Keeper on the Hook

Over at The Angler editor Donavan Hall has been putting up some new stories so if you haven't checked it lately, get over there. Here's a story from Issue 3 (divination): "Around Close" by Chris Sheehan.

You may remember Chris Sheehan's story "Roots and Limbs" from the STORYGLOSSIA Fiction Prize Issue—check it out if you haven't already. In "Around Close" Sheehan also takes risks with language, this time via a meandering syntax that perfectly captures the quality of reverie, except that this story is told in 2nd-person present tense, which gives it a stream of consciousness feel:

You study the road ahead where at the fringe of the headlights there's a cattle guard, and you think you know the direction the cow came from, but you don't say it, because somehow anything you say now brings your mother here. She looks all right, you say, because that is a tough thing to say, and if he thinks of your mother it will be in a good way, since you are not surprised by anything here and don't care about the cow. He will see that you understand this is something that happens and there is no reason to get involved and pretend you can help.

You can see the writer at work here, not simply jotting down an experience with the first words that come to mind, but toying with them, folding them back into the experience, then letting the new shape emerge, just as batter becomes cake.

Another remarkable quality of Sheehan's story is the number of story moments and how they are all compressed by the language to fill a smaller space so that when you get to the end you feel you've read much more story than you would have expected from the number of words and pages ahead of you when you began. This could have been a much longer story—it has that many story moments in it—with the present action woven with backstory and longer passages of introspection. How many of those have we read? This could have been another. And a good one I expect. But what makes this a great story is that Sheehan didn't do that. Instead he squeezed all the story moments together and wiped away the extraneous backstory and character interiority, left you infused with the moments and just enough else so that you descend into the story's world and feel a bit of the experience for yourself. Consider:

Inside a Sheriff stands by the coffee machine. He's a tall man with gray, curled hair on the sides. He straightens when he sees your father and you know the look well. You've seen your Pops with the law. You've seen how they keep their hand near their pistol, even when it's only for a fishing ticket. He watches your father walk by, to the cooler, and pull out a case of beer. He watches him set the twelve beers on the counter, and then look sad, almost, when your father adds a brown-red rose to the order, laying it on top of the case, smiling, as though his problems are over.

A whole history there, no? Can you imagine yourself in the boy's shoes? Go where his feelings—the ones not described on the page, but in the moment—go? I can. I agree with Donavan Hall, this story is a keeper.