…The night after the delivery truck backed up to the garage with the sleek machine, Laney announced that she was planning to attend an equinox gathering for the weekend. I thought we had agreed to take the kids to the aquarium and some intemperate remarks were exchanged. In the back of my mind, a suspicion formed that she was at least flirting with Prevane. The soft, sheltering fall had given way to the denuded clarification of winter. That’s the way I thought of it; not the plunge of temperature so much as the disappearance of wildlife and the feeling of an abandoned resort. The nests were suddenly visible, as if caught in the intricate web of branches like wayward kites. The smell of burning leaves was among my favorites, along with woodsmoke, cinnamon and rain which seem to lead me back to some indistinct sense of ardor and love.
It was maybe late November when Laney read in the church bulletin that Father Gilroy was planning to stage a nativity skit for midnight mass and she wanted to be in it. The parents were going to perform for a change because the last version had turned into a debacle of forgotten lines, contagious hysterics and hurled straw. I knew it might mean a few more “Hungry Man” TV dinners and a missed card game or two, but it seemed a preferable alternative to the other atavistic nonsense. Laney had done a little acting in highschool and I thought this might divert her from the disappointment at not getting pregnant on schedule. She had been used to the previous times when this occurred quickly, as if it were something you just ordered over the phone…
~ published by Carve
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)