Cut and Thirst by Margaret Atwood

Short story published by ‎ Amazon Original Stories on May 1, 2024

Fern has MS, for which her three old (pardon me, “older”) friends blame eight men — or is it nine? — who caused her so much stress that they put her in “a wheelchair rolling downhill to the morgue.” The women plot revenge and since they are well educated, they quote Macbeth. The women all taught at universities at some point, but Myra wonders why anyone would want to teach these days, with students so eager to “rat the professors out for the slightest verbal misstep.” Look at Chrissy, who was mobbed on social media as being anti-woman for teaching ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Never mind that she chose it as an example of misogyny. In Myra’s view, kids today only want to study literary works in which everyone behaves perfectly all the time. “How French Revolution of them,” says Leonie. The story makes clear the difficulty of walking the line between sensitivity to the feelings of others and the excessive demands of expressive conformity on college campuses.

Amusing digressions to comment upon the state of the world (and the new cheeses they try during their weekly meetings) occupy more of the story than the plot to murder eight men (or is it nine?). The women all began their careers in the literary world (mostly as proofreaders), writing for each other in the hope that their work might reach a larger audience before opting for academia and steady paychecks. They still have connections in that world, mostly to the authors with whom they slept, but Fern is the only one who earns a living writing books.

Back to the plot. The eight or nine men savaged an anthology that Fern edited because she decided not to include a story by Humphrey Vacher, an affluent and conceited author who owns a few small press publications, the only publications that will consider their work. Because they owe Vacher, they trashed Fern’s work on the ground that it appealed to “the sloppy middle-age women and easily duped teenage girls” who are the reading public. They even condemned it as “girly,” a term they wouldn’t be allowed to use today.

Coming up with a successful assassination plan proves to be challenging. “Their respect for murderers is increasing: not so easy, this murdering business.” Ultimately they settle upon a workable revenge scheme that, naturally enough, does not go as planned.

The women learn that revenge, when served cold, might no longer have a purpose by the time it is executed. Which leads to the lesson that revenge is better left unserved. That’s always a lesson worthy of illustration, and Margaret Atwood does so in an enjoyable story that mixes amusing characters, pointed insights, and a few laugh-out-loud moments.

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The Havana Run by Ace Atkins

Published by Amazon Original Stories on March 12, 2024

George and Jay are retired journalists living in Florida. An old man named Navarro offers them $10,000 to travel to Cuba and recover “family valuables” that have been hidden away since the Revolution. They fly to Havanna, where Navarro has arranged for Carmen to act as their guide. Carmen drives them to a hotel and assures them that a driver will take them to Santa Clara on the following day. Whether Carmen is trustworthy may be questionable. Sure, she drives off with their luggage, but maybe she was in a hurry.

Later that day, George and Jay are in fact met by a man named Armando who agrees to drive them to Santa Clara in the morning. Armando tells the men not to trust Carmen. In the hotel bar, George meets an American who tells him not to trust Nararro. They soon learn that they cannot trust Armando. The trip to Santa Clara turns out to be perilous.

In Santa Clara, George and Jay search for the contacts Navarro provided, Rosa and Safia. The two women are widely believed to be witches, but they put George and Jay in touch with a very old man. When George shows the man a map that Navarro made, he knows exactly where to find the valuables. Recovering them, however, will be a hairy experience.

Ace Atkins is high on my list of favorite thriller writers. This story earns points for avoiding the usual thriller themes. George and Jay aren’t tough guys. They don’t have guns. They don’t use their wits to accomplish their mission. Instead, employing journalistic persistence, they muddle their way forward until they get what they came for.

George and Jay have little choice but to place their faith in unsavory characters who routinely betray them. Yet they took the job and they doggedly perform it. Reflecting their uncertainty about their journey, the nature of the “family valuables” Navarro asked them to recover turns out to be ambiguous.

“The Havana Run” is driven by Cuba’s revolutionary history and post-revolutionary corruption. The medium-length story doesn’t waste a word. Atkins tells an offbeat tale at a good pace, creates atmosphere, populates the story with colorful characters, and grounds a plausible plot in an interesting history lesson.

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Harbor Lights by James Lee Burke

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on January 23, 2024

The stories in Harbor Lights feature people who have been in prison and people who might end up in prison. Some are drifters, others are professionals. Some live in solitude, others share their life with a child. Most have experienced a significant loss. Some have given up on life, others are still trying to figure it out. They are all from the deep South although some have migrated to the West. Nearly all the protagonists try (not always successfully) to cling to their moral center. Collateral characters are often racists and white trash who never had a moral center. A few characters are ghosts.

Three stories feature Burke’s recurring character and alter-ego, Aaron Holland Broussard. “Deportees” tells a story of Aaron’s grandfather as he stands up to southern hatred of Mexicans and Japanese-Americans during World War II.

The title story is told from Aaron’s perspective as the son of a man who defied the FBI by telling the press about his sighting of a German submarine while fishing off the coast of Louisiana. In retaliation, the FBI arrested the woman with whom Aaron’s father was having an affair, accusing her of being a communist spy. The story is about the ugly truth a boy learns about his father and the far uglier truth he learns about the country in which he lives.

The melancholy that pervades the novella “Strange Cargo” is almost overpowering. Aaron may have symptoms of cancer that he refuses to let his doctor diagnose because (in the doctor’s view) Aaron believes he deserves to die. All the things he loves are in the past. Following Holland family tradition, Aaron stands up to a tobacco chewing sheriff who is known for his racism, antisemitism, homophobia, and vindictiveness. The sheriff is haunted by the ghost of a slave just as Aaron is haunted by the ghost of his daughter. Aaron also sees spirits of slave chasers and their victims. If this were a different kind of story, the supernatural might threaten to get in the way. Since the story is ultimately a contemplation of death — its many causes and its effects on others — the supernatural makes a fitting contribution. It is also an exploration of southern hypocrisy, which Aaron comes to understand as an inevitability, even in his own life. The story requires Aaron to confront his family’s past (as well as his own) and, in doing so, addresses issues that arise in Another Kind of Eden and Every Cloak Rolled in Blood.

In “The Assault,” the police take little interest in investigating a beating that a couple inflicted on a professor’s (admittedly drunken) teenage daughter. The helplessness he has felt since his wife died in a car accident for which he blames himself is amplified by the assault, contributing to his sense of failure as a husband and father. While he is fishing with a Black professor, he has an encounter with racist rednecks. The police are more interested in the professor’s response to abuse than they are in the abuse inflicted upon the professor's daughter. A series of confrontations escalate from threats to violence. This is one of Burke’s most intense stories and my favorite in the volume.

“Going Across Jordan” tells the story of two drifters who ride the rails and enjoy a special kind of freedom. The older man irritates the authorities by singing Woody Guthrie songs. While working on a ranch in Wyoming, the younger man makes a foolish decision to accept his boss’ offer to borrow his Cadillac to bring a pretty Black girl back to the ranch. The young man learns that people with power who do favors for the powerless always have an ulterior motive. He also learns something about love and about achieving justice without resorting to violence.

I did not dislike any story in the collection, although three stories I liked a bit less. “A Distant War” is a story that would be at home in the Twilight Zone. A veteran whose radiator hose breaks brings his half Vietnamese son into the wrong bar (and maybe the wrong dimension) where he meets the wrong people at the wrong time. “Big Midnight Special” is a story about fighting and country music told in the setting of a prison. A seismologist who works in the oil drilling industry sleeps with the wrong married woman before all hell breaks loose in “The Wild Side of Life.”

Every story in this collection provokes thought. A reader might easily choose any of them as a favorite. All are told in a prose style that elevates grittiness to elegance in a way that only James Lee Burke can. This collection is a must for his fans.

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Old Crimes by Jill McCorkle

Published by Algonquin Books on January 9, 2024

Most of the stories in Old Crimes feature women who have reached or lived beyond middle age. An exception is “Filling Station,” a story about a man in his sixties who rents a room in a house where his grandparents used to live, a house that has been converted into a gas station. The room is an excuse to stay away from his wife, as is the time he devotes to a dying high school teacher he regards as a mentor. The other exception follows “a lineman for the county” who prides himself on his competence (he’ll survive the coming apocalypse because he is good with tools and knows how things work) but regrets his failure to make his relationships work.

“Low Tones” is the story of a woman who isn’t prepared to be old. She can no longer hear low frequencies, a convenient excuse for developing a case of selective hearing. She regrets the moments in her life when she wasn’t the person she wanted to be. Her husband has “a bad illness that leaves him making hand signals” and she doesn’t know if she can cope with him. Cancer has reached his brain and makes him say awful things to her, although he’s always been abusive. She’s annoyed by the young people she sees making out in a truck and feels empathy for an unrepentant woman who murdered her husband. I think the point of the story is that life doesn’t always turn out as one hopes, and never will if we don’t take control of it while we still can.

My favorite in this collection is “Commandments.” Three women meet regularly to gripe about the man who dated and dumped them all. They all aspired to be pampered for the rest of their lives by a rich man but none of them succeeded. This seems less than tragic, given that they all appear to have achieved pampering by less wealthy but comfortably affluent men. Each woman has been in therapy but they disregard their therapists’ advice to move on with their lives and devote their meetings to “beating that decayed horse down to its bare bones.” The story works because the waitress who brings their lunch is more interesting than the three women. She doesn’t seem to envy their designer clothes and purses. She knows the man they hate, recognizes him as an asshole, and governs herself accordingly. The waitress — “a living Bible of truth and common sense” — teaches a good lesson about karma and wisdom that surpasses anything the women have heard from their therapists.

The protagonist in “Swinger” is “the kind of invisible woman who might be referred to as sturdy or dependable, smart and practical.” She was living with a married man, waiting for him to get divorced, for three years before he died. The man had Polaroids of naked women that he kept in a shoe box, photos of his conquests, but never took one of her and now never will. An encounter with a burglar at the novel’s end gives the story a heartening twist.

A woman who got a divorce, relocated with the kids, found a new job, and dealt with the death of her father and decline of her mother never had time to have the breakdown she deserved. In “Sparrow,” memories of the past (including an old story about a boy’s disappearance that still haunts the town to which the woman moves) interweave with experiences in the present (including speculative whispers about the death of a young mother and her son). The story ends with a suspected child snatching. The point of the story seems to be that people want to keep themselves and their children safe but have no idea how to do it.

The other stories in the book are well crafted but I found them to be of less interest. A woman realizes that “evil and violent things” have always happened and always will. The purchase of an old confessional prompts characters to speak of their relatively inconsequential sins. A retired school librarian tries to teach biblical values to Bible-belters who don’t want to feed or educate children. A family gathering causes a drama teacher to see life as a play that is well into its third act. These and other stories are devoted to insightful character building, but they generally seemed longer than necessary, given how little the characters do after they are built. Still, the best stories in the collection make the book worth reading.

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"Calypso's Guest" by Andrew Sean Greer

Published by Amazon Original Stories on August 22, 2023

The narrator of “Calypso’s Guest” betrayed the other humans on his planet by doing a deal with the godlike Others. The deal included the promise of immortality. Having discovered the betrayal, the narrator’s people banished him to the unoccupied colony world of Calypso, where he lives as a prisoner. Robots serve the narrator’s needs but they will not build a ship to help him escape. Even if he had a ship, the robots would not let him leave.

After the narrator was banished, the humans on his planet were killed by the Others. No other colonists joined the narrator on his new world.

One day a spaceship crashes and the narrator is joined by its surviving occupant. The narrator believes his guest was sent to him as part of the bargain he made with the Others. The guest gets along with the narrator, even joining him in his hut on some nights, but the guest is disappointed that there is no way to leave the planet.

The guest has stories to tell — the sort of stories that Odysseus told, complete with one-eyed monsters. The guest is adventurous — like Odysseus — while the narrator is more of a homebody. The guest wants to build a ship to explore their world. He seems to have little interest in having the narrator accompany him on that journey.

Homer wrote that Calypso held Odysseus on the island of Ogygia for seven years. The guest has been on Calypso for seven years when the narrator discovers a newly arrived spaceship. Its occupant is dead but the ship is intact. The story’s moral dilemma involves the narrator’s possession of that secret. Should he share it with his guest? If he does, will the man he loves leave the narrator alone on the prison planet?

I suppose every serious writer needs to write a story that is inspired by the Odyssey. This one is almost moving. It certainly tries to be moving. Perhaps it tries too desperately. The sentiment seems forced, too obvious to be genuine. Still, a short story can be entertaining without being substantial. I’m not sure I would spend money to purchase a short story that will likely appear in an anthology at some point — I like to get more words for my buck — but “Calypso’s Guest” is a better story than most that appear in annual anthologies.

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