(In this issue's High Five, author Matt Bell discusses his favorite Everyday Genius stories)
Every once in a while, a literary journal puts out an issue or a run of daily content that just blows me away, above and beyond my already high expectations for the journal. It's happened a few times recently, like the Ben Marcus-edited issue of Guernica last year, or FRiGG's all microfiction issue a couple of months ago. And it's happened again in the month of August and the beginning of September, when Michael Kimball joined Adam Robinson in guest-editing Everyday Genius.
The purpose of this column is pick five favorites, but I haven't really done that below. I truly loved everything published by Everyday Genius in this period, and have merely singled out the five below because I think they are particularly strong and also because I thought I might be able to say some small thing about them. Please go read the rest of the work up at the site, both currently and in its archives. There are so many excellent writers included there, and lots of new discoveries waiting to be had. Congratulations to Robinson and Kimball on such a fine editing run, and thanks to both of them for providing so much great reading.
To begin, check out this first sentence:
Whew! That's wakes you up, doesn't it? Jones' story here is in seven sections, each one of them beginning with a sentence just as arresting, something that a less prolific and impressive writer might save for its own story. Check out the six other "first" sentences:
My father was the kind of physicist who, in his later years, wore his oxygen tank on his back when he came to visit.
In the garage last week I found a letter my wife wrote to my son when she was fifteen.
Picture this: a man sits in a bar after his father's funeral, and though he's hunched protectively over his beer, still, the fight raging around him slings a dollop of blood into his mug.
The most terrifying moment of the twentieth century has to have been when I walked into the living room one night and sat beside my wife in front of the TV.
A strange attractor in a system of repetitive motion is a point which seems to be organizing the system when, in fact, it's the product of the organization itself.
What stories might be written from these sentences! Jones uses them to build paragraph-long narratives, each consecutive section re-organizing the ones that have come before, the white space giving each room to breathe, to form connections, until the story becomes the very "strange attractor" the last section suggest. This is non-linear fiction at its best, and one of the finest pieces I've read anywhere this year.
This a story that claims an implicit context, without giving us any more than the title and the first two words, "Contact Seller." We are to understand then that this is a message written while drinking and typed into a web form on Ebay, addressed to the seller of seven dollars worth of bore butter. (Fun fact: "Bore butter" is a product apparently made necessary by the inadequate sources of formerly common black powder lubricants, such as bear fat, dear tallow, and sperm whale oil.) This is frame number one, the context that creates a second layer of humor on top of the undeniably funny message itself: The seller's wife is hot. The buyer's "balls are big as oranges, and he's angry and confused about the country, wishes he "could invent a dinosaur that would eat dems and liberals and communists." He's also preoccupied with a story about Japan, where "there are 10,000 bicycles lined up outside the Tokyo airport and nobody steals a fucking one."
"I think there are better people somewhere," he says.
"I want to meet them," he says, and out of context these two sentences sound like the sanest things anyone has ever said, ever wanted.
In context, they are easy to miss, surrounded by the rest of the rant they're embedded in.
It is important not to miss them.
The story's second frame comes after the italicized message, when the narrator-invisible until now-steps in to complicate whatever reading of the protagonist we've managed to glean so far. We're told:
So he smells his fingers.
He likes to smell his fingers before he goes to bed.
I think this last section is meant to push us away from the protagonist, to keep us focused on his crazy mind instead of his perhaps good heart. It works too, at least on me, at least the first time through. Reading it again though, I see other things. There are better people somewhere. One day we too might get to meet them. "Thing is the bicycles they don't even lock them up to nothing."
Some answers (and further questions), in response to Amelia Gray's own excellent queries:
1. A house of small rooms could be a burrow or a den, a good home for a close family, a litter or a pack. Perhaps it could be built by a man with fox-like qualities, or else a fox who could love a human woman. It would cost nothing, but be so exhausting that the maker would have to hibernate the whole winter long, while you did everything you could to keep him warm.
2. Is "this" the mode of asking questions, or is "this" this the sitting on the laundry room floor? Or something else altogether?
3. Paranoia and certainty rarely go hand in hand, but yes, I am sure: Per the demands of dramatic tension, they are talking about you.
4. This would be a great place for an aluminum can crusher. Thank you for noticing.
6. Other possibilities: Is the building shrinking? Is the dryer growing?
7. Yes, really. It's what under the linoleum that you should be worried about.
8. if you ask this question to Google, this is the answer: http://bit.ly/3ggVPq
9. My guess is that you will never know.
10. Your second question contains the answer to the first. The answers to the second and third question are probably not the same, although it perhaps depends on how you interpret the third question (has your mother asked all of these questions/has your mother asked any of these questions.) Is it the ambiguity that makes this the right place to stop?
There are just thirty-one words in this poem, and only two or three sentences, depending on how you read it. Rewritten as a note, or a letter, it might seem quirky and weird, both charming and a little disturbing:
Broken into lines and read as a poem—as it was intended—Moran's words become something more. Beyond the beauty of the language, I can't help but be intrigued by the emotion here, by the curiosity and longing empathy laid bare. This little poem was published only a month ago, but already I've returned a half-dozen times to visit again this tiny clenched need. And then, to wish one more time to be the kind of person who could inspire a poem like this, to know the kind of person who could write it.
To end with, another opening:
What I love here is the way DiTrapano very lightly enstranges the world of the story, first with the pleading of the first sentence, then with the halted syntax and mutable wishes of the next few. "He dials the number and hopes for no answer," a hope instantly quashed. "They pick up and say hello. They ask for his voice to say the hello back." It's not even him they want, the narration seems to suggest, but merely the sound of his voice, the gesture of civility and normality.
"If the mind is a terror gift, he is an opener," we're eventually told, the most direct insight into our protagonist we're given, and one that's far more chilling than his blank answers. It's also the way forward: An opener suggests something to be opened, and in this case there is "the box" of the phone booth. Only the protagonist is already in the box when we're given the terror gift/opener line, and it's only once he's out of it—once he's closed the box behind him—that his mother's voice fills the box with news of his brother. It's also here, at the end of the story, that we get another wish, one we cannot so easily evaluate: "He wants a voice from the other way from home," we're told. And yes, sometimes don't we all.