. Spinning .

The next selection also has illness and death as themes.  Footsteps by Yunny Chen involves a relationship between a man and a woman; long-lived, married, and in the way of this, still secretive about feelings. 

There is a difference between the personalities that is made more intense by the difference in their religious faith, by the childlessness which burdened their marriage, by family disapproval, and yet, even though they met through a marriage broker, there is a developed strong bond of love.  The wife is dying of cancer, the husband is trying to cope.  There is the usual self-protective instincts that illness brings, and the softness of true caring that often only comes out on the bad days, the rough times. 

It’s a well written story of love and faith and what two people build together that keeps them together.  Nicely done without any overly dramatic scenarios.  Through some backstory vignettes, we see what they have overcome and how they’ve established their stand through compromise, the author giving us just enough to set the images of forty years to come to this time where the threat of separation is very real.  A good read.

All of Me, by Erika Krouse is a story about change, physical, mental and emotional.  A man is recuperating from a heart transplant operation.  A knock on his door one door bring with it a young woman who claims that the heart he has been given is that of her past lover.  The girl is everything the man is not; quirky, emotional, eccentric, open, loving.  She moves in with him, insisting that she has that right, and while it takes them a while, they become lovers.

The man is changed–one of those all important elements of story–but by what?  Is it truly the heart that lays out who we are, or is it a case o having been so close to the possibility of death.  The latter is certainly a common experience; the survivor gets a new lease on life and immediately mends his ways.  There is one thing that the man makes a decision on–the changes in personality (for the better) he accepts and is glad about–and that is to discontinue taking his medication that prevents rejection of the heart.  He feels that though the risk is there, he prefers to live without the sickness the meds bring with them.  What he feels also, is that the girl loves him, no longer with him for the old love’s heart, but for himself.

Very nicely written, very relative, very interesting story here.

Not reading this one in the traditional manner–front to back; skipping around to what appeals at the time.

Sightseeing, by Rattawut Lapcharoensap, is a short story that seems to contain all the necessary elements of method to make a story work.  There is a theme–sight; the story is about a young man (first person pov narrator) who is deciding to put off going off to college because of his mother’s impending blindness.  The plot is linear, with the timeline encompassing their departure on a "vacation" while the mother can still see, along with some minor backstory to enhance the relationship.  The conflicts are clear: the mother may lose her vision at any time, and the son is giving up his dreams of furthering his education.  The characters are portrayed in their relationship both by dialogue and by in particular, the mother’s dealings with a merchant when she purchases a pair of sunglasses along with her seasickness on a part of the journey.  I loved the easy way the story flowed with interesting characters, a dramatic event held to a low key approach, and an ending that keeps the reader thinking about the story.

Goodwill Gestures by Leo Hwang is fairly interesting in story, but for me, fell short in that the timelines hopped around (fine, I can handle that) without leaving the reader with a full sense of the characters.  Too many characters involved in a simple story.

David Cates’ Things You Cannot Know was well enough written, yet I never felt a connection with the first person POV narrator nor cared about her problems.  Again here, a few too many rambling histories of secondary characters.  The ending was unsatisfying in what the protagonist has actually come around to thinking, despite a final scene where a shower might have had some meaning deeper than just thinking time.