February 5 - "Loving the Dead"

“Loving the Dead”
by Ronald F. Currie, Jr.
New Sudden Fiction (2007)

* * * * * (Excellent) Realistic

As summer fades to fall, the narrator allows himself to hate once again. This hate is not directed toward the living, but instead, the dead. The narrator hates his grandfather and grandmother for the hardships they endured to raise and love their children, and eventual grandchildren.

This is the type of story that I normally don’t understand. The kind of story where you must read beyond the literal, find meaning in the spaces between the lines. Only, this is a story – a feeling – I recognize, share. Those vague spaces made clear.

What I enjoyed most was how Currie plays around with his commas, listing feelings in staccato bursts – giving the narrator a distinct, memorable voice.

“The flesh of her face has collapsed, and her eyes are huge, black, bottomless.”

“My older brother, six, towheaded, bespectacled, buries his face in my grandfather’s lap.”

“And everyone is frozen there in their limp, feathered seventies hair, their powder blue shirts and butterfly collars, their thick glasses, their horrifying floral prints, their bad skin, their bad teeth, their shared grief and their tiny private miseries, so varied and yet so sickeningly alike – the same mistakes, the same laments – and all of it is captured, frozen, preserved, because someone has actually brought a camera to this place.”

At first the structure appears awkward and unwieldy, but once you catch the rhythm – the beat of the heart, the soul of the speaker – it’s easy to fall in love with the prose.