REVIEWS: Quickies

How to Set a House on Fire/Stace Budzko: Not a riveting story, more like a weblog post geared towards the sarcastic attempt to be clever

Currents/Hannah Bottomy: In a series of "before that(s)" the story works backwords through a disturbing series of events that touches poignantly on the drowning death of a small boy to finish with a powerful statement of the beginning: "Before that, it was a simple summer day."  Nice.

1951/Richard Bausch: Telling the story of a young girl’s realization of the power she holds over her father in his choice of female companion, and feeling responsible for the death in childbirth of her mother, the suicide of the housekeeper, and reveling in her supposed strength.

Bullet/Kim Church: Best line: "Here’s what I learned from marriage: I am not brave. I never will be. But I am patient, and I can outlast anyone." The story rides on this theme as the woman patiently deals with conflicts that come her way, looking forward perhaps to the day when her husband ends up facing something and doesn’t come out ahead.

Consuming the View/Luigi Malerba: Sort of fairytale-like in its simple premise of a town believing that a view is being destroyed by too many foreign tourists taking it in.  A number of political maneuvers to dissuade tourism fails, and the solution of eliminating the view via planting a line of trees is a lesson in itself.  Neat story.

The Great Open Mouth Anti-Sadness/Ron Carlson: Beneath the rambling tone of the story that mimics the narrator’s drunken state, there is a nice statement perhaps on a father’s sadness at losing his daughter to marriage.

Things You Should Know/A. M. Homes:  Sort of clever variation on the idea of what’s life all about? but it seems to fall a bit short in its zoom through the narrator’s life to end in a confrontation with someone who proves he knows by providing diagrams and backup while the narrator, unsure throughout life, finally feels the confidence to realize that life experience has provided the list of things one should know.  I think.

Rose/Biguenet:  Rather nicely done, a story of the loss of a child and years later, the loss of his wife and a man realizes how his wife had secretly coped with their son’s life, and he recalls the very night the boy was killed and the image of red roses as he hurried to the scene of his son’s death.

Tiffany/Stacey Richter: Who the hell knows.  I don’t have time for this one.

The Fallguy’s Faith/Robert Coover: Another idea overwritten and overdone to death. Some of these flashes of fiction could honestly have even been shorter.