"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) )