…It’s difficult to explain but it was important that I get the tallest, most magnificent tree I could find, almost like the one at the White House, which seems to thrust up into the sky like a rocket. The holidays were a disaster last year, even more so than usual, and it’s as if there were some awful canvas in my living room that couldn’t be disposed of but only painted over. That’s what I have to do, let one year eclipse another and disarm its memory. There was an incident at the Corbett’s party, which we aren’t invited to this year. Lana says we’re probably on a few NSTA (never see them again) lists and this is anathema to her. It’s almost as if she has been marooned in space, just circling in her capsule until the oxygen runs out. The party was an annual event and a regular bacchanal, known for its lascivious games and odd rituals.
One of them involved the selection of the worst gift from the previous season and either smashing it or setting it on fire, whichever was appropriate. It was an honor to initiate the demolition. Last year’s entry was the replica of a fountain which had the illusion of water trickling, but the constant gentle sound had finally driven the Flannigans to exasperation. Cal Usher dispatched the innocent object with a couple fierce passes of a ceremonial sledgehammer, catapulting some pieces to the far reaches of the yard.
The other notorious game was “Under the Mistletoe” or, as it was more informally called, “name those lips.” I suppose that I will never be able to prove that the selections were rigged and that several slips with Lana’s name had been placed in the punch bowl. But suddenly she was up there with the blindfold looking kidnapped. Ted Corbett, who had been leaning into her every chance he got anyway, was now taking full advantage and kissing her as if this were the climactic scene of a Hollywood epic. She guessed George Mathews and of course everyone was laughing and applauding except me and Lana who just wanted to get out of the spotlight. Corbett came over to me and said he was sorry but that he had been waiting to do that for so long, he got carried away.
“Do that again and you’ll get carried away in a hearse”, I shot back, a bit surprised that my internal party censor had been bypassed altogether. And if that had not been enough, I couldn’t stand his unrepentant expression and shoved him half way across the room…
~ published by the Beacon Street Review
My writing tends to gravitate toward certain themes: misunderstanding, romantic discord, the struggles of being a parent, conflict with a community’s prevailing ethos, and the characters’ frequent sense of exclusion from an accepted place in society. I like fictional situations where people are placed under stress, often due to their own mistakes, so that they end up reacting in a pivotal and unforeseen manner.
So here you will find: a guy unwittingly drops a torrid love note in the church collection basket; a jealous husband finds a unique way of seeking revenge against a romantic rival during a Christmas nativity play; a character who runs an independent wake up call service has trouble getting a crucial call of his own; a message written on a dollar bill and released into circulation somehow finds its way into the right hands; a father who plans to miss his daughter’s birthday party seeks the counsel of a friend who specializes in the “perfect excuse,” a condo owner is unwillingly elected president of the association’s board with disastrous consequences, a beleaguered character finds refuge in the treehouse of a neighbor and becomes an unintended spy; a man who is mistaken for someone else decides to impersonate him following the clues in the conversation. It may be tragedy of a sort but only in a minor key, the parried slings and arrows of modern relationship.
I enjoy the stuff of ordinary life, which, through a sequence of escalating difficulties, suddenly becomes remarkable and strange. I like depictions of the world that attempt to balance minor tragedies with irony and an occasional touch of humor. Also, the writers I most admire pay attention to the sound and rhythm of words, take risks with language and metaphor. It’s wonderful when the great ones create a structure of imagery beneath the surface of a story that seems to integrate it in some mysterious way.
Much has been said about the capacity of fiction to generate empathy for other points of view and science appears to bear that out. In an era of increasing tribalism, few traits are more needed than the one which compels us to hear the other voice, feel the unusual or contradictory experience. We need not agree with different perceptions but must be able to get to the root of them before any sort of understanding can take place.
By its very nature, fiction also helps cultivate and preserve language as the primary means of apprehending the world. While the proliferation of movies and videos and photographs and emojis are a marvelous addition to our lives, only language enables the recipient to bring his or her full imagination to the encounter. A novel or collection of stories uniquely engages a reader to construct a world right along with the author, to infuse what’s been created with a unique filter, to make the abstract visible in one’s own mind. If a “picture is worth a thousand words,” it cannot do quite the same thing as those words. In our rush to compress, to abbreviate, to go faster, to live more and more, this might be something we should not allow ourselves to forget.
~Tom Benz
THOMAS BENZ graduated with a B.A. in English from the University of Notre Dame. He recently won the 2017 Serena McDonald Kennedy Award for a short story collection called “Home and Castle.” The book is to be published by Snake Nation Press in the fall. In the last several years, he has had fifteen stories (…read more)