"Sitting" by H. E. Francis

You can find this story here:
http://www.amazon.com/Sudden-Fiction-American-Short-Short-Stories/dp/0879052651/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1243402825&sr=8-6

So much was encompassed in this story in only a page and a half. Not a single word seemed unnecessary; everything was taut, focused, pared down to its essence. As a writer who leans naturally towards long synonym-filled sentences of descriptive prose, this writing style struck me as powerful in its tacitness, and as something I would like to try in my own writing.

It also was a story that left me with many questions and an overall feeling of ambiguity. I felt like the sitting people were supposed to symbolize something, but I could not grasp what it was. The people are described as just sitting there, staring, indifferent. They do not say a word throughout the entire story. They sit through sun and rain; when the police take them away, they are back in the morning. There is a creepy, other-wordly quality about them – you never see them do essential human things like eat, sleep, or communicate. By the end, it seems the man who lives there simply resigns himself to their sitting on his front step.

The ending was powerful for me – it gave me a clear visual image, like something out of a movie, of a camera drawing back over hundreds of houses, with anonymous people sitting on the front steps of all of them. However, again, I felt like there was a touch more meaning to this image that was just beyond my grasp – that if I only knew a bit more about the sitting people and what they meant, I would be able to unlock a deeper understanding of the whole story. Perhaps that is part of the writer’s intent: if you are not exactly sure what the sitting people represent, you can apply them to all sorts of different things happening in your life, as varied from a stubborn problem that won’t go away, to a resilient truth that won’t let you escape it. This story also showed me that it is possible for the reader to enjoy and relate to a story without even wholly understanding it; as a writer, I don’t always have to explain everything to death.

"Twirler" by Jane Martin

You can read this story anthologized here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=eEY0wIVuYdIC&pg=PA37&lpg=PA37&dq=twirler+by+jane+martin&source=bl&ots=j0T6y4OHLN&sig=n2_Vm1rHyh_tu4VAAYH1jRuRY6A&hl=en&ei=WQ4bSvyLBI-ctgO0_-zWCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5#PPA37,M1

Martin’s story struck me because she managed to cram such a great deal of emotion, action, and exposition into such a short space. I was also interested to see how Martin used the dramatic convention of a monologue to create an entire story.

At the beginning, the tone seems very innocent – the young woman describes how when she was six her mother made her a baton by sawing off a broom handle. While I do not have experience baton twirling (and, I am guessing, neither does the majority of the story’s readers) Martin drew me into the story immediately with her description of the homemade baton. It brought to mind the many homemade Halloween outfits, theater costumes, and doll-house accessories of my own childhood. However, as the story progresses, Martin slowly and subtly darkens the mood, until we suddenly come to realize that twirling is not just a fun hobby for this girl. Martin builds this epiphany through the character’s statements: first, she describes the “prejudice” twirlers face, then mentions how with a baton you can “draw on the sky,” and eventually says twirling is the “throwing up of yourself to God.”

Still, it comes as a shock when, on the final page, she describes the “God throwers” gathering for a religious-type ceremony with razor-laced batons, and the twirlers purposefully cutting themselves as an offering to God. Because of the story’s structure as a monologue, I felt an odd combination of being one with the character and yet also being separate from her – like I had been drawn into her psyche, and yet was also watching her from a distance. By the end, my heart was racing and I felt a bit sick to my stomach. The scene of the “God throwers” was so vivid that I couldn’t help but picture it in striking detail, for example the image of the red blood on the white snow. For me, “good” stories are ones that strike me in this unexplainable, visceral way – the stories I “feel in my gut” – and this was definitely one of them.