. Spinning .

Finished this issue, and the last story is worth remarking upon.  Properties of Storm for Healing by Doug Crandall is another take on the father/son relationship–oddly there are at least three of them in this issue–that employs good writing, action, and character development. 

The base is the same, loving fathers who cannot communicate with their children.  And the opening of the son coming home for his father’s funeral and leaving with a new level of understanding is certainly not original, but the handling of it made the story a page-turner.  A tornado, a dopey hound dog, a change in gravesite, an old man missing his nose, add interest and action.  The realization of the relationship comes not merely through the cliched photos on the wall of him as a child, but through the discovery of his father’s cabin; he has proudly built himself one just like it in another state without ever knowing of his father’s.  And, through a dog that easily transfers his loyalties to his dead master’s son.

There is a subtlety that tells us that there is good in everyone, that there are things shared that become common ground.  A fine story to end this anthology.

Obviously the idea becomes a story (unless the story just happens to happen), and the handling of it is dependent upon skill and technique. 

In Kate Kasten’s Home Fires, the concept is laden with potential:  In third person pov, the story of Hans begins with his boyhood in Germany during WWII, and points out that the family’s view of the war was so radically different than the reality of it.  Living out in the country in the vicinity of Buchenwald, they believed it to be merely a prison.  Hans fondly remembers picnics nearby.  He is fired up to grow up to be a soldier and fight in a war, inspired by the friendliness of an SS officer to a small German boy.  His parents are made aware of the situation when the Americans arrive in Germany, and they are changed forever by the knowledge.  They move to the American Midwest, and the story actually starts with Hans reading about Buchenwald in his high school textbook.

However, he doesn’t believe it.  This is where the author lost me.  Hans still insists on going into the service and finally sees action in the Vietnam War.  The concept was brilliant, but I don’t believe the story.  You can’t merely pooh-pooh away the facts.  All he had to do was ask his parents.  There was so much potential for this story, and while the narrative follows Hans around the jungle, broken and bleeding and close to death, there is feeling of war, but not enough (for me) depth to the character for me to care about him enough.  It’s still a lot of gore and pain, but without any realization of what war really means–which is what I would have expected him to finally understand.  Instead, he peacefully dies in the jungle, looking forward to "going home" to his childhood–and Germany represents that!

A bit implausible, and I would have liked to see the intensity of WW II, and Vietnam, more deeply affect the protagonist.

A beautifully written story by Julie Rose, Pinhead tells in the first person pov of a father’s love for his estranged son, and his frustrated attempts to show his feeling while being stymied by the words to say it. 

But Rose knows how to say the words to show the feeling:

Winding down through the flanks of these mountains were the small, hardy trout streams and furnace brooks where I have always fished. In the land preserves where I’ve spent a lifetime hunting, stone walls lay like spines, half-buried in the parchment-colored winter fields, defining obsolete perimeters.  In the small, mossy graveyards cradled beside country roads, stones half-sunken beneath the land bore receding nscriptions of birtht and death and belovedness.  I tried, even though I knew better, to say how it felt to be out there driving on the dirt roads toward home through fields cloaked with snow, cold as it was, beautiful and glittering and ending as everything was.

"Another shitty day in paradise," I said. (p. 36)

The above is a scene where the narrator’s friend is driving him home from the hospital after an operation.  It so clearly shows that what the man feels and sees is something he cannot put into words when speaking with someone else.  There is that reticence of the danger of revealing, or of looking stupid, or simply of becoming too close. 

This is his problem with his relationship with his grown son.  So he spies on him, dreams of a confrontation or conflict that brings them together through need or deed to end the silence.

Because he doesn’t know what to say.  But how wonderfully well the author says it all.