Posted on July 6th, 2009 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Science Fiction, Short Stories.
A story about a succesful, unpopular lawyer in the 1820s in the Border States, who moonlights as a slave trader. A slave in his thirties with consumption was sold by the lawyer; he dies two days later. The lawyer covers it up; the only witness was another slave, a blacksmith, and a slave's word is no good in court. The purchaser knows he got cheated, but can't do anything.
The lawyer and purchaser meet by chance that night, while the purchaser is getting his horse shod by the blacksmith. The lawyer decides to be fair, or at least half-fair. But the purchaser growls, and reaches for (the lawyer thinks) his gun. The lawyer shoots the purchaser. But the purchaser's hand is empty, and he is dead. The lawyer is quickly surrounded; the unarmed man, dead, and the lawyer, alive and holding the smoking gun. The lawyer, panicked, turns to the blacksmith slave. The slave is silent.
Posted on May 23rd, 2009 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Reading Classics, Short Stories.
"Virgin Violeta" by Katherine Anne Porter.
Violeta is fifteen, infatuated with cousin Carlos who writes poetry. But Carlos is taken by Blanca, Violeta's older sister. Carlos is casual with Violeta. But when the two of them are alone, Carlos holds her arm kisses her: "Violeta opened her eyes wide also and peered up at him. She expected to sink into a look warm and gentle, like the touch of his palm. Instead, she felt suddenly, sharply hurt, as if she had collided with a chair in the dark. His eyes bright and shallow, almost like the eyes of Pepe, the macaw. His pale, fluffy eyebrows were arched; his mouth smiled tightly."
Violeta is terrified; Carlos then does denial: He kissed her like a cousin. "'Ah, you're so young, like a little newborn calf," said Carlos. His voice trembled in a strange way. 'You smell like a nice baby, freshly washed with white soap! Imagine such a baby being angry at a kiss from her cousin! Shame on you, Violeta!'"
The story is a violation, and Violeta, while clear that something is wrong, doesn't know what it is. And she keeps it inside. But her infatuation with Carlos, and his poetry, has turned bitter.
Posted on May 22nd, 2009 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Reading Classics, Short Stories.
[Katherine Anne Porter, "Pale Horse, Pale Rider"]
Oblivion, thought Miranda, her mind feeling among her memories of words she had been taught to describe the unseen, the unknowable, is a whirlpool of gray water turning upon itself for all eternity . . . eternity is perhaps more than the distance to the farthest star. She lay on a narrow ledge over a pit that she knew to be bottomless, though she could not comprehend it; the ledge was her childhood dream of danger, and she strained back against a reassuring wall of granite at her shoulders, staring into a pit, thinking, There it is, there it is at last, it is very simple; and soft carefully shaped words like oblivion and eternity are curtains hung before nothing at all. I shall not know when it happens, I shall not feel or remember, why can't I consent now, I am lost, there is no hope for me. Look, she told herself, there it is, that is death and there is nothing to fear. But she could not consent, still shrinking stiffly against the granite wall that was her childhood dream of safety, breathing slowly for fear of squandering breath, saying desperately, Look, don't be afraid, it is nothing, it is only eternity.
Granite walls, whirlpools, star are things. None of them is death, nor the image of it. Death is death, said Miranda, and for the dead it has no attributes. Silenced she sank easily through deeps under deeps of darkness until she lay like a stone at the farthest bottom of life, knowing herself to be blind, deaf, speechless, no longer aware of the members of her own body, entirely withdrawn from all human concerns, yet alive with a peculiar lucidity and coherence; all notions of the mind, the reasonable inquiries of doubt, all ties of blood and the desires of the heart, dissolved and fell away from her, and there remained of her only a minute fiercely burning particle of being that knew itself alone, that relied upon nothing beyond itself for its strength; not susceptible to any appeal or inducement, being itself composed entirely of one single motive, the stubborn will to live. This fiery motionless particle set itself unaided to resist destruction, to survive and to be in its own madness of being, motiveless and planless beyond that one essential end. Trust me, the hard unwinking angry point of light said, Trust me. I stay.
Posted on May 20th, 2009 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Reading Classics, Short Stories.
"Hello," said Dr. Hildesheim, "at least you take it out in shouting. You don't try to get out of bed and go running around." Miranda held her eyes open with a terrible effort, saw his rather heavy, patient face clearly even as her mind tottered and slithered again, broke from its foundation and spun like a cast wheel in a ditch. "I didn't mean it, I never believed it, Dr. Hildesheim, you mustn't remember it--" and was gone again, not being able to wait for an answer.
The wrong she had done followed her and haunted her dream: this wrong took vague shapes of horror she could not recognize or name, though her heart cringed at sight of them. Her mind, split in two, acknowledged and denied what she saw in the one instant, for across an abyss of complaining darkness her reasoning coherent self watched the strange frenzy of the other coldly, reluctant to admit the truth of its visions, its tenacious remorses and despairs.
"I know those are your hands," she told Miss Tanner, "I know it, but to me they are white tarantulas, don't touch me."
"Shut your eyes," said Miss Tanner.
"Oh, no," said Miranda, "for then I see worse things," but her eyes closed in spite of her will, and the midnight of her internal torment closed about her.
[Katherine Anne Porter, "Pale Horse, Pale Rider"]
Posted on May 11th, 2009 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Reading Classics, Short Stories.
Friday I finished Porter's "María Concepción", the first story in Porter's oeuvre, and my first story since my stroke.
"María Concepción" is the story of a young murderess in Mexico. She was left by her husband and his lover, fifteen-year-old María Rosa, to go to war. The two come back as deserters; Concepción kills Rosa. The town bands together behind Concepción; she was liked, and Rosa was not.
María Concepción is impressively numb. At the end, she is happy, but her husband is now numb.
Posted on May 5th, 2009 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Reading Classics, Writers, Short Stories.
Today we began with pain. My physical therapist was switched; Douglas was now my PT. And boy, he caused hurt for a half an hour. And I mean, I wept. My arm was bad -- the tone was steadily worsening, and finally it was time to do something about it. It will be bad every day for at least a while. But what can I say? This is the road to being better. I hope.
So I rewarded myself. I sat down, coffee in hand, and I read a story from The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter. This was my first story, for pleasure, since my stroke. It's ten times harder than before. But I can do it. I chose Porter because, A) she's adult; B) she's awesome; and C) she's pellucid; she's not difficult, but she's very very good.
Now it's been half an hour writing this post. It's tiring. But still: I am improving, every day. And now I can read fiction. It's good. It's funny; for the past ten years, my fiction reading dropped to nearly nothing (except for pay). But now, post-stroke, I'm itching for fiction. And now, I can. Slowly; but I can.
Posted on January 5th, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Science Fiction, Short Stories.
Greg Egan, "Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies" (1992 Interzone, reissued in Egan's Axiomatic, 1995)
Egan is as interesting as any science fiction writer alive, but his huge strength -- endlessly surprising ideas that open beneath the reader like trapdoors, each trapdoor sufficient for an astonishing story by itself -- is mitigated by areas in which he is just passable: characterization, style, tone, motivation, dialogue. He's not bad at any of these -- reading Egan is never painful -- but there'd be very little reason to read him if not for his ideas (and his development of the ideas).
"Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies," unfortunately, isn't one of his well developed stories. The idea is interesting -- humanity has had some kind of mass sea change in which prevailing belief systems manifest as psychic forces that compel all within their range to believe, and the city of the story is divided into zones of belief that vie and shift, with the protagonist one of a minority who seem to have kept free by constantly keeping between the zones, never being overwhelmed by any one belief system.
This is interesting, but Egan uncharacteristically only gives his idea a single twist, and that a light one (the paths being traveled by the uncaptured are, perhaps, themselves a zone, and existence in a non-believing state is no more subject to free will than any other). The rest of the story is a kind of mechanical exposition of a day spent as this kind of philosophical nomad, including an unconvincing and unnecessary attempt to explain how the situation ("the Meltdown") came to pass, ending in an argument over the twist explained above, but leaving the protagonist fundamentally unchanged -- and his decision to leave his companion does not signal any deep change in the protagonist, but rather in the companion.
There is some decent business with the protagonist trying to work through thoughts while subject to a constant barrage of psychic philosophical propaganda; but the story would have been much better if there were more of that, more development, more anything, really. It's an idea sketch, without even a plot draped over it. Strangely, it's the last story in the Axiomatic collection, so presumably either Egan or the publisher thought it one of his best. It isn't, but even failed Egan is intriguing.