…As I walk out with into the shadowy, vacant lot, while putting the bills away, I notice a line of black ballpoint script that runs underneath the creepy pyramid with the eye at the top and the banner in Latin which, owing to my linguistic ignorance, seems like an incantation. The message says: “Happy 4th birthday Miranda. Love, Peter,” the giver’s name running into the eagle’s talons. There is an undeniable simplicity to such a gift but wasn’t this irrefutable evidence of the man’s cheapness and torpor, that he was lacking the energy even to buy the child a decent stuffed animal?
This seemed to have been happening ever since Lina fled. A few weeks ago I had picked up a few shirts from the cleaners and when I received my change from the Asian woman who seemed so calm that she could be in a trance, I noticed there was another note which said: “Sweetheart, can you pick up the cake from Tortelli’s before three? I have a hundred other things to do and it’s on the way back from the office. I know you can do it. Greta.” It was hard to imagine this rash of missives unless we lived in a world where all the trees had been shorn and we were reduced to using every scrap of paper to effect our written communications. There seemed an epidemic of disrespect for the national currency. Would people eventually feel free to put mustaches and monstrous space alien ears on the man who turned the tide at Valley Forge or engineered the bill of rights?
The next evening, after renting a video at Cinema Palace, there was yet another memo, which weaved around the seals and across part of the floral border in tiny purple script, “Greg, I can’t believe what you said to me the other night. And right in front of you know who…Amber.” I have never been much of a note writer, though I was once tempted to express my profound gratitude to a comely waitress after she had written her name with such a flourish and added a smiling face along side it. But I thought this might lead to some criminal investigation and settled for a ridiculous tip instead. Then just two days ago, going underneath a viaduct on my way back from the hardware store, I glimpsed what appeared to be a number of song lyrics or bad poetry but on the abutment it said, “Carly, I thought we had had a deal. When is it going to stop?… Lou.” Messages suddenly seemed to be everywhere, coursing through the air unseen, on underpasses next to Utopian girlscout murals, surfacing along the erratic routes of commerce…
~ published by Wilmington Blues
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)