…In the communion line, four college students from the band that leads the hymns cut in front an elderly couple and the bassists are brandishing their massive instruments like shields. There is an announcement about some parishioners in prison, how we should send them a letter or a paperback and let them know they’re not forgotten. “Those interested should talk to Father Sloan to get their K numbers.” This reminds me of a distant cousin who did some time for tax evasion. After he came out, he quit drinking, started taking pilgrimages to places where miracles were said to have occurred and generally was much more subdued at parties. You found yourself wishing for what went away with the criminal in him. A guy in one of the back rows keeps whispering names into a cell phone, while fellow members of the congregation shoot daggers into him with their peripheral vision. A man in a florid shirt standing next to me sings with such gusto that I feel I have wandered into an opera. At one point he doesn’t know the words and just hums the rest.
Some of these distractions may partly explain why I manage to toss a fairly torrid love note from Audrey into the collection basket. I watch it falling, as in a dream, impossibly intertwined with a hoard of feathery bills, slightly above the rim. It is on peach colored stationery with illustrated borders, and Audrey’s incredibly minute penmanship one nearly needs a microscope to decipher. The missive has been folded into a tight square but once free of its captivity, releases into a larger more oblong shape, like a parachute opening to the air, floating away. I hesitate, not wanting to appear that I’m trying to get change as in a base transaction for socks or toothpaste, and the plate moves swiftly, cresting with envelopes and crumpled cash. I try to search the reactions of my fellow worshipers as it moves one to the other, back to where the usher is waiting to take it to the sacristy. Their backs are mostly to me and the most I can discern is an unusual pause, some enigmatic look in profile. Perhaps they imagine it is one of those vanity checks with the background of a waterfall or rustic town which can be used for a tax write-off…
~ published in the Pangolin Papers
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)