Journey to the center of the story: "Stump of the World" by Madeline ffitch

"Stump of the World" by Madeline ffitch joins "Thunderstruck" by Elizabeth McCracken at the top of my list of great contemporary short stories about the perils of raising children. "Thunderstruck" focused on the difficulties of raising young adolescents, and how the balance between too much parenting and not enough is difficult to find, while "Stump of the World" is about how hard it can be to get a near-adult to buy into work and responsibility, and how the child's objections to these things can actually be quite reasonable. I identify with the mother of this story, because, like her, one of the problems I've had convincing my now young-adult son to do things like get a job and plot a course for his future is that he has very logical reasons why he wouldn't want to. Work doesn't seem like a great deal, and look at all those kids who worked hard to get degrees in computer science who now can't get jobs. What am I supposed to tell him to work hard to become? I don't even know how to answer that question for myself. The world seems to be squeezing young people more and more; how can I tell my son with a straight face that he ought to go try and make his way in it, because the benefits will outweigh the costs?

Like ffitch's "Seeing Through Maps," which was in last year's Best American Short Stories collection, "Stump of the World" is just jam-packed with symbolism, double meanings, and pregnant clauses that lend themselves to multiple readings. Rather than mold all of this into one grand reading like I normally do, I'm going to work through the story based on questions that popped up while I was going through it, hoping they're similar to questions you readers out there might have had.

Summary

But first, a quick synopsis. It's always a good start, when dealing with a slippery story that's hard to pin down, to try to retell what's there. This might be a bastardization of the complex into the simple, but it can help reveal patterns as well as how the difficult parts fit into the whole.

Emma doesn't know what to do with her 17-year-old son Teddy. He's a senior in high school, but he's been skipping class, and it doesn't look like he's going to do well on his statewide assessment exam. Also, he's been shoplifting. His favorite objects to swipe are facemasks, which he claims not only help his cystic acne, but also "behind his face, his brain." Emma finds it difficult to be as hard on Teddy about shoplifting--and everything else--as she thinks she really should be.

Meanwhile, Emma's mother, who lives with them because her hours at her library job were cut and she can no longer afford her own rent, has adopted another grandchild. This grandchild is a sort of doppelganger for Emma, because her name is Jessica, which was the same name Emma used as a child when she briefly created an alter ego. Emma's mother first found Jessica through the community bulletin board at the library. The bulletin board is mostly full of sidehustling charlatans selling questionable goods and services, but Jessica's ad had been only asking for a grandparent or grandparents to adopt her.  

It's possible the world Teddy and Emma inhabit is a somewhat futuristic place with an altered climate. They drive at one point through "the kind of rain previously called a downpour," suggesting that the climate of the story is different from the climate of now. We are frequently told that "there is no city" and also that there is no state, perhaps alluding not only to a change in the weather, but a change in political reality. Otherwise, it's a very recognizable world, though. Emma works in a grocery store stocking produce.

Emma and her mother both try to convince Teddy to straighten up and fly right, to think about how he's going to make a living, but Teddy isn't interested. He thinks making a living is a scam the world foists upon people, and that most jobs, like the ones advertised on the bulletin board, are themselves just scams. The biggest scam is Gallo painting a crack in the road so drivers can see it and then asking for donations to maintain the road. 

The crack turns into a sinkhole, and the sinkhole keeps growing. Teddy goes missing a lot. He finally goes missing for a long time, and Emma asks Gallo, who has now expanded operations to warn drivers about a growing sinkhole instead of a small crack, to put Teddy's picture up. She then discovers that Teddy has been apprenticing with Gallo, and he's down in the sinkhole, exploring. He and Gallo plan to set up tours into the sinkhole. Emma is furious, and follows him into the sinkhole, thinking to drag him home and punish him, but instead, she follows him all the way "to the center of the earth." 

Technically, you can't argue that the appearance of a sinkhole isn't a sign that you have a sinkhole.

Questions that occur to me

What does Teddy mean when he says the facemasks help his brain?

Teddy has cystic acne, so it's understandable why he would want to use facemasks to control his acne. It isn't just embarrassing for a teenager, it's also a little bit painful and uncomfortable. But Teddy claims they also help "behind his face, his brain." 

Teddy might be a full-of-shit teenager, but full-of-shit teenagers have a point. The world they're about to enter doesn't seem like a great deal. Teddy doesn't want to enter this world. His insistence that he not "be interpellated" means he shouldn't be given a social identity. Wearing a mask allows him to hide his identity for a while. 

His habit of leaving the used masks everywhere is curious. It's almost like an animal that has molted leaving its old skin. Teddy's desire to steal things is described at one point as a desire to "exfoliate" them. Teddy's habit might be "annoying" to his grandmother, but he's also literally growing in front of our eyes. Each time he escapes interpellation and removes part of himself, he comes out a little closer to his fully grown form, although it may be hard to see him growing while it's happening. 

Why does Emma find it difficult to be stricter with Teddy? 

In the first place, although Emma is vexed by Teddy's behavior, she is also a doting parent. She looked in on him with anxiety when he was young and sleeping. She thinks of herself at one point as "thousands of roaring fans in an enormous arena and Teddy was the only one on the field." 

She also can relate, because some of Teddy's foibles are her own. She also stole when she was young. Emma's mother made her take the stolen paper clips back to the store and apologize, but Emma, although she intended to explain to Teddy why stealing was wrong, "figured she could do it later." It's possible she has a hard time explaining it to Teddy because she doesn't quite understand it herself. At one point, when she picks Teddy up from stealing, she brings him an apple, and it's an open question whether she paid for that apple or took it from work, since when she stacks tomatoes, she almost "forgets they were for sale." 

Emma and Teddy are alike in a lot of ways. Teddy ultimately seems to find satisfaction in going into the sinkhole, where he can see beneath the roots of grass. Having been dissatisfied with the phony face of the world, he is happy to get to its real core. When Emma first found her love of fruits and vegetables, it was growing a variety of tomato called the "Stump of the World." That's a pretty unusual name for a varietal, and it suggests that Emma, too, was interested in what lay at the bottom of everything.

Does the bulletin board represent something more?

The bulletin board is one of the best touches in the story. In our real world, community bulletin boards were kind of the precursor to the informal economy of the Internet, where people hawked goods Etsy-style or services influencer-style to the people in their community. In "Stump of the World," the bulletin board seems to be standing in for all of the tomfoolery that takes place on the Internet. Talking about influencers and Internet scams is overdone, so instead, the story replaces the Internet with something that came before it. When everyone is shouting, sometimes, you get noticed more by whispering, so this story doesn't talk about influencer culture, but an abstract signifier that suggests it. 

Teddy sees the bulletin board as the symbol of how nobody really makes a living and how all work is parasitic, a circular process in which everyone feeds off each other. (Compare this to Emma's complaint about circular logic concerning signs of sinkholes.) The bulletin board could have been something that held the community together, but because "there is no city," it doesn't. It's the symbol of all that Teddy is trying to avoid. 

Speaking of that, what does the repeated claim that "there is no city" mean?

I think we can read "city" and "state" as terms that more or less mean "community" here. There has been a breakdown of community, and in this sense, I don't think the story is set in the future much at all. All that's left of the community are the parts that discipline people. This reminds me of the concerns I've read for the decline in civic engagement. People don't join organizations or clubs as much as they used to. "The city" to us is just the things we call 911 for. It's a last resort when something has gone very wrong. The bulletin board seems like it might fill this void, but other than Jessica, asking for grandparents to adopt her, it's overrun by shady businesses. "There is no city" is a reference to the atomization of our own world. This decline in human relations is reflected in Jessica's quest for "roots" in the sense of ancestors, a quest Emma's mom can only fill by making up ancient recipes like "ethnic stew." 

What's up with missing parents? 

Teddy's father is never mentioned, nor is Emma's father. When Gallo talks about his son, he never mentions a mother. Why is everyone seemingly a single parent? In part, I suspect this is part of the issue above, the atomization of society and the breakdown of traditional familial and community relationships that held it in place. 

It may be that part of what Teddy was missing was the oft-cited "male role model." When he gets to know Gallo (a name that means "rooster" in Spanish and so pretty clearly seems to have a masculine energy), they share a "secret side-hug handshake of men." Gallo seems to awaken something in Teddy that Emma, in spite of her unquestioned love for him, couldn't. A lot of what Teddy (and Emma) were missing was something that only a traditional community could give them. It takes a city to raise a child, because sometimes, it's just hard to find someone on the right wavelength for a kid, so you need a big pool of candidates, but since there is no city for Teddy, it took him a long time to find that person. 

What's with all the fruit and vegetable imagery?

I know I've complained before about when characters in fiction are completely defined by their occupations. I hate when a brewer in a story sees the whole world in terms of yeast and fermentation, so that the author can wax poetic and show off all the research they did about brewing. So why don't I find Emma's frequent references to fruits and vegetables irritating? I think because Emma isn't doing it in any deep and profound way. She works all day stacking oranges, and so she sees oranges in things outside of work. She compares her son's skin to that of an avocado, or Gallo's face to an overripe banana. Emma's occupation affects how she sees things on the surface, not her deep psychological states.

Speaking of fruits and vegetables, there's a nice double meaning in her occupation. We chide kids on the cusp of adulthood that they need to be "productive." Emma works with "produce," pronounced with an emphasis on the first syllable, but the word is spelled the same as pro-DUCE, meaning to do something that contributes. Her job is symbolic of the adult productivity that she is trying to get Teddy to buy into. 

There is a lot of change in the story, and Teddy remarks on how change is the only constant. Does this story uphold this cliché or challenge it?

The story is probably commenting on change as much as it is doing anything. It's hard to write about this subject without getting eyerolls, because ideas like "the only constant is change" are such clichés, they invoke instinctive revolts from readers. That's why the story introduces the cliché as a cliché by having Teddy mouth it. 

The thing about many clichés is that they're true, though, and nobody comes to accept the truth of the only constant being change as much as Teddy. It's Emma who fights it. When the crack, which "had been there as long as Emma could remember," first begins to widen to a sinkhole, she denies it. "That crack has been the same my whole life," she insists. 

There is an inversion that takes place roughly halfway through the story. Emma began by trying to convince Teddy to find a job, and Teddy insisted that the whole notion of making a living was a farce. But when Emma complains about people getting paid for writing circular arguments, it's Teddy who says that everyone has to "get by." This incites Emma's response to Teddy of, "You've changed." Of course, evidence that he's been changing has been literally left all over the place, as every time he discarded a mask, he was leaving parts of his old self behind, but here, "You've changed" is an accusation. 

Teddy later accepts his own change, when his mother comes down into the sinkhole with him. "People change," he says. 

The story is almost a parable of what it takes for a parent to successfully help a child navigate into adulthood, especially when that child is resisting the change. You work and work to get them to change, but when the change finally comes, it might come from unexpected sources and it might express itself in unexpected ways. Emma meant for Teddy to be "productive," but he's gone one better by getting below the level where produce happens. It's so disorienting for Emma, she ends up completely changing roles at the very end, becoming the child who needs Teddy to lead her into his future. He offers her his hand, and she takes it as she follows "her son to the center of the earth." 

Teddy needed to change to find his own happiness as an adult, and Emma wasn't able to guide him into it. We often talk about the need to send children off on their own in adulthood, but that's not the image at the end of "Stump of the World." Instead, Teddy still needs the company of his mother, but she needs him to show her how the new relationship will work. It's not so much a child going off into the world as it is a role reversal in which the child now needs to show the parent the outlines of the new relationship. 

Aside: my own job troubles and the future of the blog

As I wrote about a few months ago, I left my long-time job in early March. Since then, I've returned to Ohio, where I grew up, found a home, and looked for work. And looked. And looked. I finally found something, and I start tomorrow. I'm terrified of going to this job. It's a stressful job with a lot of responsibility, and if I do it wrong, bad things could actually happen. In my early fifties, I don't know if I'm still mentally dexterous enough or physically tough enough for long hours of a stressful job. I need to do something, and after months of looking, this was the best option I found. It's possible I'll actually like it and be good at it, but it's going to be a tough adjustment. I'm going from a job where I was supremely confident I knew what I was doing to a job where I'll be the dumbest guy in the room as well as one of the oldest. 

With this adjustment going on, I don't know if I'm going to be able to keep blogging for the foreseeable future. With twelve-hour shifts that will sometimes be longer, and with having to learn a lot of new material, I don't foresee a lot of time to spare for reading literary fiction and writing about it. 

In spite of all the times I gave up blogging in despair, this has also come to be a comforting constant in my life. Especially since I changed from blogging about the travails of writing life to focusing on literary criticism of short stories, it's been nice just to have a clear assignment to do. Feeling like I occasionally do a good job has been a bonus. 

Since moving back to Ohio, my own son, like Teddy from the story, has sort of been figuring his life out. So like Emma, I'm going to look to him to guide me as I go to a job I'm frankly very afraid to go to tomorrow. I don't know when I'll be back here, but I have really enjoyed posting about short stories for the confused and consternated these past many years. 

Trad quest for hippies: "Sanrevelle" by Dave Eggers

Let's start with the name Sanrevelle, which is both the title of the story and the name of the woman the main character Hop falls in love with and spends most of the story trying to locate. It's not a traditional name, although it seems to mimic one. Characters in the story comment on the name, unsure if it even belongs to a person. In the real world, there is a Revelle College as part of the UC San Diego campus, but neither San Revelle nor the one-word combination really show up on any map or in any directory. Google tells me that it is a "rare Portuguese woman's name," although its sources are divided on the meaning. The "San" part would indicate a saint, but the latter half of the name is a mystery, and in any event, Sanrevelle herself shows a lack of interest in the history of names when Hop starts to explain his own. In the context of a boat parade of Christmas lights, it might be fair to do a little bit of association and go from "revelle" to "revel." She is the saint of Christmas revelry, and Hop is on a quest/pilgrimage to reach the saint. 

A pilgrimage to a saint is a pretty traditional formula, and so is Hop's hoped-for fix to feeling lost in the maelstrom of life by looking to the love of a good woman. These traditional formulas are in opposition to the new-age gobbledygook that surrounds Hop. His boss, co-founder of one of the largest personal injury firms on the West Coast, has gone a little insane, and has started looking to every phony, hippie-dippie system on Earth to help him make sense of the world. He's started a list of grudges against his long-dead parents, consulted with mediums, and gone off to be part of a cult in Europe. Meanwhile, he's left Hop to man the ship at the law firm, and ship from which one lawyer after another is jumping.

The firm is located in the Millennium Tower in San Francisco, a building known mostly for how it began to sink soon after construction was completed because it was built in soft clay. That alone sounds something like a Biblical parable about building your house on rock, and, because it's set in San Francisco, sort of the epicenter of liberal, flower-power culture and its modern descendants, the story comes across as a bit of a rebuke to that culture and a suggestion that answers to life's questions might, on occasion, be better looked for somewhere else. Hop, who eventually starts living in the tower full-time at his boss's request, finds himself looking out of the window and wishing for a way out. He sees the bay, which leads him to try sailing lessons, which leads him to meet Sanrevelle, the sailing instructor. 

Hop's passivity

Part of modernity's endless boring discourse has to do with the manliness of men, with conservatives criticizing weak, passive, "cuck" or "beta" males. Hop fits that description. He assures Sanrevelle that he isn't a "middle-aged thumbsucker" with "mommy issues," but I beg to differ. Her boat is called the fucking Cradle for Christ's sake, and if that's not an indicator that he is looking for a mommy to fix him, I don't know what is. 

By making Sanrevelle Hop's instructor, the story encourages the reader to see her as more than just a mentor in sailing. She is a guide to him trying to figure out his life. He quickly falls in love, but he is too afraid to make a move. She is somewhat guarded, although she does put out some signs that she's open to dating him, but he is too passive and uncertain of himself to take a risk, up until the final act, which makes up most of the story. She's getting ready to go on a long wished-for trip to the Sea of Cortez. She needs a crew, and there have been hints between Hop and Sanrevelle that if he wanted to go, she might be amenable to that. But he hasn't gotten up the nerve to tell her how he feels. 

Traditional narrative within non-traditional trappings

And so we come to the Love Actually-esque scene that, with interruptions for backstory, makes up the plot. Hop has decided to throw caution to the wind and find Sanrevelle on the night that the flotilla of boats with Christmas lights is supposed to cruise through the bay, which is a San Francisco tradition. The setup to this scene isn't exactly clear. She apparently told Hop that she would be on her boat a little before the parade started, and if she wasn't, she'd be in the barge-made-bar she likes to hang out in. It isn't clear if she had asked Hop to be part of the flotilla with her. In any event, she isn't at her boat, nor is she at the "Waterfront Social Club," and she isn't answering her phone, so Hop, suddenly encouraged by Sanrevelle's friend who seems to have had a change of heart about him, takes a canoe and goes out to find her. (She is called "Sanrevelle's skeptical friend Joy," a name as pregnant with meaning, along with a description as on-the-nose as anything Hawthorne might have written.)

Come to think of it, Love Actually, with its attempt to package traditional love stories in hip, modern packages, kind of reminds me of "Sanrevelle." On the one hand, Hop's travails as he goes from one mistaken location to another in search of Sanrevelle are so traditional they could probably neatly fit into a Joseph Campbell-inspired diagram. He accepts his call to adventure, faces trials, and eventually perseveres by showing his steadfastness of heart. It's a very old formula, one that's set against all of the weird, new answers to life that only lead people astray in the big city. 

On the other hand, it doesn't end with Hop becoming the traditional male lead of the relationship. He has just enough agency to go ask Sanrevelle for help, and when he does that, the story ends. It ends with Hop getting what he wants, which is for Sanrevelle to show him the way. The last line is: "And so he let her guide him." Having shown enough agency to have looked for her and expressed his real interest, she relieves him of further need for agency by taking over guiding him. 

Liberals flirting with traditional answers

"Sanrevelle" is perhaps not a complete rejection of hippie culture. Hop does, after all, get his canoe from the communal pile of watercraft next to the social club. It is, however, a story about a man who escapes the spiritual confusion of living in modern San Francisco through heterosexual love, a love that ends with a trip to escape San Francisco and its tottering society built on sand. There is an implied critique there of the answers to life's problems that "San Francisco"--the symbol of all kinds of New Age flim-flam panaceas--offers. 

Hop doesn't declare Jesus Christ as his lord and savior at the end. It's not that kind of traditional. But it does, by bringing in a large number of Christian symbols, and by poking fun at the silliest excesses of New Age thinking, at least re-introduce old answers as possible cures to the ills of modernity.   

I don't think it will be terribly controversial if I posit that the editors who determine what gets published in literary fiction such as the O.Henry Anthology skew toward the politically liberal. The New York-based establishment of publishers skews heavily left in its politics. Unlike a lot of claims of bias, I think this one is pretty hard to argue against. But every now and again, for reasons I don't quite understand, someone--typically an older, white male--is able to sneak in conservative messages that are accepted pretty much whole cloth by the literary establishment. I think Cormac McCarthy was the prime example of this. I have no idea how his novels, which in some cases featured sympathetic characters fighting evil while also railing against modern explanations of evil, were accepted by the literary establishment as they were. 

Part of the answer is probably that people aren't very good readers and they may not even understand the themes of the books they read, but I also think that liberals have had enough time go by to realize that not all of the things they hoped were true two generations ago have panned out. That doesn't mean they want to go back to 1955 like MAGA does, but they do seem, on occasion, to be willing to look to the past for virtues that might be worth salvaging and trying to incorporate into a modern setting. "Sanrevelle" attempts to do this, and by slipping Jesus in among the lights and Dean Martin, it does it unobtrusively. But its implied critique of at least some of the worst solutions "San Francisco" has to offer is hard not to read in at least a partly political sense. 

In the end, the hearing aids in "Hearing Aids" by Clyde Edgerton are donated to the reader (O.Henry 2025)

The sense of sight is considered so central that seeing is often equated with understanding. To say "I see" means "I understand." Jesus used seeing as a metaphor for spiritual comprehension. You'd think glasses, which are for people who have trouble seeing, would be a symbol of some kind of inability to perceive on a deeper level, but I can rattle a few examples off the top of my head of glasses being used in a narrative to show that someone sees exceedingly well: the eyes on the billboard in Great Gatsby, the eyeglasses worn by the killer in "A Good Man is Hard to Find," and the sunglasses worn by Boss Godfrey in the movie Cool Hand Luke. I guess that since glasses give one good sight, it's understandable to use them in this way.

So what about hearing aids? Well, hearing may not be the central sense in our language that seeing is, but it's close. If you're struggling to understand someone, and you listen to them for a long time, and it finally makes sense, you can say, "I hear you now" to mean, "I finally get it." And Jesus, who spread his message orally rather than through the printed word, used hearing nearly as much as seeing to represent true insight, e.g. "Let those that have ears hear."

Not T.J. Eckleburg-level ominous, maybe

So I think we're justified to take the hearing aids that the narrator in the story by that name wants to donate as a symbol of more than just little gadgets that make your ears work better. The narrator, near the end of his life, is trying to figure out whom to leave the hearing aids to. They're expensive, after all, and it's a pain not being able to hear, so somebody should have them. But it's more than that. The narrator is dying, and he's trying, in the short pages of this very short story, to explain what has been confusing him throughout his whole life. He is trying to be heard.

Half of the story involves digressions into all of the things that upset the narrator, and these digressions are involved enough they could be seen as spinning out or as crazed diatribes. There's the recriminations of himself for his inability to stick to things in life or complaints about the lack of people who made him stick to things. There's the litany of objects in history that used to be commonplace but which were later replaced by better versions. There's the way the world comes at us too fast, and the lack of sensible organizations that might do something like find fitting homes for all the perfectly serviceable hearing aids in the world. 

These thoughts aren't just the crazed rants of a bitter old man, though. They're his attempt to leave his most important insights into life, and he's running out of time. He may or may not be on his way to throw himself in front of the fast-moving train that comes in the afternoon, but even if he isn't, the train is a pretty obvious metaphor for death, as the narrator is about to leave the station for the final time. These final thoughts are coming out jumbled together, but the pieces are all there for those with ears to hear. 

History comes at you fast, and it will leave your head spinning. You'll end up wishing you'd stuck to something. Encouragement to stick to something might be lacking, but you should stick to it, anyway. The story is itself that encouragement. It doesn't need to be a longer story, because history itself goes by in a blink just like the story does. 

What it was going for and what I see: "Blackbirds" by Lindsey Drager

Aristotle distinguished between mimesis and diegesis, with one being "showing things," as in a play, and the other being "telling about things," as in a narration. These terms eventually took on different meanings with the advent of film, but before the cinema, beginning in the mid-to-late 19th century, several movements in art were also pushing what they meant by them. Mimesis had always meant "holding the mirror up to nature," or showing the world as it is, but in the mid-19th century, realism began to take this to new extremes by depicting parts of life nobody had ever thought worth showing. Meanwhile, other writers, influenced by realism and taking it further, began to pay closer attention to the psychological mechanisms of human beings, and the inner thoughts of characters began to be not just a role in moving the plot, but what the whole story was about. In time, some extreme examples of psychological stories became all about the strange mechanisms of the mind, and techniques that are now commonplace, like stream-of-consciousness narration, were developed to try to depict all the weird things a human brain does when it guides us through the world. 

Stories that focus on human psychology are a blend of mimesis and diegesis. They are part of realism, because they are trying to show us the world as it is, but because that world is filtered through our subjective consciousness, what it presents can never really be a true, objective mirror, because our brains don't work that way. They distort the hell out of everything. This influence has never left Anglophonic literature, and many stories still center around an attempt to depict not reality so much as our attempt to make sense of reality. 

That's more or less what I think "Blackbirds" by Lindsey Drager is going for. It centers on an unnamed eight-year-old girl growing up in 1980s-ish Michigan. When we first meet her, the girl is in the bathroom at school trying to trick herself into a mind-over-matter cure to asthma, having forgotten her inhaler at home. She finds it's too much to count numbers in order to clam herself down, because numbers don't have an inherent end, but if she recites the alphabet, that does help, because it is finite. Which made me figure that okay, this girl's development is going to include learning to compartmentalize, to shut out all of the big world and bring it down to manageable chunks. But for the most part, she doesn't do that. She actually prefers making her perspective bigger and broader. She likes to ride the Ferris wheel, "because you can see so much at once." She loves fossils and dinosaurs, and she is familiar with the geological timeline of Michigan, meaning she thinks of time primarily in unfathomably large units. No wonder she keeps failing her "clock tests" in school, and no wonder she's especially vexed by the existence of a seconds hand, because she can't understand why anyone would need to count seconds unless they were in a race. 

It seems to me that if the girl is undone by thinking about things that are too large, like numbers that don't end, and if it helps her to get through life by breaking down life to more manageable quantities like the number of letters in the alphabet, she would want to start thinking small, as in seconds and minutes and hours, rather than in epochs. But a lot of her world in contradictory. She can pick the lock to her mother's room but she can't open a can of ravioli. She can locate fossils that are difficult for adults to identify, but she keeps messing up the rather simple concepts of analog clocks. And don't tell me that she's just bad at math, because she can calculate the number of months to the end of the school year. She just has a funny brain, which can do some things well and not others (like remember her inhaler). Which is to say she has a brain like anyone does, because all brains are curiously contradictory. Especially when they're being asked to do more than anyone has a right to expect of them. 

That's what I think the story is going for. It's an attempt to portray the psychological realities of an eight-year-old girl who has way more put upon her than should be. It's a stylized portrayal of how time, space, and the concept of rarity are all "elastic," how they can "bend and stretch and fold," which is how the girl goes from hoping for the small and finite to the large and cosmic. The girl is struggling to obtain perspective by getting away from the trenches of her life while at the same time the day-to-day reality she faces forces her to break from big perspective thinking to small. The end of the story, when she sees blackbirds on the roofs of the houses in her neighborhood and wonders if they are on her own rooftop, is her desire for the ability to get far from her own reality, enough to see it better and make some sense of it.

Regular blackbirds are kind of ugly birds, but I really dig the red-winged variety.

Which, fine, but as I read the story, that's not what really pops out to me. When I read this story, with its improbably ubiquitous dinosaur and fossil references (what elementary school kid has graffitied a pterodactyl on the bathroom stall?), I see a depiction of a species in crisis and about to go extinct. Imagine an alien reading this story and extrapolating from it what humans are like. Humans are so fragile physically, some of them can't breathe without portable medicine and, when it's really bad, a machine. They take insanely long times to mature enough to be independent, so they require constant and exhausting parental care, but they also suffer from evolutionarily disadvantageous psychological problems like post-partum depression. That would be fine, since humans generally live in packs, and others could pick up the caring slack, but in the case of the girl in "Blackbirds," the community that should be her caring village is so stupid and apathetic, they are hoodwinked by the half-assed attempts of an eight-year-old girl to cover up her mother's illness. Maybe the girl herself should realize her situation is intolerable and ask for help, but because her mind isn't totally rational, she prefers the devil she knows to the devil she doesn't, with the unknown devil being what would happen to her family if the world knew her mother wasn't caring for her or her baby brother. It's a somewhat more depressing version of Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos, in which humans, with their big brains that make them do all kinds of stupid things, are an evolutionary dead end. 

The end of the story is the girl seeing blackbirds on all the houses and wishing she could get far enough away to gain perspective and see them on her own house. I see this as a Jurassic Park kind of ending, only instead of looking at the birds that are the evolutionary descendants of dinosaurs and thinking that life finds a way, the birds are making the roofs that protect the houses of human society "go soft" and "melt." An evolutionarily less idiotic species is knocking down the ridiculously flimsy human society and about to take its place. 

The girl struggles to find the bigger perspective of time and space she longs for. She's eight. That's understandable. But for the reader, watching her struggle to take in breaths second by second against the backdrop of hundreds of millions of years since life came into the picture, our perspective tells us that the girl's species is probably boned. We can respect the hell out of the girl and admire her plucky determination to keep life going for herself and her brother, but the species clock for humanity in "Blackbirds" is running out. 

 

I'm 90% sure the title isn't ironic: "The Pleasure of a Working Life" by Michael Deagler" (O.Henry Awards 2025)

It's a good idea in general to be on the lookout for irony when you're dealing with a title as triumphant-sounding as Michael Deagler's "The Pleasure of a Working Life." One good reason to be wary is that's exactly often how good literature works. You think you're going to get a paean to working-class life, and maybe the story does dangle some distractions at you to get you to think that's really what it's about, but really, it's about how capital takes advantage of this very idealization of working life in order to extract maximum value from labor without paying a fair wage in return. I was especially on guard for this because "capital takes advantage of labor" seems like the more likely political stance a story in a literary fiction anthology would take. 

But I think that actually, the opposite is happening. I think the story is using the instinctive wariness of irony among its readers, coupled with a number of characters who are skeptical about the value of a working life, to throw the reader off. We are expecting another takedown of capital, but really, the story is, without offering any real opinion on the battle between capital and labor, simply reaffirming an old belief in the value of work.

The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker

An occupation is given for almost every character in "Pleasure." Rather than being dehumanizing, reducing people to the work they do, this has a humanizing effect. Nearly everyone in the story gets to demonstrate at least some level of individuality, and the means by which they do it is primarily through work. Here are some of the people, and the work they do:

-Gary Monihan, the main character, who delivers mail until bad health forces him to run the small post office in Kilntown, PA. Gary could be seen as alienated labor. He never really liked carrying mail, and he always wanted to do something else, like write.

-Chuck Feeney, Gary's friend who is higher up in the post office, and who tries to advise Gary on how to be politically savvy. 

-Gary's pair of malcontent employees at the Kilntown post office, Marla and Alondra. Alondra complains more, but Marla outdoes Alondra in terms of malfeasance, as she eventually gets caught trying to pull off a worker's comp scheme.

-Adman Jeremy Krukowski, who fashions himself a wheeler-dealer but who seems mostly to be bad at his job. He wears loud suits. He imagines he's an old-time business man, making secret deals in smoke-filled rooms, but he is mostly just failing, and his wife has noticed. John Candy would have played him in a movie, if John Candy had ever wanted to make the jump from comedy to tragi-comedy. 

-Gary's wife, Claire, who keeps books for a screw and bolt manufacturer, along with their daughter Caitlain, who has a degree in communications and their son, Colin, who works in medical software along with his significant other. 

-Unnamed construction workers Gary sees through his window as they work on a ditch. 

-The nuns Mary Elizabeth and Agnes Marie, with whom Gary makes jokes. 

-Two unnamed postal employees, one of whom seems to really love his job.

"Pleasure" acknowledges that work is work

One of the red herrings the story throws at readers that might make them think this is actually critical of the idealization of work comes when Gary looks out the window of the Kilntown post office. (Even the name of the tiny town where Gary works gets its name from the kind of work that was once done there.) He sees construction workers. He imagines some ill-informed people thinking that it might be nice to work outside on a day like today, and he extrapolates to something he also heard when he was carrying the mail:

For thirty years, people had said to Gary, "At least you’re getting exercise," even as he stood before them in all his heaviness, growing wider by the season. It was a hot day for early May, with the sort of heat that a person walking in and out of buildings might mistake for beautiful weather. Anyone who had to dig a ditch would never mistake a hot day for anything other than what it was.

I've heard similar complaints from people I knew who worked outdoors. Everyone sees them outside on a sunny, sixty-eight-degree day and thinks, oh, I wish I had your job, but they don't notice when it's a hundred and muggy or when it's four below. People do have a tendency to imagine jobs are better than they are, especially when they're jobs they don't themselves do. Everyone envies teachers being off in the summer, but anyone who thinks this is unfair is welcome to go become a teacher if they want, and yet few do. Jeremy the adman think Gary's life as postmaster seems pretty good, because Gary has enough time to sit and read books, but Jeremy wasn't there all those years when Gary was slogging from one house to the next, slowly getting bad hips. Jeremy comments on how it would be great to slow down like Gary does, but does he? No, he prefers to keep on keeping on with his get-rich-quick schemes that don't pan out.

 

"Pleasure" doesn't ignore the cold and hot days. It doesn't overly glamorize work. Its characters go to their jobs with debilitating medical conditions, like lupus, a herniated disc, and diabetes. They struggle with seeing the meaning in all of it. They feel alienated, because they can easily imagine things they'd rather be doing. Gary acknowledges that there are seasons in life, and some of them, like when you've got young kids and you're struggling with work and family, are the hard part of life, and there's just no getting around it being hard.

"Pleasure" manages to avoid both extremes of work as either paradise or purgatory. 

But work still has value, and it might even be allowable to enjoy it

In spite of the very real challenges of work, "Pleasure" still holds out hope that a working life can be a pleasure without irony. It shows us a number of ways people deal with the hardships of a working life, all of which I'm sure we have all seen examples of in real life, and all of which, on a given day, I'm sure I've done to some extent. There is the complainer in Alondra, who never meets with a work condition she can't kvetch about. There's the scammer Marla, who gets tired of seeing her cousin make what looks like easy money, and decides to try to make some of her own. There's the dreamer Jeremy Krukowski, who thinks the key to making working life succeed is to have the right connections, leading to the right golden opportunity. There's even the "I love my job" guy, shredding the postcards at the end, and the woman with him, who seems to enjoy the social aspects of work, along with her frequent smoke breaks. 

Then there's the main character, Gary. Gary was a guy who slogged ahead, in spite of not wanting to, and near the end of his career, while his old, broken-down body is struggling to shovel snow out of the parking lot, he chastises himself for not having picked one of the other strategies: 

He had been a fool to think there would be an early departure, a special dispensation that would excuse him from his work, his real work, before they had gotten everything they needed from his body. He ws only--had only ever been--a set of arms and feet, a back to lift and haul. A shoveler. A carrier like his father. A smarter man would have played his hand better. Cut corners, made a fuss, found a scam. He'd lacked the imagination for that. 

This is a nearly Marxist way of viewing his labor. He's been a schmuck, used by callous, cynical capital, who saw him only as an expendable bag of bones to be exploited until there was no more value to be squeezed from him. Against such a view of labor, it's natural to think it's okay to pull off a worker's comp scam, or just to have been as underproductive as he could get away with, complaining and taking smoke breaks as often as possible. 

Community and solidarity

But Gary's father, who had also been a mail carrier and who originally got Gary his job, had an entirely different way of looking at work. His father, on the last day he carried mail, put a letter in the mailbox of every customer he had served. The letter was all about how his job had at times been difficult, but "the people on his mail route were a source of fulfillment." Gary's father had considered being among these people to be "the pleasure of (his) working life." 

There are two senses the story gives us in which work may not be utterly futile. By far, the biggest is the way works makes us part of the community we serve. When we ring a register, dig a ditch, or build software, we become part of the lives of the people our labor serves. Gary learned about the letter his father wrote when one of his father's former customers gave it to Gary at his father's funeral. Gary is later astonished at how meaningful it is to the family of a woman he once delivered mail to that he went to her wake. "He delivered mail to Mom for ten years!" the son announces. When the adman dies, Gary cannot understand why his wife thinks he should go to the funeral. He wonders why anyone would care that he sold stamps to the dead guy, but his wife thinks it might matter to the family. Most of us never get to achieve immortality through fame or far-reaching deeds, so the closest we get is in the links we make in the work we do every day. If we repaired a driveway so well it'll still be in good shape three owners of the house from now, that's all most of us get. In Gary's case, he's been fortunate in that by delivering mail, he's impacted a wide number of people in a small way every day. His work has an effect in ways he can't quite see, down to even the (presumably unemployed) homeless people who sleep in the warmth of the post office he now heads. 

Work binds employee to customer, but it also binds one employee to another. When Gary is out struggling to clear the sidewalk, he hears the "sympathetic scrape" of a shovel from the McDonald's parking lot as another, much younger worker with his whole working life ahead of him struggles through the same task. Through work communities are brought together, but also there is a universal solidarity of working people that is made stronger. Work sucks, but it sucks for the guy next to you in the same way it sucks for you, and so by working, you join a family of people worldwide who are trying to get from one day to the next. 

I don't think we HAVE to come to an especially rosy picture of work by the end. We don't have to be the "just happy to be here" guy at the end of the story, the one who drives us all crazy to be around in our jobs. It's understandable if we spend most of our working lives wishing we could be doing something else, if we regret the time not spent with family, the time not invested in doing activities that better our spirits. A college professor of mine once said that we are taught that there is dignity in work, but in reality, there is only dignity in labor. We don't have to abandon our critiques of capitalism as wage slavery, but neither should we shut out all possibility of finding some meaning in work. Gary, who spent much of his life wanting to be a writer, finally dedicates himself to reading during his easy postmaster job, and he finds that it, too, is work. He eventually gets better at it, as all people do at just about anything they stick with, but he seems to miss the point. The final lines of the story are of Gary having meant to sent his customers a letter like the one his father sent, but he forgot, and when he thought of it, the moment had passed. Gary's moment of finding something redeeming in his working life, some pleasure, has almost passed him by, too. 

Possible objections

I can see a reader with deep Marxist commitments, or possibly just one who really hates their job, finding fault with the story.  Gary's father was a boomer, and work paid back boomers much better than it did future generations. Gary's job is also a throwback, one of the few jobs that still provides a pension, that has little chance of a layoff, and which accommodated Gary when his health became poor. Most people don't have jobs that good anymore, and if they do, it's only because labor fought for those conditions and capital hasn't yet been able to wrest those benefits back yet. Work still often consists of the many being taken advantage of by the few. 

I don't think "Pleasure" totally avoids those issues, and to the extent it does, it's because it's dealing with work less as a philosophical and political issue than as a close-to-home issue nearly all of us have to face day to day, starting often from the moment we wake up. It's not looking at work primarily from a social perspective, from from an individual one, asking not how to make work better for most workers, but how to survive your job as you find it today. I don't think every story needs to examine every aspect of the themes it's working with in order to succeed. "Pleasure" is a good reminder that the thing most of us spend more time doing than anything else still has some possibilities for enjoyment.

Fear, power, and the fear of power: "That Girl" by Addie Citchens

When we first meet her, Theo is beneath an awning on a porch that almost acts like a cave in which she is hibernating. "Underneath the huge, old, rusty awning, it was three shades darker and ten degrees cooler than in the street." It's a place of retreat and safety from "the street," where dangers lurk. Theo is in her early teens, about to arrive at a point in life where she cannot hide from danger anymore. Some dangers, in the form of her mother, Jane, who occasionally hits her, have already come to her, although Jane's recent marriage to Roger has temporarily tamed Jane's violent streak. Still, Theo prefers places of quiet retreat, just as she feels more comfortable reading inside her own head, where words make sense, to reading out loud, where she has a stutter. 

Shirlee first appears on the street in front of her house, where Theo is spending the summer reading on the porch, and this is the moment when Theo realizes she is lonely and longs for some kind of connection to the world outside the cave of isolation. Whether Shirlee is--as Jane believes--herself one of those dangers of the street outside the cave, or if she merely brings knowledge of those dangers, she eventually comes into Theo's sanctuary on the porch, rather than tempting Theo to come outside. This is a pattern that will repeat itself. There are two ways to end the isolation of being in a room alone. One is to open the door and leave, the other is to open the door selectively to others so they can come in. Theo much prefers the second method, perhaps because it feels safer to her, but as any cyber security expert will tell you, leaving ports open in a firewall, while necessary in order to be able to do fun stuff like watch videos and chat with people, also leaves you vulnerable to threats. 

Theo experiments with various possible apertures to take her outside her cave of safety. There are books. Theo first reads an unnamed story "about England in the First World War" with Shirlee, finding, to her surprise, that she is no longer stuttering when reading in Shirlee's presence. Her first attempt at letting someone into her zone of safety seems to have helped her out of isolation. There are Roger's songs that he plays when he comes home, forming a diegetic soundtrack to the story. But the main doors she leaves open are literal ones for Shirlee to sneak into the house, first during the day when Jane is gone, and then later during the evening so they can do "secret, sweet stuff" with each other that one can only do at night. 

The second and third books are a book about murderers she selects to entertain Shirlee with and a romance novel she hopes to read when she is forced to go to Bible study. The book about murders is a good example of a door she leaves open into her life that brings both pleasure and fear, as she and Shirlee do, as expected, enjoy reading it together, but once she's read it, it leaves Theo worrying about murderers. One night, when she leaves the door open for Shirlee to sneak in, Theo worries that a murderer might sneak in first, showing she has realized the vulnerabilities that leaving portals open into your life entail.

She briefly imagines, along with Shirlee, taking the fight to the threat by hatching a plot to kill men who would otherwise do violence to women. Beyond the book, Shirlee has already learned about the threat from men when her principal molested her. Their plot involves luring men to let them into their cars, where they would then kill them, but Theo finds herself not up to breaking down the doors into the lives of others. When she thinks of carrying out the plan, she trembles with "fear, and power, and the fear of power." 

Shirlee comments more than once that Theo is a "scary ass" (meaning scaredy-cat) or a "scary Mary," because Shirlee is much less afraid of breaking doors down to go get what she wants. When they go to the house of an older boy to get pot in exchange for sexual favors, Shirlee walks in without fear, while Theo can't even wait for Shirlee to reappear from the back and has to leave the house, locking herself out in the process, and then stumbling back home where she barely manages to let herself back into safety. Theo is curious enough to let others in selectively, but she also knows her mind enough to know when a new adventure is too much for her. 

Icarus doesn't fall but he does get the door to his room taken off

The threat of Jane is kept at bay for most of the first two-thirds of the story, because she is too busy being happy with Roger to take much note of Theo. We will later realize that Jane, helped out by tattling from older cousin Keita, has half-suspected that Theo was running around with Shirlee, including the suspicion that Theo was a "bulldagger" or "dyke," which seems to upset Jane more because of how it would appear to the church-going crowd than anything. Jane breaks into Theo's room when Shirlee is there, and after Shirlee runs away, she attacks Theo with an extension cord. Theo curses herself and Shirlee for getting greedy and bringing Shirlee over too soon, but the worst effect of them flying too close to the sun isn't the bruises Theo gets. It's that Jane has Roger take off the door to her room. Now Theo has no ability to control who enters her quiet inner space. She has no quiet inner space left, no interior life. It's all laid bare to everyone. It's the personal space equivalent of being completely hacked, where the hackers now have access to all your information.

Worse for Theo, the hackers, in this case Jane, have shared that information with everyone. Everywhere Theo goes now, from her aunt's day school for people with developmental issues to Bible studies, people already know why Jane has concocted a strict summer schedule for Theo to keep her out of trouble. 

Lacking any ability to keep others out of places in her life she doesn't want them, Theo is reduced to a space somewhere between fatalism--wondering if she's condemned to hell or if some people just have to live out hell on Earth--and impotent fantasy, promising herself that she will run away when she is sixteen or have her mother put into a nursing home when Jane is sixty. She has one opportunity to run out of a literal door at Bible study, but she declines, and instead return to class, holding her hands over her lower abdomen in a way that leaves Brother Dobbs guessing what the gesture means. Making Brother Dobbs unsure if she has bowel troubles or menstrual cramps is the closest she has to masking her interior life at this point.

Is Theo closer to making a step forward by the end?

One could read the ending as another form of Theo's fatalism. The two girls, who have been a rare portal into happiness for one another, are not going to be able to be together, and that's that and life sucks. Theo shouts her pet name for Shirlee into the darkness, but Leelee is gone. 

But maybe Theo has gone through a transformation, one that might help her prepare for life with some kind of self-fulfillment. She has realized that the spirit resides "between the skin and the muscle," and while an "invisible razor" has been cutting her spirit loose, Theo feels this as a bit of a liberation, because "her skin had been so tight that it had been smothering her spirit." In other words, something about the ordeal has freed her spirit. When Shirlee comes to the house at night one last time, Theo herself goes out the door to meet her, not even taking a minute to put shoes on. This is a significant step for her, as it signals a movement from passivity to actively claiming what she wants. Moreover, the final sentence of the story has Theo calling after her friend, but this time, in her head. She has reestablished her ability to have an interior life separate from that which everyone can see. She's going to need the ability to keep her private thoughts private if she's going to survive long enough to get out of the house. 

This ability to keep thoughts within herself has allowed her to reclaim the phrase "that girl," which is the title of the story, from Jane. Jane has used it as a curse, "that girl" who is threatening to corrupt her baby. But Theo uses the phrase to recall the good that Leelee brought to her: "No one would ever cup Theo as tenderly as that girl had." This isn't the power to bring retribution on all would-be evil-doers, perhaps, but it is power of a sort that might help Theo survive adolescence. 

Gonna be, gonna be golden (arrow): "Arrow" by Gina Chung (2025 O.Henry Awards)

One of the good things about blogging on American contemporary short stories for a while now is that hopefully, I've gotten better at it. One of the downsides is that there are some topics that come up again and again, and after a while, it feels hard to say something you haven't already said before. So it is with "Arrow" by Gina Chung, the most noteworthy characteristic of which might be the second-person narrator. This is hardly a novelty in American literature anymore, but it's still less used than first person or third-person limited, so when it shows up, it does still stand out. 

I used to not like it, because it felt, not gimmicky, but overly writerly. It wasn't until I wrote a story using second person myself that I realized that far from being a stodgy and difficult form to maintain, it is actually very natural, almost as natural as "I" is. When I learned Tigrinya--which now seems so long ago I can't believe it was actually part of this lifetime--I was surprised to learn that as different as the language is from English in so many ways, it shared the use of the indefinite "you" in speech. Much as we might say, "To get to Cleveland from Canton, you have to go up 77," even if we don't mean that the actual person we are addressing has to do this, Tigrinya often does the same thing. This means to me that using it is probably part of humanity's inherited grammatical deep structure. It's a very natural way to speak, so much that English teachers for generations have been struggling to get kids to write "One does not simply walk into Mordor" rather than "You don't just walk into Mordor." "You" just feels right to us when we're talking about a generic person other than us. It's colloquially very common, so when it gets transferred over to a story, it gives it a lot of the natural feel that a spoken word story has over a highly literary one. 

Second person "you" narratives feel to me like they more easily maintain momentum. "Arrow" by Gina Chung was certainly no exception. 

Symbolism!!

Other than the narrative choice, the next thing that stands out the most reading "Arrow" is the symbol of the arrow itself. We're already well into the story of the main character "you" getting pregnant at 35, not knowing who the father is, and not being sure what you should do as you're such a mess you can barely take care of yourself, when the arrow shows up. It gets referenced when we read about your hookup with a tattoo artist, the third of your three trysts that give you one-in-three odds of knowing who the father is. You met the tattoo guy at a cheesy bar, where the two of you played darts. (More arrows! See, I pay attention when I read! 

"You" tell the tattoo artist about the only tat you ever wanted, which is a "slim arrow pointing down the length of (her) forearm." You don't explain what it really means to him, but it has to do with how you wanted to escape your mother and Southern California. It means two things to "you." You recall learning about how sharks die if they don't keep moving, so you also kept moving, working hard to get good grades and earn money for scholarships so you could leave. So in that sense, the arrow just represents something moving. But then "you" also associate the arrow with fear: "You thought of your fear as a golden arrow that pointed outward from the dark surrounding your mother's house, a beam that led you away...toward a future where you were no one's daughter, where the only dreams and desires you had to follow were your own." 

Fear of what? Presumably, of not escaping your mother and Southern California. Your golden arrow is both a symbol of the need to keep moving and also of fear. Turns out you have pretty good reasons to fear your mother. She's pretty tough. She hits. She belittles. She manipulates. She's like a lot of Korean mothers I've seen on Korean television shows or read about in books, and also like a few that I've known in person. There's some cultural reasons why Umma (pronounced Uh-mah, not Oo-mma like Uma Thurman) acted the way she did to you, but it was still a traumatic childhood for you. Even when you talk to your mother today, you end up on drinking binges. 

Even more symbolism!!

Once it arrives in the story, the arrow takes over as the gravitational force of the narrative. The narrator has two ideas of what the arrow means to "you," but more emerge, unasked for. When "your are alarmed by and resentful of the passage of time," this calls to mind Eddington's "arrow of time," which tells us that time only flows in one direction. This is the closing image of the story, when the gold arrow has been replaced by the golden shafts of lights coming into your apartment: "And as the sun climbs over the lip of the sky, and the two of you watch its ascent, gold filling the corners of your apartment, you begin to understand that there is only this moment, and then the next, and then the next, and then the next, and that the only thing to do is to keep on living." 

It's typical for a character's narrative arc to be completed in a way that the character wasn't expecting. The Wizard of Oz is one of the clearest examples of this, as all of the main characters find that the thing they set out to have was there all along. There's no place like home. In "Arrow," the unexpected arc is expressed through the shifting appearance of the central image. "You" thought the arrow was telling you to keep moving, to run like hell from home. But the golden arrow turns to golden shafts of light, reminiscent of the "warm, healing ball of divine light and energy" you try to imagine God as, that instead tell you to keep on living. 

If you wanted to go a little bit further, you could also extend the arrow's meaning to how, once we are all shot into the world, we are at the mercy of fortune, which is why "you" feel your connection to your mother is as much of an accident as anything else. The arrow is just uncertainty in general, then, which is natural for "you," given your upbringing. 

Foreshadowing!!

I'm just going to point out that "you" foreshadowed your own golden arrow tattoo on your forearm by cutting yourself with paper clips so you could feel something. That's it. I have no greater point than that. 

Look, this is a good story...

I have nothing really negative to say about this story. The symbol of the arrow comes in at just the right time and exerts just the right amount of influence over events. "You" are a believable and sympathetic character in your weakness. It's not too much weakness, and the explanations for your foibles don't sound like weak attempts to excuse bad behavior. When "you" lose the baby, I felt loss, even though I kind of thought that's where it was going. 

I'm often tough on Korean stories, because I think I know enough to be critical, but this one put in all the Korean touches in just the right places. I love juk, by the way. South Korea has a chain of restaurants that just serve juk (translated as porridge, although that never felt quite right to me). I think I went five times a week one autumn. 

...But I can't help reading it in the context of this cultural moment

Because absolutely nothing in America anymore can just be a thing in itself without it being a thing either claimed by right or left, conservatives are really into fitness. In a recent New York Times discussion of this phenomenon, Jessica Grose quipped that compared to conservatives, who are all about going to the gym and eating well and cutting alcohol out of their lives, liberals come off as "TikTok activists with five shades of autism, panic attacks and a Ring light." Conservatives have latched onto wellness because, among other reasons (some of which are very good ones), they feel that a message of taking control of your own life and taking responsibility for your own health will play well politically to people who are tired of being shamed for ableism or being forced to watch the Oppression Olympics. 

Conservatives of this stripe would read this story and shake their heads, saying look, here's what fetishizing your traumas instead of working to overcome them, along with decades of feminism and free sex have gotten you: a woman totally unable to live her life responsibly or make good choices. I'm just glad that "you" didn't take anti-depressants in this story, or it would have been a perfect conservative strawman all queued up for them. 

I think the "you" of the story is sympathetic and not overly indulgent of herself and her traumas. I think your drinking and dropping out of law school and questionable sexual choices are all understandable, but in this particular moment, when conservatives are being especially hard on women in their thirties and forties who aren't married and don't have kids and are still struggling to get their lives in order, it's a little bit tougher to appreciate the story as "your" own private life story and not as part of a social drama that's going on. Which might be the whole point of conservative rhetoric: to deny the existence of personal stories by turning them all into public and political ones. It's a perverse application of Kant's categorical imperative by making every individual's life journey a question of what the world would be like if we all lived in that way. "Arrow" could be seen, then, as an answer to that kind of thinking, one that defiantly defends a woman's right to pick her own errant way through life. 

I'll just say that society sometimes fixes flaws by overcorrecting. If we've gone too far in one direction, being too indulgent of ourselves as a reaction to traumas such that we have infantilized ourselves, the movement among conservatives is likely soon to go too far in another. It will eventually spark its own backlash. If so, we may one day in the near future be looking back with nostalgia to when it was okay to write stories about deeply flawed female characters using their freedom to make bad choices. 

By that time, I assume I'll have forgotten all about what happened in the summer of 2025 that made me choose the title for this post that I did.