Vaughn must have harbored some toxic mixture of vanity and cravenness that prevented him from telling Leah the ax had fallen. Though at the outset he had just meant the ruse to last until the weekend when he would be able to regroup and soften the blow. He continued to rise at 6:15 and pretended to go through the customary rites of preparing himself for the senseless whims of his neurotic clients. He took the pains of a Shakesperian actor to make it all seem natural, the tiny details of shaving and wedging himself into a suit, with that air of being timed, prodded into the world. At forty-one, Vaughn was still lean but tiny cracks had begun to radiate from the corners of his light brown eyes like streets on an intricate map. “Bye honey,” Vaughn would say with the usual abrupt kiss, his demeanor just the right tone of hurried, not fully conscious motion.
It was easy enough to excavate the small disaster fund he’d never told Leah about, squirreled away in an attic suitcase, lest it be raided for some new rosewood cabinet or antique lamp she sometimes felt compelled to purchase. Inside the moldy, plaid luggage, as sealed as a well hidden tomb, there was more than he remembered―a few thousand. So when the appointed Saturday came to spill the beans, that he had been abruptly jettisoned by McCallister Design after twelve good years, Vaughn found he could not yet relinquish the role of steady husband. He went out and brought back a dozen donuts instead. It had always amazed him what a bright burst of momentary happiness such a simple act could bring, like an evanescent round of fireworks in the night sky.
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)