Our Stories/Jo Page/Donald Capone/Short Story Review

Nominating Editor: Alexis Enrico Santi

Our Stories Literary Journal publishes some of the best short stories found on the web and engaging interviews with prize winning authors such as TC Boyle and Junot Díaz. Numerous stories have been short listed for storySouth award and published in the Dzanc Best of the Web. Central to Our Stories is a unique submission process, for every submission they receive year round, they provide personalized feedback; hence their credo "Don't just submit. Learn to receive." They are the sponsors of the Emerging Writer Award and the Richard Bausch short fiction prize and during these contests every writer whose story isn't chosen for publication receives a page by page analysis of their story. The journal was founded in 2006 by Alexis Enrico Santí who serves as editor in chief.

What struck me about this story was the slow methodical way that Jo Page begins her story and introduces a normal point of tension: the car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. She then takes the story and patiently builds terror through tiny actions and dialogue. It's probably a more "print" story than I usually find these days and I attribute this to Page's training, having worked with one of the masters of prose George Garrett, who recently passed away. Simply put: it's a story that takes your breath away.

Nominated Short Story: "AAA" – Jo Page

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Reviewed: by Donald Capone

"JANE’S CAR HAD STALLED OUT AT THE CREST OF A BLIND CURVE ON A WINDING, WOODED ROAD THIRTY MILES FROM THE RETREAT CENTER."

From the opening sentence, the reader is plopped smack down into Jane's predicament, which soon gets much worse. Author Jo Page's smooth, easy, no-nonsense writing style and dialogue grabs you and doesn't let go; you feel the tension almost immediately. In fact, I can't properly review this story without including spoilers. Seriously, major spoilers ahead. So my suggestion is to read the story first, then return to this review. Go ahead, I'll wait. I'll have a cup of tea in the meantime.

Welcome back. Now, as I was saying. From the moment good Samaritan Tom pulls up in his pick-up truck and offers a ride, red flags go up for both Jane and the reader. We're conditioned to be scared of strangers. Don't get in a car with strangers! Of course she gets in the truck, and of course Tom has intentions that aren't all pure. Otherwise there wouldn't be a conflict in the story—Jane would get to his mobile home, use his phone to call AAA, and wait for a tow truck. So we know what's coming. Still, you hope Tom doesn't go down the road that he seems intent on traveling.

Later, back at his trailer, when he asks Jane to take off her shirt, you're right there with her, and realize what you (and she) feared has now begun. You want Jane to make a break for it. Just run, get out of there, leg it back to her car if she has to. But she doesn't. She fears for her life, and goes along with his suggestion in the hope that it will end there, and then he'll take her back to her car as promised. But Tom keeps upping the ante. First her shirt, then her bra, then her pants. She's one step ahead of him at this point and takes her panties off without his asking. Here she does consider making a break for it, but doesn't think she'll make it, and worries it would anger him. Her survival instinct kicks in, as she tries to numb herself for what will come next.

We learn Jane and Tom have a similar recent history: they both have ex-spouses who cheated on them and left them for someone else. The sting of this is there for both characters, but how each deals with it is different. We don't know much of Jane's personal situation until later, but Page gives us Tom's up front: he's the father of two small children, his wife has left him for another man. Jane, along with the reader, wonders if Tom has picked up and attacked women before, or if this is the first time. We never learn this for sure, but rape clearly is his revenge on his wife, and women in general, even if he isn't aware of it. The rape scene itself is an uncomfortable read. Page doesn't let you off the hook here; she shows how it happens in detail, the dialogue between the characters, and how Jane feels immediately afterward.

Page offers us layered, complex characters—both the victim and the attacker. The rapist isn't a stereotypical violent angry brute. We get his story, too, and see how he probably does believe he's "normal" and is not doing anything to hurt Jane; in fact he believes he is gentle with her. Jane is more complex. She understands a crime is being committed against her, yet a part of her needs human touch (we later learn of her husband's infidelity), needs to be wanted, needs something, anything. But not this. Yet her body responds, and it feels good: "It felt good. It felt so good. Her hands reached for his ass, his back...This wasn’t rape. This was rape. She didn’t know." (I wonder if a male author could have gotten away with writing this without coming off as a cad.)

Later, Tom drives her back to her car, and she asks him to wait with her for the tow truck to arrive, and tries to make small talk with him. Jane then gets in the tow truck with the driver, and wonders if she is putting herself in the same situation as before. She actually thanks Tom for his help, her eyes tearing up as the truck pulls away and leaves Tom standing alone and sad on the side of the road. The Gentle Rapist. This is a case of accelerated Stockholm Syndrome here; the tow truck driver may be a new threat, but Tom is the devil she knows, who helped her on some level. She sighs and shuts her eyes, and lets "the rough ride and the vertigo of the curving roads swat her this way and that," her life a road of which she has no map.

This story will stick with its readers for a long time. It will for me; I still wish she had kicked him where it counts and made a run for it, though.

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Reviewer's Bio:

Donald Capone's stories have appeared in Edgar Literary Magazine, Word Riot, Weekly Reader's READ magazine, Thieves Jargon, and Ampersand Review (forthcoming), as well as the anthologies See You Next Tuesday, Skive Quarterly 6, and Rebellion: New Voices of Fiction, which he also edited, and which was a finalist in the 2006 USA Book News awards. His comic novel, Into the Sunset, is available on Amazon and other places. He works in publishing as a designer of children's novelty books. He blogs here.

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Fiction Weekly/Patricia O’Donnell/Mary Akers/Short Story Review

Nominating editor: Jason Reynolds

Since launching in July of 2008, Fiction Weekly has published a steady stream of high caliber stories by established and emerging authors. Stories that first appeared in Fiction Weekly have been included in Sundress Publications’ 2008 Best of the Net Anthology and storySouth’s list of Notable Stories Published Online in 2008. We’ve been fortunate to publish award winning authors, and we’re equally proud that almost half of our contributors were first published in our pages.

Fiction Weekly has a simple and singular mission. We’re dedicated to offering readers one new and noteworthy story per week. Our editorial policy is also straightforward. We believe that stories should be judged by their ability to move readers, nothing more and nothing less. As such, we consider stories regardless of genre, and we give each submission the attention it deserves.

Due to the wide variety of fiction we publish, there’s no one story that sums up our tastes or style. That being said, Patricia O’Donnell’s “Gods for Sale” is one of our favorite pieces. The opening paragraph immediately calls to mind classic travel literature, and yet the story is unquestionably of our era. O’Donnell’s writing is layered and nuanced—thoroughly organic. Her eye for detail provides not only crisp imagery of unique settings and characters, but also insight into the story’s protagonist, her history, and her current and past dilemmas. “Gods for Sale” is a story worthy of multiple reads. As such, we’re proud to have O’Donnell’s work represent Fiction Weekly on Five Star Literary Stories.

Nominated Short Story: “Gods for Sale” - Patricia O'Donnell

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Reviewed: by Mary Akers

Patricia O’Donnell’s short story, "Gods for Sale," takes a couple celebrating their tenth wedding anniversary into the strangeness of an African game preserve. As the story opens, they are discombobulated, flying into their final destination as “Americans, their eyes wide, still dazed after two days in Cape Town from hurtling to the other side of the world, from being upside down.” The wife, Elizabeth, stays unsettled as the trip unfolds. Although excited to visit the land she has long imagined, she finds herself uneasy with the racial and economic divide she senses there, face-to-face with the stark differences between the haves and the have-nots.

“The country of South Africa was a huge mystery to her, its squalid miles of tin shacks leaning together in the dust, donkeys pulling wrecked cars on flat wagons on the freeway, not far from elegant houses, Cape Dutch style, sweeping wineries, and estates behind high fences topped with electric wire. Everything was all jumbled together in this country. Here they were protected by sliding electronic gates from the locals, and by electrified fences from the animals, in a spacious enclosure where they could imagine they were close to nature.”

She is also beset by memories of the recent loss of her mother and an attraction to a handsome younger man she’d served on jury duty with. As the insomnia of a strange new place plagues her nights and the turmoil of her thoughts consumes her days, she turns a critical eye to her husband, reexamining their marital relationship in the light of the harsh African sun. When their rental vehicle malfunctions on a trip into the bush, and they end up stranded and alone as dark descends with the wild animals congregating, she realizes she’s been delivered the perfect point of decision.

The observations and sensory details in "Gods for Sale" are lush and perfect, drawing the reader simultaneously into the foreign world of Africa and the all too familiar world of the fickle human mind.

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Reviewer's Bio:

Mary Akers is the author of Women Up On Blocks, a short story collection that explores the price women pay when they allow the roles of wife, mother, daughter or lover to define them. She co-authored the non-fiction book Radical Gratitude: And Other Life Lessons Learned in Siberia (Allen & Unwin, Australia) and also titled The Greatest Gift: Lessons Learned in Exile in Siberia (Simon & Schuster UK/Canada).

Her fiction, poetry and non-fiction have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, The Fiddlehead, Ars Medica, Brevity and other journals. She has work in the anthologies The Maternal Is Political: Women Writers at the Intersection of Motherhood and Social Change and Home of the Brave: Stories in Uniform.

Akers also co-founded the Institute for Tropical Marine Ecology, a study abroad marine ecology program located in Roseau, Dominica. She enjoys snorkeling, hiking, backpacking, mountaineering, and snowshoeing. Although raised in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia—which she will always call home—she currently lives in Western New York.

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Guernica/E. C. Osondu/Clifford Garstang/Short Story Review

Nominating editor: Meakin Armstrong

Guernica is a magazine of art and ideas that author Howard Zinn called "an extraordinary bouquet of stories, poems, social commentary, and art." In its short time online, it has grown from one of the web's best-kept secrets to one of its most acclaimed new magazines. In 2009, Guernica was called a "great online literary magazine" by Esquire.

Last October we ran "Waiting" by E.C. Osondu, and even after all of these months, it's still a favorite of mine. The story of Africans in a refugee camp, I find it compelling from its first few lines:

"My name is Orlando Zaki. Orlando is taken from Orlando, Florida, which is what is written on the t-shirt given to me by the Red Cross. Zaki is the name of the town where I was found and from which I was brought to this refugee camp."

I love fiction such as "Waiting," because it isn't pretentious nor rife with literary trickery. It's simply a well-told story about a kind of life most of us couldn't even begin to imagine.

Nominated Short Story: "Waiting" - E.C. Osondu

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Reviewed: by Clifford Garstang

“Waiting” is the story of Orlando Zaki, an African boy in a Red Cross camp for Displaced Persons. (The author, E.C. Osondu, is Nigerian, but the war-torn land of the story is not identified.) Camp life is a constant battle for food and water, and the children are waiting to be chosen for adoption by families abroad. Waiting is all there is to do. It’s a sad portrait of misery and unrequited hope that is, unfortunately, a little too familiar.

There are some wonderful passages here. We learn that Orlando’s name is derived partly from his t-shirt and partly from the village where he was found. The other children—Acapulco, Sexy, Paris, Lousy—all get their names in the same way. We also learn the history of the dogs in the camp. Once common and friendly, a period of food scarcity created a grisly conflict between humans and dogs, and now there are none. And the children are, today, waiting for a photographer to come. Having their pictures taken is an important step in the adoption process, and so the photographer’s arrival is eagerly awaited.

Orlando’s most important relationships are with his friend Acapulco, whose prospects are even bleaker than his own, and with Sister Nora. It is the Sister who has encouraged Orlando to write down his story, and also has provided him with books to read, including Waiting for Godot. She explains that the people in the book are waiting for God, but Orlando is waiting for water, for food, and for hope. There’s nothing else.

It is, perhaps, fitting that little happens in the story, as in the book Orlando reads. There is no specific conflict except for the daily struggle to survive. There is no real tension or plot. As the story comes to an end, Orlando and Acapulco do have to fight for a meager meal, but their small success offers no relief and no resolution. In the end, not a thing has changed, and Orlando is still waiting.

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Reviewer's Bio:

Clifford Garstang’s story collection, In an Uncharted Country, will be published by Press 53 in September 2009.

He grew up in the Midwest and received a BA from Northwestern University. After serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in South Korea, he earned an MA in English and a JD, both from Indiana University, and practiced international law in Singapore, Chicago and Los Angeles with one of the largest U.S. law firms. Subsequently, he earned an MPA in International Development from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and worked for Harvard Law School as a legal reform consultant in Almaty, Kazakhstan. From 1996 to 2001, he was Senior Counsel for East Asia at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., where his work concentrated on China, Indonesia and Vietnam.

Garstang received an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte in 2003 and has attended the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences. He is a Fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and formerly served as the Fiction Assistant for Shenandoah: The Washington & Lee University Review.

Garstang’s work has appeared in Shenandoah, Whitefish Review, Cream City Review, and elsewhere.

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Freight Stories/Andrew Roe/Meg Pokrass/Flash Fiction Review

Nominating Editor: Andrew Scott

Freight Stories publishes new, emerging, and established writers, including many known to wider audiences: Robert Boswell, Patricia Henley, Mary Swan, Lee Martin, Cathy Day, Larry Watson, Gina Ochsner, Daniel Wallace, and more. One of our goals is to bring a rigorous editorial process to the endeavor, which is one reason we were the first journal to publish online the work of some of these established authors, but we also work to find new voices. Freight Stories—including in No. 5, which will “go live” in mid-May—publishes many emerging and debut authors, and we take pride in that.

Andrew Roe’s “Why We Came to Target at 9:58 on a Monday Night” features compelling characters in a difficult situation, and its narrative voice is relentlessly engaging. Roe’s story answers perfectly a request made in our submissions guidelines: “Fiction of all lengths and styles is welcome. We wish only that your work be driven by the exploration of the lives of believable, compelling characters, and that it help to illuminate, broaden, or in some way enrich its readers’ perspectives.”

Nominated Flash Fiction: “Why We Came to Target at 9:58 on a Monday Night” - Andrew Roe

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Reviewed: by Meg Pokrass

The narrator of Andrew Roe's remarkable flash "Why We Came to Target at 9:58 on a Monday Night" lets it be known right away that she is perceptive, nervous, and trying to figure out where she and her boyfriend fit. She is vulnerable—a young person in a flawed world. The landscape is our present America; economically, and spiritually diseased. A Target store serves as Roe's stark, though colorful, setting.

The power of Roe's writing is in how unconsciously he approaches the reader with tiny physical details that add up to a feeling of these two young people being overwhelmed by forces that feel out of their control: mainly, temptation vs. limitation. The narrator and her boyfriend are coming off being drunk and/or high—having fun in the Target store, right at closing—the way kids will do at an adult's expense because they have each other to play around with.

Soon, we realize that Roe's narrator is getting nervous, knowing that the store is closing—though her boyfriend, Donny, is throwing whatever catches his eye into their cart, and can't seem to stop himself: "The lights in the store dim (hint, hint). I say to Donny, Let’s go, over here, I think." The narrator's emotional landscape begins to match the physical, in that the odds of buying and paying for all this unnecessary merchandise (and we can extrapolate this out a few years) are heavily stacked against them.

There is a moment in which Donny realizes his mistake and throws the items on the ground, "so he dumps everything on the floor . . . and we bail. Some minimum job wage slob will have to clean it all up. Not us." Here, we are shown that she is acutely aware of status, and that she does not intend to belong in that minimum-wage world. She sees herself and her boyfriend in an elevated light, as if they were a different species. Later, she judges makeup the checker is wearing, calls it "spooky" and "old ladyish." Here we recognize her tragic flaw—the inability to see people realistically.

Roe also shows us in slivers that Donny is emotionally immature, possibly reckless. We don't know why he is acting like such a destructive clown. She says, "But I’m not laughing as much now, because I’m starting to remember why we’re here." Roe's narrator bounces in and out of awareness of her own judgment, and of her own fragile identity apart from this boyfriend. To me, this is a delicious part of what makes this story memorable, and what makes Roe's characters real. They are complex and we worry for them. He's a master at showing us the internal struggle, and providing an uncomfortable feeling that something bad is brewing.

Reading the story, I could not tell if they are planning to steal something, or buy it—and I don't want to spoil it. The thing they are getting at Target feels important, and we are not told until late in the story what it is, though we are given hints: "It’s not like we’re buying condoms or porn, we don’t have to mask it with other stuff you know." They are young, though not children. These are seniors in high school, Donny is an all-state wrestler and "can lift a keg like a six-pack."

The story remains very grounded in physical details. The reader is trapped in the scene, like it or not. We don't know what is going to happen; why they are there, what will happen in the checkout line, and what exactly they are doing. This tension is part of the reading experience, and adds to the overall power of the piece.

The narrator's observation of the checker (the only other character in the piece) and her scripted words that she is too tired to even SAY are funny and unforgettable. Soon after they leave the store we are thrust into the deeper truth of why the narrator is so attached to her boyfriend—inseparable from him. We see that perhaps, she is losing her footing as a young person coming into her own. She is being stunted, and the way Roe later lets us in on the "why" is seamless.

Roe's writing is smooth, subtle, at times humorous—and the dialog is spot-on. There is not one moment that allows for escape from this little gem of a story. One feels, when reading this—superstores are like planets we don't completely trust. Kudos to Freight Stories for its amazing pick.

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Reviewer's Bio:

Meg Pokrass lives in San Francisco with her husband and daughter. Originally an actress, her flash fiction stories and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in 3AM, The Pedestal, Toronto Quarterly, Mud Luscious, Juked, Pindeldyboz, Smokelong Quarterly’s Fifth Anniversary Issue,Wigleaf, Elimae, Keyhole, Frigg,Wordriot, The Rose and Thorn, Thieves Jargon, Eclectica, Kitty Snacks, Rumble, and various upcoming anthologies of flash, including Dogs: Wet and Dry. Meg serves as a staff editor for SmokeLong Quarterly, and will be mentoring with Dzanc’s Creative Writing Sessions. Her blog, with prompts and writing exercises can be found here.

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