clever and popular. Sherman invites him on a double date and Stewart loses his virginity. Sherman dies in a streetfight because his lover's husband hit her and he hit him back. Stewart begins to live Sherman's life. Sherman's mum says that he and Sherman had the same father. He takes a gun from a mugger and threatens to kill him.
• Otis - Reginald (Crash) is clever. At school he helps pupils cheat. Thinking he's about to be expelled, 15, he runs off with a tent. He meets Otis, who's been expelled many times. Crash thinks Otis understands him. Otis kisses him. In the night Otis steals all his stuff. The police take Crash home. Years pass. His twin brother becomes a soldier. Their mother left. His brother dies of a heart attack. Crash tracks down his mother. find that she's with an old schoolfriend who recovered from cancer after she cared for him. Crash makes money creating a web site to help kids pass exams. When he discovers the Otis has died, he goes to the funeral. Otis's mother said he kept talking about Crash, the only person who took him seriously.
• Showdown on the Hudson - Felix, 16, lives in New York. Billy, a black cowboy his age, arrives from Texas. He works looking after police horses in Central Park. He has a duel with Nacogdoches (a rich delinquint who dresses like a cowboy - no bullets), winner decided by looking at the video. Billy wins, entitling him to take Felix Nacogdoches' white girlfriend out. He does, innocently. Nacogdoches later punches her. They duel again, this time with bullets. Nacogdoches dies. Billy flees. Years later, with a Ph.D in literature, Felix gets letters from him, thanking him for his friendship. Felix welcomes the clarity of his morality.
• Breath - He wakes confused, breathless. He thinks he's an NYC prof. He's in a hospital room with 3 other old blacks. He's had an asthma attack and a heart attack. Colleagues arrive to get him released.
• Reply to a dead man - Roger's brother Seth died 6 months before. Lots of family tree info. Roger had been too poor to attend the funeral. A messenger arrives, saying that Seth paid then to give this delayed note. It says that the white girlfriend he had when he was 17 had been pregnant when Roger's parents forced him to dump her for race reasons. Seth had been keeping in touch. The girl died a year ago. Roger visits her daughter, likes her, and gets another message from the messenger saying Seth has $137k to give to the daughter. Roger, decides he'd like to apply to be a messenger.
• The letter - Frank's wife Corrine has white/black parents, is 41 (he's 55, black) and earns 3 times what he earns. He's had 3 affairs. His father killed himself when Frank was a kid. He intercepts a letter to Corrine from a man who has talked to her about things that matter to her. He's sacked from work for incompetence, not telling his family. After 4 months he writes a letter to his wife saying they don't talk any more. He starts living rough, ends up fighting for his life in hospital. His son appears at his bedside. If he lives, he'll return home.
• Haunted - When 68 y.o. Paul Henry's 1000th story is (like all the others) rejected, he's so grumpy that his partner Mira leaves him. After he dies, his hatred of editor Clark Heinemann keeps his spirit alive. Mira goes to him asking for Henry's stories to be published. She sleeps with him, he publishes a story, she sleeps with him nightly. They marry and have a child they call Paul Henry. Clark gives talks about Henry, has an affair. The boy can see the ghost of his father. They chat. The father thought it was hatred kept him haunting, but he realises he's going to be around for a while yet.
• The sin of dreams - A start-up company offer transmigration of souls (downloading into a computing then uploading into a new body). There's a court case about whether there's only one soul though there may be multiple copies - if a new body kills the old one, is it murder? [Chris Beckett for example could have done so much better than this]
• An unlikely series of conversations - Laertes Jackson (50-something - he has an ex-wife Bonita, 35, and an 11 y.o. daughter Medea), a bank teller, goes to an interview at MMM and fails because he argues about the term "African-American". He's had no dates for 6 years, since the divorce. He joins a dating site and gives essay-style replies. MMM's boss offers him a job on the strength of these replies. He waits to reply, spending months.

Lots of overweight men, family trees, men with younger wives, broken families, 5- and 6-digit numbers. I wasn't impressed by any of the stories.

Other reviews

• arefugefromlife (Several of these stories were just depressing, though. Some even seemed pointless. Rufus and Frank both appeared multiple times, enough that I learned that I didn’t want their lives, even though they proved to be equal parts entertaining, exciting, depressing and super, super awkward. Another thing to note is that I’ve never been a fan of the author’s science fiction—mostly it seems too far out there, too unrealistic, even silly—and the few scifi reads within didn’t disprove this. My favorite stories were: Almost Alyce ... Between Storms ... Local Hero ... Reply to a Dead Man )
• L.D. Barnes (The internal dialogue of each man is different, yet the message is the same. “I have been injured and/or abused by people and/or the world.” Each one he talks about is intelligent, yet fragile. Sensitive, yet doggedly resilient.)
• John Paul (Mosley imbues each and every character with an astonishing degree of detail and genealogical backstory (often rendered within a single, almost impossibly informative sentence) that makes many of these stories read more like biographies in miniature. ... The sole exception to this almost hyper-real approach is the sci-fi-leaning “Cut”.)

"The wild flowers of Baltimore" by Rob Roensch (Salt, 2012)

Stories from South Carolina Review, Epoch, PANK, etc

• The dogs of Baltimore - He's finished college. All his friends have gone away - touring Europe, etc. Soon he'll be leaving Baltimore forever, but for now he's a dogwalker. Something happened in spring - we never find out what. He knows he needs to change his life. He's been reading Kierkegaard. He muses about dogs, the beauty of the city. The style has the looseness that can contain paragraphs such as "Fireworks: when you see them you see so much, such piercing specific color, such designs intricate as a spider web. But then, later, try to remember one explosion. Try to remember a color" and "If a bunch of geese is a flock then a bunch of keys is an insanity. Only one is right, and even the one that is right will not work"
• Stillborn giraffe - One summer Zack works in a zoo and watches a giraffe struggle to give birth. The calf did not move. Weeks later he wants to tell friends about it. The ending is "But he could not yet understand how to tell it. He felt somehow that he needed to hold onto what he'd seen and felt. How real death was. And then how the stillborn giraffe shuddered, and lived."
• Dark Molly - Fragmentary. Each sentence is a paragraph - "Her Death is a serious architect" etc.
• A girl called Random - Scott and Corinne have been married for 2 years or so. No children. They're thinking of adopting a Chinese baby. They go back to Corinne's home town (a rich white enclave in a black poor area) to attend a house party. Scott's puzzled that Corinne doesn't return more often. She knows most people at the party, has done so for years. He knows nobody. They have a little tiff. She leaves him alone. He starts drinking. A man tells him that Corinne used to be quiet, then there was the accident. Scott's puzzled. He seeks Corinne in vain. Her parents arrive. He avoids them, finds Corinne who admits that she once stole her dad's car and had an accident. She says she's desperate to run away again, desperate for Scott to give her a child.
• I won the bronze medal - The narrator's a bit mad - "I can't stand it when babies cry in the grocery store. I hear their crying right in the center of my skull, just above my uvula. It's like a swallowed a butterfly. I have never actually swallowed a butterfly, but I have swallowed a moth. What happens behind my skull when I heard a baby crying in the grocery story is bigger and more colorful and less hairy than when I swallowed a moth ... One day later the news gets more real, like the way a Polaroid starts out as nothing and then burns into what it is"
• John's story - It begins (rather strangely, in retrospect) with "Here's my brother John a few years from now". Then there a present-tense tale of a lonely boy who signs up for the army (his mother's sad, his father's proud) and who has a clever older brother (who photographs him on his graduation day). He goes off to bootcamp and feels he belongs. He bunks next to Buck. He's sent to a desert, starts reading the bible, recalls when he was a child that he never questioned God's existence. Buck catches him praying. His convoy is ambushed. He turns his vehicle towards the enemy (the black in the blackness). He wakes in a hospital. He knows he is dying - a hero maybe but not a believer. He hears a call to prayer.
• Henry - Half-page sections, subtitled. The male of a young couple starts talking like Henry David Thoreau. "I do sort of like you like this" his partner says. It's funny for a while.
• The customer -
  • It begins with "I have been here all day waiting to save you". The narrator's working at a supermarket till and sees a man with a gun 2 aisles away. He tried to warn the customer without attracting attention. The cashier 2 aisles away is shot dead.
  • Then there's "Here is my story: I was seventeen.". At a party he discovered there was a queue to have sex with a passed-out girl from his school. He did nothing - didn't take advantage of her, didn't save her. He keeps looking out for her. At the supermarket he shields the customer.
  • Then there's "Are you still here? Now it's summer.". In the supermarket car-park he's collecting trolleys when the storm breaks - "the light does not fade to reveal the ordinary parking lot but is instead becoming brighter and brighter. You stand there"
• The poetry unit -Dan, nearly engaged, is in his first year of teaching at a catholic school. A boy wants to read out a sonnet about Stacey, 18, in his class, Dan discourages it. He recalls from his own youth what unrequited love is like. Stacey reads a poem that stuns people. She dashes from the room. Only Dan knows it isn't hers - it's Tennyson's. He awkwardly talks to her later. She's had an abortion. He's upset about telling the head nun about it, but feels he must (his partner thinks so). Stacey's not at the next class. Dan thinks that the class blame him. The boy wants to read the poem out anyway. Dan blurts "Josh, she doeesn't love you". He shares the poem.
• Hush - Billy (newly a Sheriff's Deputy) phones the narrator Mike (with baby Casey) asking him to join a search party for a missing girl in a wood. He and Mike used to play in the wood. He got lost there once. The crossroads there has a special significance for him. Mike sets off at dawn, notices that Billy "wasn't in charge; he was holding himself together". They see a deer at the crossroads. Billy shoots, misses. At the end "I saw that when we found the girl it would be Billy who would approach her ... If we found the girl and she had passed from this life, it would be Billy who would ... close her eyes with his thumb and middle finger"
• The wildflowers of Baltimore - It's late. The narrator's 13 y.o. son has just finished a science project posterboard display of wild flowers. His wife's a lapsed catholic who sometimes wants to believe. He thinks back to when he won a prize for a science project. Otter Fisk was friendly to him though he wasn't as bright. He was in love with Valerie who he couldn't talk to. He saw Otter and Valerie kiss. He won a scholarship to college, expected to be special there, but he wasn't (he ended up a bureaucrat). When he returned in the vacation he went to a party feeling superior, but nobody paid him much attention. Otter left early and died driving home. Mike's son disappears in the night. He's done it before. Mike starts looking in the places his son collected the wildflowers from. He eventually finds his son who says he's looking for "flowers that only bloom in the dark. You said there are flowers that only bloom in the dark". At the end he remembers what it felt like to love Valerie in science class. She used to pass Otter notes folded into perfect right triangles, his name along the hypotenuse. He wanted to read the hidden words. He wanted the hidden words to be for him.
• The day - You have abandoned your car before the town-centre. Windows are smashed, people are shot. Your wife might be home by now, she'd have read the note. You find your daughter - "you won't be able to see her face because, beyond her, the day will be too bright to look into, but she will see you". 2 pages. Lost on me. "above the are bare enough" (p.156) is a typo.
• Hairline fracture -Ben's called from work because his daughter has an accident at school. He takes her to hospital, meeting his wife MaryAnn there. The father of the boy who caused the accident is there. Ben isn't polite. MaryAnn is more controlled. He recalls meeting her for the first time. He recalls having a fracture when he was a kid. MaryAnn and the girl go home. He doesn't drive home or back to work. He drifts around the city, thinks about having a drink, goes into a record store. The ending is "And he saw the face of his wife when she was young, and drunk, beautiful ... And he saw the body of his daughter .. just at the moment she knew she was hurt, before she started to scream. He had not been there. He had not saved her and could not save her. He loved her. He was a child; he was breathing in his last breath"

Lingering epiphanies. Enigmatic endings. Moments in a parent's life that revive a significant memory from childhood/youth. Shy boys. Shades of David Means. I liked several of the stories, and found something of interest in most of the others. Maybe "The wildflowers of Baltimore" is my favourite.

Other reviews

• goodread ("The Poetry Unit" was a particular standout (Heidi Nibbelink); there is a saminess about these stories, sometimes the voice of a supposedly unaware male is unconvincing and I didn't feel that the author was quite overcoming and overturning masculinity sufficiently (Ruth Brumby) )

"Astral bodies" by Jay Merill (Salt, 2007)

Stories from Stand, MsLexia, London Magazine, Staple, The Interpreter's House, etc. Some are only 3 pages long.

• Beacon - Weeks ago, Tilly had given the narrator a houseplant that the narrator has neglected. Tilly was raped when a schoolgirl by a boy who seemed gentle at first. She decided that truth is deeper than appearance. She wanted to be an actress. Later her father contacted her. She hadn't seen him since she was 5. She visited his big house and new family. She preferred her simple life. She befriended a homeless couple who turned out to be druggies. She decided that truth can be what's obvious. She visits the narrator for the first time in weeks, sees the plant and sets it alight - "She says we need a beacon to tell us where we are". The narrator hears a noise - birds or car horns? It's too dark to see.
• Yellow plastic shoe - Alternating between the PoVs of a beachcomber and a gardener - in sight of each other, both female, both thinking the other self-deluded about life. Each has a moment of self-satisfaction - one finding, one planting. Each sees the other in their private bliss and there's a moment of understanding.
• The other side of Diane - The narrator, 8, has a baby sister Glenda and a friend Mel who had a sister a year older Diane (naughty but fun) and a baby brother Robbie. Her father had died. Diane had a serious, dutiful mother side, once claiming for Robbie some wellies that the narrator's mother had paid for.
• Blue movie - Puff, the narrator Squeak's friend, has asthma. They've both been in a home. Puff suggests they do a blue movie together. She suggests they pick up a client and nick his wallet. She gets caught shop-lifting. The blue movie idea sounds good again.
• The outsider - Josie is boozy. It's hot. She gets into a cool, empty house, acts like a latterday Goldilocks. The family arrive. As she runs away, she's happy that she's left an indelible mark on other lives - "it means everything to her to be blended in, to be connected"
• Salamander - There's a meta feel to some of the pieces. Self-actualisation is explicit. Both these traits are in this story. Nerine's about 40, a nurse. She plans to follow her brother Stephen to Canada. He once saw a salamander on her, and called her Salamander ever since. Stephen fell in love with his twin sister Babe. Don (Juanita is his girlfriend) is Nerine's flat neighbours. In paragraph 3 we're told "This is a story about how there was a brother even though Juanita, and Don, who knew her later, hadn't thought so ... It is also about how Nerine was burdened. ... Her life it seems, was a battle that she couldn't win ... longing for a past which perhaps had never happened, a future which couldn't be". Don gets on with her, Juania somehow fell out. They wonder why she should have made up a brother. "This is the preamble to their discussion of the why's and wherefores". Juanita thinks she's mad, and blanks her. Nerine tells Don that she thinks Juanita wants to get rid of her. There's a fire in the tower block. Nerine has to be rescued. "She doesn't survive but it isn't till some time later that Don and Juanita know this". After, "She leaps and twists before his eyes at unexpected moments. In the hallway, in the street at places he most frequently used to see her. Light and shadow". Then there's a change of narrative viewpoint. I don't know why - "I know it's wrong to fall in love with your sister. ... This is what the brother Stephen would have like to hear himself saying to them" Then there's

  But who is Babe? Don asks self-consciously, the name Babe embarrassing him as he shuffles out the question.
  But who is Babe? Don asks self-consciously, the name Babe embarrassing him as he shuffles out the question.

  which may be a misprint. Stephen turns up at Don's. His twin sister left him to marry 5 years before. Had Nerine ever forgiven him? He returns to Canada. The ending is "Where did this idea come from that a salamander could not burn? He himself was guilty of believing Nerine was protected in some strange way by something bigger than all of them, by the charisma of some reifed glory, by perfection, a story larger than words. But he knows now Nerine was just a woman. It's a lesson that is painfully difficult to learn."
• Tango - Waitress Rose is getting the tables ready for breakfast at the hotel. 7am. It's her 5th year. Bella the receptionist looks (condescendingly?) on as Rose nearly cries. The tables laid, she perks up. Suddenly they dance around the tables, as usual.
• Chicken eye - Nadia's tongue is misbehaving. "she always has this sealed up feeling about her, Nadia ... she's feeling insecure because of the cousins ... she once tried to kill herself, ... she was once committed to a mental institution ... She's known me all my life ... Nadia's my sister, she's fifteen years older than me ... I'm twenty five. I am divorced - and Nadia was married once." Nadia imitates people. "I" explains to the cousins that Nadia married at 17, was pregnant and then a widow, miscarriaging. It's a story she often tells, and adds details to the description of the accident, making it sound like a story. Their parents locked her in afterwards, but she still nearly threw herself out of the window. Nadia likes listening to her story. "It's one of the tragedies of Nadia's life that the more she tries to reach people the more she turns them away from her"
• Billie Ricky - The narrator Lorraine, 10, is holidaying with Sandy (adopted) and Annette. "And I know it's because of the net in Annette, those times I keep seeing fish as helpless and floundering, and all caught up". Lorraine and Sandy play in a river, saying the assumed name of Sandy's biological mother into the water - calling for her. The ending is "This place is definitely the best place in the world to have a wee in and this when you come to think about it is more than likely because of the we in weir"
• WatchTower - Clara, 24, is married to Bill, 33. They have 2 children. When Bill's friend Francis (33) comes round on Saturdays they regularly invite Jehovah Witnesses in and the men debate with them. One day, Francis and Clara have sex on the floor and Bill watches. 3rd person omnipotent for the most part, though the 5th paragraph starts with "All the energy led up to one special moment which she promises she'll be coming to by and by. Not yet, because first she wants to give a few details about where they lived then and what life was like". We learn that "she had ambition. Her name had started off as Clare but she herself put the a in, it was more noisy. She felt like a loud musical instrument. Twang. She had strings and a belly and a mouthpiece. She played the part of a woman. They could all agree what this part meant and that equalled harmony". Later, she thought about sex with Francis - "this play or film she was in started to seem far better than the dull life she'd been living. Maybe it didn't matter if there was true meaning there or not". Later "All this energy did lead up finally to the one special moment and this is how Clara puts it: Francis had his charming side which was pleasing, exotic and erotic". During sex with Francis, "Bill has right there towering above her"
• The Girl Can't Help It - Jessamine is sleeping with married Rick. Her friend Beb is going out with Robin and wants sex with him. Beb has helped Jessamine think of herself as a dizzy blonde rather than the plain girl she thought she was. Again there's a narrative surprise - a section begins "Towards the end of the week here they are in a bar" - why is the "here" inserted? Later Jessamine asks him who the lady was that he'd been walking with. She screams, he punches her. She falls. Later they make it up. Beb is still going on country walks with Robin.
• Tailbacks - Jan is being driven to Laura's wedding by Matthew, a friend of Laura. There's a roadblock - a dog's been run over on the hill ahead. She has a moment of bliss, a mad moment, "deeply believing in that intense and isolated act". They go in a field, have sex. After, driving past the dead dog, she realises that she orgasmed just as the dog died. "And I knew then that a very significant part of me would always remain stuck on that hill, that I'd never be entirely free of it". They didn't go to the wedding reception, taking a different way home. Nor after that did they ever do more than occasionally speak together.
• The sadness story - Celine, a beautiful actress who keeps fiddling with her hair, tells a group of people about a man who keeps phoning her. She turns him down, though he's a perfectly lovely man. Bwcause of his intensity, they can't just be friends. The last sentence is "The well-it-can't be-helped sadness and we,-none-of-us,-can-help-what-we-feel-even-though-we-might-be-fools sadness, of her smile"
• Astral bodies - Sisters Sharon and Isobel, both about 50, complement each other. Sharon is past-oriented, reminiscing from previous lives, whereas Isobel want to control the future. She regularly drops into an amusement arcade, thinking she has intuitions about One Armed Bandits, etc. She loses.
• Lady of the spin - 3 pages. Brenda, thinking of Sir Lancelot, buys freshly made candyfloss from Ms Della Gira at the seaside. There's a storm.
• Waving with rabbit - Magician Jon and Louise are in Tenerife for perhaps their last season - Jon's going blind. They've been together 9 years. Her father did a disappearing act when she was 9. When she was 11, her mother died. Louise is afraid of change. She is cut in half, then recovers. The audience have to believe, but also have admire the illusion. Does Jon really love her?
• Monkey face - "A coin in my hand, held up between my fingers like a crisp silver moon. Now it's gone again, too fast for you to see. The most real part of me lives in the palm of my hand, a hidden self that I conjure up out of nothing". A mother is with her 1 year old daughter. Andrew, the father moves to New Zealand, only returning briefly with the baby's 10. The mother had a lover or 2 but nobody since her daughter was about 3. She thought her toddler had been snatched on the street but she was ok
• The gold-road - Schoolfriends Emma and Lou head for the beach to swim as they've done each day. Today it's cold and Lou says she's not going in. "strangely, perhaps mystically, this is a turning point. Sometimes, without warning, the world does change in this way.". Emma goes in the sea - "there's this long golden path which links her to the horizon. From her own tiny section of the sea she feels connected to the sky, and to everything". Lou "feels the past through contact with the stone and gets this sense of harmony". Reminds me (too much) of "Yellow plastic shoe".

There's much to like. "Salamander" and "Waving with rabbit" are my favourites. There are sudden shifts of narrative mode (especially changes in the closeness of the third-person) which are often combined with foreshadowing. Two people momentarily share a state of mind that hitherto was private. Two characters find themselves simultaneously. There are "infodumps" (2nd or 3rd paragraph) about prevailling mental states and life hopes. People and what they say are evaluated as if they were in a story or play. People become narrators of a short story. Seasides are common.

"Seeds of Stars" by Richard Stimac (Buttonhook Press, 2024)

This is a chapbook of 13 Flash pieces from Book of Matches, Wild Words, Your Impossible Voice, The Blue Mountain Review, etc, available as a free PDF from the Buttonhook Press site.

Kids are often discussing grown-up (even spiritual) ideas. Sometimes adults are trying to explain something important to them. Symbolism is often explicit, the author or characters explaining it. E.g.

• "Dead man" - "he told them he liked to stand between the rails, put his arms at an angle so that his fingertips touched at the vanishing point. He didn’t use that term, of course. Instead, he said that his arms stretched to where the rails seemed to meet, and he saw his wife reaching back to him. The rails were her arms open to take him in. His wife was the vanishing point."
• "Seeds of Stars" - “'The dew is the tears from someone missing someone they love. And in each tear is a seed of a star. ... After some time, the seeds of the stars sprout and then grow into the sky. That’s where stars come from. Both the person who is missing someone they love and the person who is loved can both look up and see the star that grew from a tear'. ... A tear fell down her cheek, like a falling star. The man took his finger and caught the tear, on the tip of his finger, then he held it up for them both to see. The kitchen ceiling light kaleidoscoped in the tear. ... Just then, a small cloud, just one, covered so many of the stars, not all, but enough to bring a deeper darkness to the night, like forgetting does loss, not gone, simply unremembered for a time. ... their tears, one by one, fell onto the grass.”

Symbols are shared by stories. E.g. -

• "Fireflies" - “When Rickie was young, the evening air hung thick with fireflies, as if a sea of stars fell from the sky. One could stand on the earth and touch heaven at the same time. ... They’re slowly disappearing."
• "Smoke" - “When I was young, on a summer evening like this, there were hundreds of fireflies. It was like we were walking among the stars. There aren’t so many now.”

There are train tracks, wrong side of the tracks, dogs being cuddled.

There are 2 typos in "Good Friday" - "The boy wen to the kitchen"; "danced like drunken Angles of the Lord" - and the use of "literally" in 3 stories surprises me.