sheesh. i’m losing track. but that means i need to say something important about short stories. i love shorts, i really do. but they’re hard to write and few people read them anymore.
i have a couple of literary magazine subscriptions (TNQ and Grain), and i also try to read the five commonwealth prize stories on the short list and guess which one will win. i take short collections out at the library, too. it’s not often that i buy collections anymore, but that’s more a budget and space thing. i do keep up with the latest collections, but not as avidly as i once did. i don’t know why? it could be because i’ve got several long projects on the go and i’m reading novels and screenplays.
it’s always hard to point out a terrific short story because there are so many, but i thought i’d go with a canadian from Granta Magazine’s Canada edition (2017). Lisa Moore wrote “The Fjord of Eternity” and it’s a weird story about an insurance claims adjustor from Toronto who tracks down swindlers who jump off cruise ships:
The cruise-boat crowd that Trisha and Jimmy work have a mean age of seventy-two. Skin sucked back off their cheekbones like Saran Wrap, the women, smelling of emollients made from aborted lamb foetuses. The men have mostly taken up with younger women and are burning through their pensions before they have to hand over half of it in alimony to their first wives, whose wisdom they miss like a phantom limb.
Moore is great with images. We see Loveys as he got out with his guitar, his back aflame, giant wing flying up towards the heavens from his shoulders. Later, we see Loveys tend to his dying mother and, after her death, she appears to him, as follows.
Loveys’ dead mother appeared when he was trying to dry out and told him to keep on playing. That was what he’d been put on earth for, according to Mom Loveys.
She said of all of this without moving her lips. Loveys’ mom had appeared to him as if encased in a milky and semi-opaque envelope floating two feet off the ground without a stitch of clothes. What follows is a completely trippy description of Loveys’ mom as corporeal being that reminds me of Gloria Sawai’s old woman shrinking in the bath house in “The Day I Sat with Jesus on the Sundeck and a Wind Came Up and Blew My Kimono Open and He Saw My Breasts.”
And I am so down for it.
In this story, the MC Trisha takes a case of a missing rock star who jumped into the Atlantic at The Fjord of Eternity–who wouldn’t love a story with a final destination of The Fjord of Eternity? This is a rhetorical question. It’s a quest story, which I enjoy, and it doesn’t entirely make sense, which I also enjoy, and then it’s over.
Lisa Moore is an exceptional short story writer and I can’t figure out why she isn’t feted. I always buy her short collections when she publishes.