January 23 - "A History of Everything, Including You"

“A History of Everything, Including You”
by Jenny Hollowell
New Sudden Fiction (2007)

* * * * * (Excellent) Realistic

The title of the story says it all: this is a history of everything. From the spark of creation until the narrator’s last flickering moments with the love of her life, this story examines the world around us.

These three pages of perfection blew me away. For an author’s first published story, this is pretty impressive. What makes this story sing are its sentences. Each sentence has a rhythm – a styling – that makes it both unique and absolutely necessary to the overall picture being created. In clumsier hands this very well could have turned out to be one boring list after another. Instead, each word has been thoughtfully – artfully – placed, packing each sentence with the power that makes this story so remarkable. These two paragraphs are excellent examples of Hollowell’s prose styling:

“Life evolved or was created. Cells trembled and divided and gasped and found dry land. Soon they grew legs and fins and hands and antennae and mouths and ears and wings and eyes – eyes that opened wide to take all of it in: the creeping, growing, soaring, swimming, crawling, stampeding universe. Eyes opened and closed and opened again; we called it blinking.”

“Above us shone a star that we called the Sun and we called the ground the Earth. So we named everything, including ourselves. We were man and woman, and when we got lonely we figured out a way to make more of us. We called it sex and most people enjoyed it.”

This will be a hard story to top for my favorite of the year. I can’t find anything wrong with it at all. I mean, it covers everything, including the theoretical me, and does so without a single misplaced word.