Neal couldn’t help but be annoyed when people reacted strangely to his early retirement. Their initial shock routinely gave way to a shallow congratulation, and after a certain interval, the bombshell would uneasily sink in. Where did he get all that loot with the economy on life support? Was his good fortune actually the result of some clandestine criminal enterprise, some off-the-books wheelings and dealings with a safe deposit box in Monaco? He could almost read these inner queries like a teleprompter radiating across the faint lines of their faces. He knew that this questioning was not malice so much as mere curiosity, of the kind any detective novel worth reading would produce. And Neal looked younger than he was, which may have added to the sense that something was awry. Everywhere he went, he seemed to overhear a remark reinforcing the fact that he’d become an outcast, which in ancient societies was tantamount to a death sentence. The mood of the country was sour, even belligerent. The national debt was in such bad shape that scapegoats and pariahs were necessary. In Barrymore’s, a nearby watering hole where he and Rita often went for Factoid Night, Neal eavesdropped on a woman he recognized as one of the regulars. She had a small tattoo depicting a sunrise at the base of her shoulder and was intermittently shrill in her certainty that the questions were rigged.
EXCERPT
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)