A merciful two-for-one: "Countdown" by Anthony Marra and "Just Another Family" by Lori Ostlund (O.Henry Anthology 2025)

There are two kinds of stories I feel I can mostly skip over when I'm blogging my way through one of the big short story anthologies. One is a story I think so bad, so undeserving of its place in one of those anthologies, that I just can't bring myself to look at it closely. Those aren't any fun to do. The other is a story that seems to me so obviously accessible to nearly any reader, there isn't much for me to do. If the point of me blogging is, for the most part, to help a bright and curious but non-literary-professional see things in a story they might not see for themselves, then a story that doesn't really present many difficulties for the non-professional is one where I can take the day off. 

That's the case for both "Countdown" and "Just Another Family" from the O.Henry 2025 Anthology. In the case of "Just Another Family," I've already dealt with it (or not dealt with it) before, because it was in last year's Best American Short Stories. It's a fun and funny story that pretty much anyone can read and enjoy, but it's also a little long for the kind of analysis I do here, plus I don't know that the analysis would add much.

For "Countdown," there might be some context to the story that isn't familiar to an American reader not familiar with life in modern Russia. However, I think most of that context can be inferred pretty easily, at least enough to understand the stakes of the story. It's very easy to find oneself sympathizing with the family trying to avoid getting pulled into Russia's immoral war with Ukraine, especially given that Alexei's brother sacrificed his own life for Alexei in another, earlier episode of Putin's adventurism in Chechnya. Alexei's many and familiar foibles add to our ability to empathize with the family. He's not a perfect person, and he has likely lived his life fully aware of how little he has justified his brother's sacrifice, but for that reason, he comes across as an underdog, and who can resist rooting for an underdog? Especially one in a beat-up car racing for the border? 

We probably tend to think (if we aren't repeating Putin's propaganda) of the victims in the war being primarily in Ukraine itself, but "Countdown" reminds us that there are plenty of victims in the aggressor country, too. American readers can perhaps see parallels from our own history of fighting a largely unjust war in Vietnam but still feeling sympathy for young American service members sent to fight there. 

I'll only offer two very quick observations, which are more questions I won't even bother to answer than they are analytical assertions. Feel free to answer these questions for yourself.

1. When I was in graduate school, I had a moment where I couldn't stand to read fiction anymore. On every page of every story, I felt like I could see tricks. Maybe film students learning about technique go through something similar where they can't just enjoy a movie as a normal viewer anymore, and it kills all the magic. Every time I saw a technique that felt "writerly" to me, the whole spell of the work was gone. I left grad school not wanting to read anymore, and it took me a few years go get over it. 

I'm mostly over that instinctive repulsion now, but there are still passages I read where I have a hard time staying under the spell of the suspension of disbelief. Here's one from "Countdown": Very early in the story Alexei and Sonya are sitting at the table talking about trying to get flights out of the country. "Sonya set her passport on the kitchen table. She'd been smelling the visa itself, which had the fresh, fibrous scent of a newly minted banknote." 

I recognize that this is good technique. Most of the story moves pretty fast, which is appropriate, because it mirrors how events moved fast early in the war and how quickly the family needs to make decisions in order to escape. This passage, then, has the effect of momentarily grounding the reader in the world through a slowed-down, tangible, five-senses observation. And because writing advice tells us that anyone can use sight or sound but real pros use taste, smell, and touch, it picks one of the cooler senses. Everything is right about it, but I felt that old, instinctive desire to keep the work at arm's length. This might explain what might be my own greatest flaw as a writer, because I tend to resist putting observations like this in my own work. I don't know how to alternate between movement and slowing down, because I myself so dislike slowing down as a reader. While there is nothing I can say to really critique a passage like this, because I know it's the "right" way to write, I do wonder, when I read it, if I've completely followed a wrong path in life with literature, because part of me is constitutionally not built for it.

2. I don't usually look up anything about writers themselves, because I think it's not relevant to examining the text of the story. For this story, though, I made an exception, because it made me wonder if Marra himself had a personal background in Russia. It doesn't appear to me that he does, although he has written about Russia and Chechnya before and once studied in "Eastern Europe." I'm sure he's done more than his fair share of research. Not just research, which has an end goal in mind, but study, which starts from a more open-ended perspective of wanting to discover truth. I write stories about Korea or Ethiopia, because I think I've studied enough to do them justice, and there's certainly no reason Marra couldn't do the same with Russia. 

But would a top literary journal like Zoetrope, and a top anthology like The Best Short Stories, allow a white male writer to publish stories about, say, Nigeria the way they allowed this story about Russia? Are there modern examples of a Conrad writing about Africa without added scrutiny in the way Marra writes about Russia? Isn't it at least as possible that Marra's outsider view differs in important ways from a native Russian such that the story would feel alien to a native as it is that an outsider writing about the DRoC would feel somehow odd to a native there? Do we allow white writers to write about Russia in ways we don't allow for with Latin America or Africa because most inhabitants of Russia are white, and our American liberal perspective tells us that color matters more than geopolitical or cultural complexity?

I'm certainly no expert on Russian affairs, but a few things struck me while reading "Countdown" (which, again, I liked very much and think of as an obvious "thumbs up") that felt slightly off. One was Alexei's penchant for taking his news from Reddit. I really had no idea if Reddit was popular in Russia. When I originally read it, I didn't know anything about Marra, so I thought, "Oh, that's interesting. Here's a writer of likely Russian origin telling me that Reddit was a big thing in pre-invasion Russia." But it turns out that Reddit wasn't really that big in Russia. VK is by far the most-used social media platform in Russia. But okay, maybe Alexei was very Western-leaning, and so he hung out on Reddit. Maybe he's an unusual Russian. I also wonder, though, whether Alexei should have been refreshing Instagram, which was blocked in Russia in March 2022, just a few weeks after the invasion. I don't know the exact time of the story, but it's not quite the very first days of the war, because we have a reference to "since the first days of the war." 

I'm not sure enough to call the inclusion of either of those sites exactly "wrong," but I guarantee that in the real world, Alexei would not have found flights to Pyongyang in 2022. The story has him finding "even flights to Pyongyang" booked. (I could be wrong that these are still the early days of the war, but it does seem that we are still in 2022 in this story. I think it might be late 2022, when mobilizations began. And if it isn't the early days, then there's no way Instagram is still working. Unless Alexei is cleverly using VPNs to access it, which we know he doesn't know how to do.) North Korea wasn't allowing any foreign flights into the country at this time. So you couldn't find "booked flights" to Pyongyang. You couldn't have found flights at all. 

Then there is the child, Masha, who repeats Alexei's cursing. This is a charming part of the story, and Masha's eventual cursing out of a car impatiently beeping at them presents a needed moment of defiance. Still, I can't help but wonder what the original Russian is when she repeats "Fucking, fucking fuck." There are times to present the dialogue in direct translation and times when it feels right to me to first present it in the original Russian, and this should have at least some reference in it to the original Russian. 

Again, this is a good, even a very good, story. I don't think any of these quibbles make it less so. But I do think it's quite possible that if a white, male writer did a similar story about a family in Sudan trying to escape the trials of war there, and there were a few small factual derivations from reality in it, it's possible there would be an outcry among some politically liberal readers in America. I think it's especially possible there would have been such an outcry if this story had come a few years ago, when being woke was safer. 

I don't think such a reaction is necessary or helpful in the case of this story, and I don't think it would have been necessary or helpful in the case of a story written by a white, male writer about China or India or Lesotho or Haiti, but I can imagine it happening for the latter cases much more than I can for Russia, and I 'm not sure the reason for this makes much sense. You can have stories written by insiders, like Maria Reva's amazing story "Letter of Apology," set in late-Soviet Ukraine, but you can also have a story written from the observations of a keen outsider who has done the work to learn from another part of the world than the one he comes from, as in the story with Marra. And if this is true of a politically complicated place like Russia, then it ought to be true of anywhere. 

Am I wrong? If so, am I wrong because it really would be wrong for a male, white writer from Nebraska to write about a family from Sudan, or am I wrong because if the story were good enough, there really wouldn't be any pushback, even if it contained a few minor errata? 

I guess you can't buy an epiphany: "Winner" by Ling Ma" (O.Henry 2025)

First, an update:

I said I might have to ditch blogging about contemporary short stories in my last post. That might still happen soon, but for now, I have a little bit of daylight and might as well keep going. I had already half-written this post anyway. 

Having been off of work for the past almost eight months provided me with an interesting perspective for reading "Winner" by Ling Ma, which I now launch into. 

Winners and losers

It's pretty common to speak of a capitalist society in terms of winners and losers. Those who really believe in the system tend to speak as though the winners--those who accumulate wealth--deserve to win and those who lose--the poor--deserve to lose. Critics of the system point out that there is a lot of contingency involved in who makes it and who doesn't. It could have gone a different way. Another word for "contingency" in this sense is "luck."

The unnamed narrator (N) in "Winner," a second-generation immigrant from an unnamed foreign country, knows she is lucky. She was struggling to survive in the system just like most of us, working late hours and coming home at night to eat, drink, and watch TV before passing out in her small apartment. Then she won $60 million in the Powerball. That's not Elon Musk money, but it is enough to never have to work again.

Immune...or maybe not

Common wisdom suggests that lottery winners often end up unhappy, although at least one article suggests that's not the case for most. According to widely accepted belief, which the story seems to at least partly accept when it warns of winners "falling into destitution," lottery winners are at profound risk of losing their moorings, making bad decisions, getting depressed, and blowing all their money in a short amount of time. Publicity surrounding the cases where this has happened may tend to make many people exaggerate the danger in a sort of availability heuristic. But even if the danger isn't as prevalent as many of us have been led to believe, the danger is there, and even if the average lottery winner doesn't blow all their money, there's still the question of what to do with your life now. Malaise can set in as winners struggle to figure it all out. 

N should be immune from the malaise. The tendency to blow money is American: “It is not choosing the ‘big’ things that is fundamentally American but the blind insistence on grandiosity despite the reality of circumstances. It’s not living beyond your means, it’s the unceasing, headless insistence on ‘the best,’ whatever that is.” But N, as a second-generation immigrant whose boss praised her because she's "no American," ought to be immune, right? She ought to be grounded in whatever traditional values she was raised with, the ones that make her work longer hours while slacking Americans dip out of work, right?

Sort of. N doesn't seem to have blown all her money. She thinks, while she, her husband, and her child drive around town on a Saturday, that they could be mistaken for a normal, middle-class family. Their home does have some extravagances in it, but they're extravagances that are accruing in value. She insists on buying toys for their child, but that's hardly going to bankrupt them. 

So N managed not to blow all her money, but she's also pretty clearly rudderless and unsure what to do with all her luck. That's why, when she finds the keys to her old apartment, she makes a totally unnecessary trip back to the building where she used to live.

                        This story got this song stuck in my head, so I'm paying it forward to you.

Normally, if keys are a symbol of anything, it would be of unlocking some clue that leads to enlightenment or resolves a difficulty. Finding a key should be the thing that immediately precedes the main character's epiphany, but in this case, it's the opposite. Finding the keys leads N to become more enmeshed in her confusion. It's significant that the keys are on a "daisy key chain." This could mean, of course, that it's a keychain in the shape of a daisy, but it also suggests the notion of the "daisy chain," when one thing after another is linked together. It suggests that as much as N's big moment of winning the lottery should have freed her from her troubles, she's still linked to the same things that were troubling her in the past, like her need for acceptance from her boss and, by extension, her parents. The keychain isn't a symbol of solving a puzzle; it's a symbol of staying stuck. 

This is one kind of daisy chain. Also, I think Daisy Chain would be a good name for a female professional wrestler.

Critic of the system...or maybe not

In N's pre-lottery days, she worked in an insurance brokerage company. She was miserable, working for another person whose origins were in the same country as N's parents. N's boss took advantage of this to shame N into working longer. N hated working there and was generally unhappy in life. She sees having won as having "narrowly escaped" her life. 

N is full of quips critiquing capitalism. There's the comment quoted above about Americans always wanting to choose the best of everything. (If that's true, why do so many people shop at Walmart?) Then N calls insurance brokerage "ugly and corrupt, like all things healthcare-related in the United States.” She notes with sadness the creeping gentrification of her old neighborhood. The old liquor store now has a mural on it of "animals punching each other in a rainbow boxing ring," surely a metaphor for the dog-eat-dog competition of capitalism and how it's covered over with glitz. She also notes that her old apartment isn't too far from her current one, a nod to how in America, the rich are sometimes a block away from the poor. 

This might make it seem like N is anti-capitalist, but she's not, at least not enough to really get away from it. She notes that money did do one good thing for her, which was to enable her to get fertility treatments that made her son a possibility. When her son is struggling for life in the NICU, the only thing N can think of as an enticement to her son to stay alive is that all her money will give him a nice life. She promises him a nice life through plastic, the same material the fake bushes in front of her old apartment are made of. N then follows this up by spoiling her son with toys. Her husband notes that they're "doing it wrong" by raising their son this way, but N only responds with a non-committal "I hear you." 

Escapee returns to the scene of the crime

N refers to herself as having "escaped" from her former life, and confesses that this makes her feel guilty somehow, although she knows that "being lucky isn't a crime." So why does she go back to the old apartment? Not just go back, but break in, using her old keys? She justifies it by saying you "can't trespass into what's familiar," but I don't think this is a sound legal defense. Being lucky might not be a crime, but breaking into an apartment is. It's the kind of risky behavior people engage in when they're deeply bored. 

There's something about N that makes her want to go back to her old life. She keeps going back to the old apartment, and while there, she's applying for work. It's something she and her therapist have cooked up, to get her back to "gainful employment" (whatever that is). She claims that going to the old apartment is the most "productive" (whatever that is) that she's been in a long time. Unsure what to do with herself, N resorts to nostrums of capitalism, seeking "gainfulness" and "productivity." 

It isn't just N, either. Her old boss, "Mr. B," has sold the apartment building for "a tidy sum," enough that he can now retire to the fancy old folks home not far away. But even though he seemingly hated working when he owned the place and did nothing but watch TV whenever tenants came to him with problems, he now keeps coming back to the building to tidy it up. He asks N, without any sense of the irony he is engaging in, what he's supposed to do with his retirement, watch TV all day? 

I'm sure we all know people who talk their whole lives about retirement, and then when they get there, they complain they're bored and go looking for something to do, often another job. I have to say, after eight months of being quasi-retired, I do not understand this. Not working for most of these last eight months has been everything I ever dreamed it would be. The only thing that's ruined it has been the need to look for work, which in many ways is more time-consuming than work is. (I have a pension, but it's not enough to live off of by itself for long. We've been slowly going through savings and trying to live thriftily, but at some point, I'm going to need a job.) People who get antsy in retirement actually make me angry. I do not understand it. With full and real retirement, I would: do volunteer work; workout; read; write; put more energy into this blog; fuck off and do nothing when I feel like it. I foresee zero existential crises from this lifestyle. But N and Mr. B both seem to not know what to do with themselves now that they have the gift of time, which is really the best thing money can buy.

N's dull-headed epiphany

N sort of finally cracks this revelation near the end. "I think the real trick is to convert money into time," she declares, as though this is any kind of discovery. She ends the story by crawling into bed to take a nap, insisting that time is hers to waste if she wants. It appears that the closest thing she's had to a revelation is to stop feeling like she needs to "produce" or be "gainful." She can waste time if she wants to. In the words of her therapist, she can take up space, both in the temporal part of space-time as well as the spatial part. N worried there was something "disgusting" about this kind of sprawl, but her therapist assures N that she is "American," meaning it's her God-given right to take up as much space and time as she can afford to. Her spreading out beneath her sheets in the middle of the day is her taking up both space and time. 

Sometimes, stories present us with clear and strong epiphanies. The character thought one thing, then went through some kind of experience that made them think another, and now they've changed for good. Other stories present us with a very minor epiphany, one that more closely mirrors the kinds of changes people go through in life. Then there are stories that present us with false epiphanies or refused epiphanies, where the protagonist either is offered a chance to change and decides not to or the protagonist thinks they've made a change for the good, but we, the reader, can see that they're actually going in the wrong direction. There's probably an argument to be made that N has either made a minor change or that she's actually experience an anti-epiphany, a faulty realization that will actually do her harm. Life has come to her, presenting her with a valid point in the same way her husband has presented her with a valid point about raising their child, and N has politely ignored the advice in favor of her own mistaken beliefs. N's therapist has helped her into her bad realization, although maybe the therapist can be forgiven, because the bad and somewhat stereotypical therapist advice--to take up space--is partly a result of N not being honest during her sessions.

N misses both what's good and bad about capitalism

As a lottery winner, N's story is really capitalism in microcosm. All winners in capitalism have some luck; N just knows it. Her awareness of her luck, in addition to her status as a quasi-outsider as a result of her feeling uncomfortable being an American, should make her able to provide a unique perspective on the contradictions of capitalism. But N is too busy being swallowed up by those contradictions. 

On the one hand, in spite of her proclamations about the disgrace of American health care, she's unable to see what's bad about the system she lives in. She doesn't notice the bushes at her old apartment are fake until she gets up close, and she doesn't realize her old apartment she's crashing into is now the model home that nobody lives in until Mr. B catches her in the apartment one day. She literally can't tell fake from real. 

On the other hand, she also misses some of what's good about capitalism, and yes, in spite of all the terrible contradictions and inequalities of capitalism, there are some positives. Her skepticism about healthcare ignores all the hardworking nurses and doctors in the NICU who help save her son when he is born. N sees these doctors and nurses quickly moving from one patient to the next, rather than spending all of their time with her because she is rich, but she doesn't note the egalitarianism of the NICU, the way the caregivers treat every patient the same. 

"Winner" seems on the surface to offer a critique of capitalism, but looking deeper, as N does with the bushes, one can see that this isn't really where the story's headed, because its protagonist isn't capable of looking at it closely enough. There are some scattered observations about the lack of logic in the system, but nothing coherent and unifying. The story works better as a study of the psychology of the lucky winner. Whether destitute lottery winners are really as ubiquitous as believed, it's certainly true that capitalism's winners of all types, whether they won the lottery, inherited a building from their parents, or simply had enough things go right in life that they are finally able to retire in comfort, often act in ways that don't make a lot of sense. What we're really all chasing in the rat race should be time, but we need to develop ourselves such that know what to do with it when we get it.  

A 1960s existentialist play smashed into a 2025 short story: "The Spit of Him" by Thomas Korsgaard (O.Henry Anthology 2025)

I had two thoughts during the first half of reading "The Spit of Him" by Thomas Korsgaard. First, what I thought I was reading was something of a mashup between Death of a Salesman and Waiting for Godot. I thought I was going to read about a salesman wandering from house to house in search of someone who might take pity upon him and buy what he was hawking. This was, in my imagination, going to be some kind of metaphor for the human condition, in which we wander in a cold rain looking in vain for someone to empathize with us. My guess, until Kevin meets the Madsen family, was that he would continue wandering and never finding anyone to connect with, and that this would all reflect his early reflection that "There were so many people you would never meet. Most, in fact."

The second thought I had was that the style was very much similar to Raymond Carver or other highly stripped-down, bare-prose-style writers, the kinds that introduction to fiction writing books or many graduate writing programs of the 2000s favored. Most of the language is describing only what Kevin sees, what he says, what he does, and what others say and do to him. There are only a small number of trips into Kevin's head, and even those are short-lived, although they do get a lot done in terms of filling in gaps.

Surprises everywhere

While the second impression held throughout my reading of "The Spit of Him," the first one didn't. It turned out that Kevin's decision to head to the next town over to sell Christmas sticker in spite of warnings from his old man wasn't about the journey, it was about the destination. This is true even though Kevin was unaware of what the Madsens meant to his family, and seemingly remained unaware even after his meeting with them. 

The whole story gets turned on its head when Kevin shows up at the Madsens. In most short stories that appear in an anthology like O.Henry or Best American Short Stories, there are plenty of surprises, but not really what you'd call a "twist." Twists--the girl in the boat was the escaped convict, the apparent victim was actually the thief, the main character was dead the whole time--are for movies or plays, not literary short stories. Meg Wolitzer's introduction to Best American Short Stories in 2017 warned against the use of "unearned surprise for a surprise's sake" in short stories, and it seems most literary stories heed this warning.

But the twist in "Spit" is completely natural, possibly because the story itself feels more like reading the script of a play than a short story. There are actually two surprises revealed during Kevin's interaction with the Madsens, at least for me. I was thinking Kevin was in his twenties, perhaps, and possibly a person with special needs who had been tasked by an organization responsible for helping him with going out and selling the stickers. I did not realize this was a nine-year-old kid, and I was surprised when that fact came out. The second surprise, of course, is that Kevin's father used to live in the town he warned his son to stay away from but left when he hit and killed the child of the town's candle-making big employers, the Madsens, in an automobile accident. Henrik Madsen, the father, seems pretty convinced that Kevin's father was drunk when the accident happened, although if that's true, one wonders how Kevin's father has seemingly been present for Kevin's whole life instead of in prison. 

So it turns out the story isn't an existentialist tale of wandering, but instead about this interaction between the child of the guy who killed a young man and the parents of the dead child. In addition to being the kind of pared-down prose fiction primers like, it also uses dialogue in the way that those same introductory texts call for. The mother and father don't agree with one another about how to deal with Kevin, and every word they say contradicts each other. They are also talking past Kevin the whole time. 

Symbols and theme

Just because the prose and the settings are plain doesn't mean there isn't a lot going on to think about. All of the three houses Kevin visits have changes of lighting. The first one has lights on until he knocks, at which point the lights go off. The second house's lights are off, until the owner approaches Kevin from behind and, seemingly knowing who he is, gets angry and goes in the house, turning the lights on as he does. 

The Madsen house ought to be the very symbol of light. They make candles, a business that they say employs half of the town. And, in fact, when he rings the doorbell a second time, the lights come on, and mother Birgitte answers. She's a little stand-offish, but seeing a child out in the cold rain badly dressed for it, she takes pity on him and decides to buy his stickers. It seems that his journey to find a sympathetic soul is over after only three houses. But when Henrik arrives at the door, he recognizes the boy because he's "the very spit of" his father, and that leads to a longer interaction. 

Right after Kevin mentions Thailand, where his father's girlfriend's son lives, and adds that he has never been there, one of the candles on the chest of drawers in the Madsen's hall goes out. Birgitte re-lights it. 

One of the few entries we have into Kevin's head gives us the line about there being more people in the world you don't know than you don't. The mention of Thailand as a place Kevin has never gone, and likely will never go to, adds to this original line. There are also more places in the world you'll never see than there are places you will. Because of this unavoidable lack of experience, none of us really receives much light or knowledge in our lifetimes. We're all kind of provincial, tied only the the small number of experiences even the most cosmopolitan of us can ever have. Kevin is an extreme example of that kind of insularity, because he's never even been as far before as this one little town not far from his own. His father isn't exactly going to open up the world to him, either. One house he's been to turns its lights off when he approaches, literally refusing to share its knowledge with him. The second turns its lights on only after it has told him to leave. The third turns its lights on, and the mother, at least, makes an effort to keep them on when they threaten to go out. But it's only the sputtering light of a candle, and even Birgitte's care can't make it much more light than that. 

At one point, Kevin literally attempts to allow in more light. When Henrik says that Kevin looks like his father, Kevin points out that he has his mother's eyes, and he "widens them so that both Henrik and Birgitte could see." But Henrik ignores this and points out Kevin's nose, which is exactly like his father's. Kevin has traveled in search of bettering himself, but the world seems not to want to answer when he knocks. The scant light from a candle that the one sympathetic person he finds lights for him is scarcely enough to help him to see with. 

In addition to light that is unavailable to him to see with, there are also signs he cannot decipher. He sees a sign at the first home offering appointments to shop in the store attached to the home, but no phone number. The Madsen home offers a candle showroom, but Kevin, although he knows about the candles, is not brought in to see them. Finally, there is graffiti-scratch on the bus stop he is waiting at near the end of the story when he is ready to go home. The graffiti sort of offers several versions on it of microfiction, tiny stories told only by the smallest of hints. "torkild lund is a joke" is one. A "for a good time call" phone number and subsequent commentary on the number is another. These microfictional stories further emphasize the theme of how many people there are in the world, each with their own story, and yet we will never be able to enter in to those stories.

Even the few openings we have into Kevin's interiority are kind of like microfictions themselves. We get a paragraph about his father, spitting his phlegm into the sink. We get the heartbreaking look at his party box under his bed and his hope that he'll be able to add the Madsens to his list of invitees. Last, we get him remembering his father's commentary on the moon in Thailand, and how by comparison, the moon in Denmark where Kevin lives is small and pale. Again, this last little peak into Kevin's mind emphasizes how small his world is and how little chance he has for enlightenment living in it. 

Nod to the translator, Martin Aitken 

I don't speak Danish, but I've been a translator for most of my adult life. I know how hard it can be to get certain phrases translated well, especially when there's a play on words in the original. I don't know what the Danish original was for "Cow-hoof trimmer? Age's no beginner!" but I'm impressed by how it came out in English. 

It's not like anybody gave me a choice: "Sickled" by Jane Kalu (O.Henry Anthology 2025)

I once knew a co-worker who shared a gene with his wife that meant they had a one in four chance of passing along a very debilitating condition to their children. They found this out when their second daughter got it. That daughter died young, but the couple, believing in God's goodness, continued having children. They had one more without the disease and then finally one more who had it again. My co-worker poured all the love he had into that child, making huge alterations to their lives to try to make life less painful for their child with the disease while also keeping life semi-normal for their others. Nobody could say he neglected his duties as a father of a special needs kid, but people could (and I was aware of some who did) fault him for having a child with a one-in-four chance of getting the disease in the first place. I haven't heard from him in a while, since I abandoned Facebook about four years ago. His daughter would now be older than the age their first sick child was when she died, so I wonder if she is still with us. 

Do parents have a right to have children when they know there is a chance they'll pass on a painful condition to their child? If not, how great a chance must there be before they should refrain from having kids? Is one in four enough of a chance, as it is any time both parents are recessive carriers? How bad must the disease be for it to mean the parents should not have children, and how would you even measure that?

These are the questions I wanted the narrator of "Sickled" by Jane Kalu to interrogate. The ingredients are there. We have parents who knew they were both recessive carriers of sickle cell, who were told by a church that they shouldn't get married, so they went to a different, more extreme church, one that believed fervent prayer can fix anything, and got married there. They had one daughter without sickle cell anemia and then one with it. The story mostly takes place in the months soon after the daughter with the disease, Ije, finds out about her parents' choice. 

Instead of delving into the philosophical issues the story brings up, "Sickled" is more interested in how those months affected the psyche of the narrator, Ije's older sister Adamma. Adamma is narrating the story from sometime years after it happened, which was in Nigeria in 1994, not long after the military coup of General Sani Abacha. Adamma's family refers to Ije's worst outbreaks of sickle cell-related sickness as "crises," but the family itself is in a crisis. Mother has lost her government job because of the coup, and father seems unable to do anything besides go to church and pray for divine intervention rather than do something himself to improve his family's life directly. 

Ekwensu, an Igbo deity who represents chaos. Or, if it's easier, just translate it as "the devil." That seems to be how Adamma's family uses it when they compare Abacha to it.

Gap between narrator at time of narration and time of events of story

Having an older narrator look back on events from when they were much younger is a very time-tested technique to story telling. It has the advantage of allowing two different narrators, the one that the narrator once was and the one that the narrator now is with the benefit of hindsight and years of wisdom. "Sickled" makes use of this, invoking the "I know now" formula on more than one occasion. 

There is some confusion, though, between Adamma before and Adamma after, and to me, at least, it makes it so I'm not really sure what kind of psychological journey the narrator has been through and what kind of growth it's caused. When we first get a look into the younger Adamma's interior landscape, it seems like her attitude is distinct from that of her devout parents when it comes to the care of Ije: "I was the one who listened to what the doctor said, give her paracetamol when the fever starts, and put a cold cloth on her head...During those hospital visits, my father was often preoccupied with praying the crisis away, and my mother, well, she followed his lead." 

That seems to be the older Adamma thinking back on herself as the younger version, and while it doesn't necessarily paint the younger version as an outright skeptic about her parents' faith, it does show her to be more pragmatic, wanting to focus on concrete steps to take to help Ije rather than praying and hoping God will heal her. There seems to be a distinction here not between the older Adamma and her parents' faith, but the younger Adamma. It seems like even when she was sixteen, Adamma had a least a strong suspicion her parents didn't have the right approach to life. 

Again, when looking back, Adamma summarizes that "Our father, instead of getting a job, took on more duties in church, insisting that we needed God's intervention. He remained adamantly unemployed, despite my mother's failed attempts at finding work..." This sounds like we are getting the attitudes of the younger Adamma, and that the younger Adamma is cynical about her father's devout prayers when he could have helped his family situation by just getting a job. If this were the older narrator looking back, we would expect to get a hint, like "Looking back on it now," which the narrator does inject in other parts of the narrative. Absent some clue, we assume that the clues about attitudes are those of the younger version of Adamma, and early on, we have these two clues that she is somewhat skeptical about her father's religious approach. We also see her viewing her parents as a unified front representing this approach.

There is more evidence in the first half of the story that the younger Adamma is not part of the unified front her parents present. She has pieced together the story of her parents having children against medical advice sooner than Ije has, by listening to the whispers of nurses about "how irresponsible our parents were." 

But then there are contradictions

The younger Adamma isn't always opposed to her parents beliefs, though. "I, on the other hand, did not disagree with our mother. I believed that there was a reason God allowed her illness," the narrator claims, clearly speaking here of her younger self. It's possible that younger Adamma's reasons for believing God gave Ije this disease are different from those of her parents. They believe God allowed it so they could pray and allow God to show his greatness by healing her. Adamma, continually worn out by worry about her sister, thinks more that if nothing else, the disease keeps Ije's wild spirit in check. So perhaps this one passage isn't enough to show that Adamma sides with her parents.

In two other passages, though, Adamma seems far more in line with her parents' philosophy. When Ije asks if her suffering is her fault, Adamma "wanted to tell her that it was. That if only she followed the rules, that could keep her from having a crisis."  Later, when recalling her New Year's resolution from early 1994, Adamma says, "Hers was to do whatever she wanted, sickness or not; mine was to bring her closer to God. I believed in the undefeatable power of God. I believed in miracles. I believed that God could heal her if only she believed." This just doesn't sound like the version of her that was introduced at the beginning of the story, the one focused more on practical steps to take than on prayer. 

I think the story itself has some technical mistakes in it. It has tried to take advantage of the ability to have two versions of the narrator--an older, wiser one and a younger, naive one--but failed to make the distinction clear in parts. Yes, it's possible to be too pedantic about what a story "should" do or about accepted craft, and yes, other world traditions might part from Western standards, but to me, the lack of clarity about which version of Adamma is thinking what, or possibly the simple mistake of having two different versions of a character running into each other, makes it hard for me to see what the narrator's journey has been. Even if I ascribe the snarkier thoughts to the older narrator and the more pious ones to the younger, I'm still left without a clear link of how we got from one to the other. When Ije has a crisis near the end of the story brought on by pregnancy, she (the older version, probably) seems to suddenly understand her father: "It must have all been from fear. The desperate need to exert his power over the disease, his insistence on keeping himself detached from our world in order to remain resident in one that relieved him of the consequences of his actions. It was all fear. All of it." 

From whence cometh this understanding of her father? We see the mother in vulnerable situations that allow us to view her as a complex character of her own, but we never see this for the father. He's a pretty dull, stock character throughout, droning on about faith over fear. There's no moment when the narrator is given sight that would allow her understanding that he acted out of fear. If the older version of her is trying to forgive her father in some way, I fail to see where the step in her development came. 

This is also true of how the narrator sees the relationship between her parents. Earlier in the story, she is resigned to her mother "going along" with the father. Later, she is frustrated, wanting to know "how could she let him humiliate her" and wishing her mother would do something to defy him. This desire for defiance shows, in the first place, that again, the younger Adamma wasn't really on board with the faith of the family (in contradiction of some passages), and also it demonstrates a desire for the mother to defy the father that violates her wish that people would "follow the rules." 

You could say that this is all brilliant narration, because people are psychologically complicated and contradictory, but when a narrative is going to show contradiction, it ought to have a level of separation between the narrative and the narrator. We ought to be able to see that we have a contradictory character, unless we have some kind of obvious narrative experiment going on. This story doesn't seem to accomplish the needed distinction between complex narrator/character and clear (even if it takes some work to make it clear) narration. It allows conflation of the thoughts of the earlier Adamma as a character and the later as a narrator, and even when the voices are clear, the development from one to the other isn't.  

Epicurus

The best part of this story is the unexpected introduction of Epicurean philosophy into it. We often think of Epicurus as having espoused raw hedonism, although that wasn't really his point. Ije, at one point, seems to think that's what Epicurean philosophy is, because she has open a book about Epicurus and she quotes "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die," which is actually from the Bible (Ecclesiastes), not Epicurus. (Which makes it ironic that Adamma tells her sister to read the Bible rather than Epicurus.) Ije's introduction to Epicurus is third hand: she is getting it from Bube, the boy next door who gets her pregnant, who got it from his philosopher parents, who presumably read the original. So it's certainly possible Ije has a bastardized version of Epicurus, one that more or less reflects her own predilections. 

However, when we hear Bube's exposition of Epicurus, he doesn't seem to have it that wrong. He says that "Death was not the main event, living was. If you live your life constantly afraid of dying, you have allowed death to win twice." That's maybe not a complete bastardization of Epicurus when he wrote: "Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not." 

Epicurus is an apt philosophy for Ije, who has limited control over her disease. Bube encourages her to find small pleasures where she can in order to minimize her suffering. It seems like Bube's philosophy he inherited from his parents is a sensible alternative to the radical faith Adamma has inherited from hers. For a moment, it appears that the story is making a clever reinterpretation of Epicurus in a setting that Epicurus himself would never have imagined. 

Only when the real crisis comes, and Bube learns that he has impregnated Ije, putting her in the hospital, he runs. That sure seems like an indictment of the philosophy he espoused. (Ad hominem attacks are allowed in fiction.) 

Two versions of philosophy have been discarded, one denying the present in favor of eternity (extreme Christian faith) and one denying eternity in favor of the present (whatever version of Epicureanism Bube has passed on). So what are Ije and Adamma left with? 

The mother ends her life. Her alternative she takes is despair. Ije, who has been fascinated throughout the story with an owl in the backyard, an owl the rest of her family saw as a harbinger of demonic forces, perhaps sees a different alternative. The last time Ije and Adamma see the owl, it has two eggs it is nesting upon. Adamma's reaction to the eggs is to exclaim, "Poor Daddy!" because this means the owl he has tried to pray away is about to lead to even more owls. The rejection of daddy's world view allows the girls to find their one moment of unity, holding hands just before they go in to find their mother dead. That moment represents the brief moment of life we have before death takes us. That's the moment we all live in. Perhaps the girls haven't rejected Epicurus, but their misunderstanding of Epicurus, and what they've done at the end is independently arrive at a conclusion more akin to that of the original. 

The shot still lands even if it's not a knockout

I didn't find this story to have quite the power punch it might have had. I wish it had spent more time focusing on the issue Adamma raises when she dreams of what it would have been like to live in a family with fewer problems: "It's not like anybody gave me a choice." With its irresponsible parents clinging to faith, the story could have asked a lot more direct questions about the meaning of life in a world where we all kind of get dealt a hand going in that we wouldn't have chosen for ourselves. It didn't, which left me a little disappointed. I was also struggling to enter into the narrator's mind because I couldn't trace what her journey actually was. But just because the story wasn't a knockout doesn't meant it had no impact. It was still an inventive blending of ideas and worlds into something worth thinking about. 

Maybe this story could be a little bit sweeter, but I'm not sure how: "City Girl" by Alice Hoffman (O.Henry 2025 Anthology)

The easiest critical posts for me to write about contemporary American short stories concern stories where a lay reader might be confused what makes the story in question worth reading. I write for the intelligent, curious lay reader, so these stories feed into what I'm trying to do perfectly. I find a thread worth pulling on that might not occur to most readers, and I pull on it. The hardest stories to post about are the ones where I either dislike them so much I don't see anything worth further appreciation (although once in a while, it can be instructive to write about why I don't think the story is worth this kind of consideration), or stories that are so obviously good and easy to appreciate, any reader can see why they're in a "best of" collection. 

"City Girl" by Alice Hoffman is in the latter category. Although its subject matter, concerning a teenage girl who decides to drop out of school and get high with a drug addict in her rich father's New York condo, is pretty normal for an anthology like the O.Henry, the sweet and --dare I say--happy ending isn't. This is more the kind of story you'd find in the Coolest American Short Stories series than in O.Henry or Best American Short Stories. Normally, in a high-end literary short story collection, I'd expect the girl to continue wandering toward her own destruction in a quasi-nihilist way. Instead, all the bad things that happen in "City Girl" only serve to treat the reader to the dopamine-producing kindness of the girl's father-in-law, Gig. 

There's not much to add to that, but I will note one characteristic about the story that might not be readily apparent. There's a diversity of opinions among writers about how much of a character's motivation to show. I think most writers agree that's it's possible to either show too little or too much, but I feel that with a majority of stories in contemporary short story collections, there's a tendency to agree with Aatif Rashid and err on the side of showing too little rather than too much:

"And so, writers end up clarifying their characters' desires with such precision that their narratives becomes perfect structures of cause and effect—this character left her husband because her mother never left her abusive father. This character is withdrawn because his mother never told him she loved him. This character is depressed because her brother drowned when she was young. It's Freud reduced to teleology, and it cheapens the complex reality of human experience."

Iago from Othello is often held up as an exemplar of a character without a fully explained motivation. I Googled Iago, and I assume this must be who they're talking about. 

That's kind of where the narrator/protagonist of "City Girl" begins. She confesses at the beginning to not listening to her father's warnings. She gives only surface motivations for her recklessness: "We loved the city, even though it was dangerous," or "I only felt alive when I was dancing" as an explanation for going to clubs while underage. Both of these only take us one level into motivation, and they invite further questions, the answers to which we are denied. Why do the father and daughter love the city in spite of it being dangerous? Why does she only feel alive when dancing? 

Most of the girl's true motivations for the first half of the story can be summed up in her own profession of ignorance: "I don't know what I was looking for." However, there is a point, soon after she brings Cooper, an older drug addict, into her family's home, when she has what in therapy would be called a breakthrough. She has just gotten done letting Cooper take her virginity, and she is cleaning her blood off the couch, when she looks at herself in the mirror and says that "all at once I knew I had done this because I could never be a dancer." She's too tall to go as far in dancing as she wants, and since she's denied what she really wants, she's decided to go ahead and ruin herself.

Once we get this confession, others follow. "My own real father hadn't wanted me; my mother loved her baby boys." We get a full backstory of a father who abandoned her and a mother who was distant from her. When her father-in-law rescues her and puts her in a detox clinic, she meets with therapists, and there, a whole torrent of motivation comes gushing out after she tells the doctor she thought she saw a little girl beside the pool she jumped into in despair:

"My doctor said it was me, me before Gig, when my mother would leave me alone when she went to work and I sat in one place, terrified, until she came home. And then one day I walked out the door, tired of being terrified. I decided I wouldn't be a child anymore, I would do as I pleased. I would step out of the world and make my own way."

"City Girl" has come up with a different way of resolving the too much motivation/too little motivation dilemma. It began the story by withholding it, and by the end of the story, it was brimming over with it. This parallels the way the story begins with a character who is mired in nihilistic indifference to her own suffering, then begins, little by little, to be open to the possibility of happiness.

Narrative theory might prefer that stories refuse to give too much motivation. We can have hints about why Iago hates Othello, but ultimately, Iago should hate Othello because he just does. And that's all fine for plays, and yes, in some ways, it is reflective of how the human psyche is incomprehensibly complex. But for human beings living our lives, we do kind of need to understand our own motivations if we're ever going to find any level of happiness. "City Girl" begins in narrative purity and ultimately defects to human kindness, and in the process, it refuses to continue to kill its darlings and delivers us a teenage girl with hope for her future. I think most readers will approve of the rebellion.  

The pícara as parent: "Shotgun Calypso" by India Finch

(Personal update before launching into this: Obviously, my new job has slowed down my pace of posting here. I don't know yet if it will end my pace completely. I'm so tired right now it's hard to see how I'm going to keep pushing in posts, even delayed ones, but I've been doing this a long time and don't want it to just end yet. So I'll keep pushing forward slowly, even though everything below is probably fatigue-induced gibberish.)

The picaresque story is one of the great, ubiquitous forms of Western storytelling. In a picaresque story, there is a person (the pícaro, variously translated as "rascal" or "rogue" or something like that) who is typically at or near the bottom rung of the social ladder, cynically using the contradictions of society to survive. The pícaro doesn't worry overly much about right and wrong; he is pragmatic, and he thinks only of what works and what will help him to live another day. Using his wits to make his way in the world, the pícaro highlights society's absurdities by understanding it on a more fundamental level than those who are doing well do. Pícaros tend to move from one master or sponsor to another, and they wander somewhat in their quest to survive.

The picaresque novel originated in Spain, but there are a number of classic American examples. Huck Finn might be the both the best-known and the clearest example, but there are many more. What there aren't a lot of are picaresque novels with a female protagonist, which I guess would be called a pícara. Moll Flanders might be one, but it's the only one I can think of off the top of my head. 

"Shotgun Calypso" is kind of a picaresque story with a female pícara, only the pícara isn't the main character. (Even though the main character, like Huck Finn, doesn't like to wear shoes.) The story is narrated by Calypso, but the pícara in it is her mother, known only as "Ma." Her mother is cynical about using sex to get men to help her out financially. She may or may not feel some affection for the men she uses, but the affection is by the wayside. Ma is a survivor who uses the affection or just plain horniness of men to get what she needs, and she passes her knowledge of how to do this on to her kids. 

Judging Ma

It's possible to read the story and feel only contempt for Ma, because she is physically abusive and puts her children in danger by getting them close to a pervert, which is her latest boyfriend Lonnie. Lonnie and his wife apparently have some arrangement where he is allowed his dalliances with Ma, but only if his wife doesn't have to witness any of it. Ordinarily, Ma, Calypso and Calypso's younger sister Clio drive from Huntsville, Texas, to Houston and pick Lonnie up, but today, they stay at Lonnie's house, because his wife leaves for the weekend, so it's okay for them to be there. While in Lonnie's house, Lonnie tries to teach Calypso about how to perform fellatio by using his finger. 

So yeah, if a social worker were to read this story and if it were about a real family, Ma would lose her kids immediately, I'm willing to bet. But I don't think she's entirely bad. She's just what happens when a pícara tries to have kids. She's got nothing to pass on to them but the tricks whereby she has survived. (She literally calls the men she's with "tricks," which is what a sex worker calls her clients, but also what a pícaro plays to get by.) Calypso seems to understand that her mother's physical abuse is a limitation she has, but when she says of Ma that "she didn't mean anything by it," the phrase seems somehow more self-aware than when most abused people offer justifications for their abusers. Calypso isn't justifying; she's observing. Moreover, there is a bit of raw wisdom in Ma's advice to her kids that they should become lesbians, because then at least they'd have someone to perform cunnilingus on them, which is "half the battle." As an indirect kind of sex worker, Ma has to worry more about the pleasure of her tricks than her own, but she wants better for her kids.   

Because the pícara makes her living by taking advantage of falsities in society, Ma has a hard time passing on anything authentic to her children. She is invading Lonnie's wealthy neighborhood by bringing her kids and beat-up car into it, and there is a concern about how it all looks. Because there is so much concern about how things look, Ma finds it hard to separate appearance from reality. She doesn't want Calypso to act uncivilized in front of others so "people wouldn't call her an unfit mother." Similarly, white people make Ma nervous because she is "too busy thinking about what they're thinking" around them. The pícara is supposed to survive by taking advantage of the hypocrisy of those around her, but motherhood has taken Ma by surprise and forced her to become hypocritical herself. 

Yet there are moments when Ma transcends her transactional thinking, and those moments have to do with her genuine affection for her children. Calypso and Clio overhear Ma reminiscing about how she almost hooked up with the bass from Boyz II Men. The question comes up about whether this might not have led to the ultimate sugar daddy, but Ma doesn't regret it. Her reasoning, essentially, is that she'd have ended up with kids other than the ones she had. It's at this moment that Calypso realizes that her mother actually likes her and her sister. She knew they were loved, but not liked. There are a lot of kids with "better" parents who might never feel that. 

Boyz II Men, Girlz II Women

The day of the story, the girls head straight to the bathroom to start stealing small items from Lonnie and his wife while Ma and Lonnie start making out. The girls are obviously pros at it, but they get a little distracted and start putting on lipstick and makeup. Soon after, they put on the dresses that belong to Lonnie's wife. Once the dresses are on, the change is immediate. "So suddenly, we were women." 

The change isn't a good one, because it's a change from a kind of innocence to shocking awareness of the danger of being a sexual object. Changes in "Shotgun Calypso" are never good. Ma changes from one type of person to another when Lonnie is around, as do the family's rules and traditions. Although the girls are able to put the bathroom back to its "virgin" state after they "deflower" it, Calypso cannot go back to her innocence once Lonnie sees her in his wife's dress and puts his finger in her mouth. The scene in which the girls are forced to pretend they enjoy the trampoline Lonnie got them, a now inappropriate child's gift for these suddenly grown women, is a horrific dramatization of the trauma they suffered. 

Power

Calypso is given her name for the powerful nymph in The Odyssey who holds Homer against his will. Ma wanted to impart to her daughter the power that comes from using sex to control a man. "My birthright was women who trapped love and took it by force even when men cried." Ma tries to pass on the skill she has learned for survival, which is to find a man who will pay your rent when you're short. 

Calypso's family appreciates the ability to grab a man. They respect Miss Winnie from next door for still being able to pull a man at age seventy. They respect the ability for the power it gives, but it's not a power without costs. Odysseus fought to escape Calypso because he wanted to get back to his wife, whom he loved. Lonnie escapes from his wife to be with Ma. Any man Ma can pull is going to come with some downsides. Odysseuses are hard to find. 

The sister's name

There's an explanation for Calypso's name, but what about Clio? In Greek mythology, Clio is a muse, but not the muse of poetry to whom Homer prays. Clio is the muse of history. We can only guess at the significance of this name. Calypso tries and eventually succeeds, for a time, to forget that night, but then the memory comes back. The memory is tied to the night not only when Lonnie forced his finger into her mouth, but also when Calypso first let her sister have the shotgun seat in the front of the car. The redemption in the trauma for the girls is that they realized their value to one another. It's a moment that completes an arc for Calypso. She originally held onto the seat as her birthright as the older sister, but she eventually cedes it to Clio, because she and Clio formed a deep bond when they shared the trauma of bouncing on the symbol of their now-ended childhood together. The bond Calypso now shares with Clio is what allows her to hold on to the memory of the history of that night.