“The Present of Concern”
by Deb Olin Unferth
Minor Robberies (2007)
* * * * (Great) Realistic
A woman goes to visit her newly engaged friend and must fight the urge to steal something of importance from her apparently ungrateful and newly capitalistic friend.
It is not unnatural – right? – to feel malicious toward those happier than you, towards those ungrateful for what they have. Unferth does a terrific job exploring this relationship between people’s differing, opposite situations. I can picture the spice rack in question. I feel both the desire to fill the tiny glass bottles and to tear the rack from the wall. In just a couple of pages we don’t get to know much about the characters in the story, but we do understand how they feel, and to capture feelings is a much more difficult task for a writer.
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