This is yet another installment in my ongoing and idiosyncratic effort to curate decent indie, DRM-free, (did we mention decent?) ebooks. Previously, I’ve recommended ebooks by Jiri Kajane, Laura Ellen Scott, and Matt Bell. Here’s another: Charactered Pieces, by Caleb J. Ross. It’s a chapbook of seven short stories, available as an ebook from Smashwords for $2.99.
Let’s pay a brief visit to each story:
For openers, we have the title story. “Charactered pieces” is a euphemism that Lori uses to move defective product at a jewelry store. Lori herself could be described as a charactered piece. She carries the leg of her fetus-in-fetu sister protruding from her stomach (think Southpark’s “Conjoined Fetus Lady” episode). In the background, we hear the grating voice of her mother. “She knows enough of Christianity to distort it.” Once, she was flawless, but a shotgun exploded in her face while she was on the set of a beer commercial. Although I’m not sure why, it seems somehow important that Lori has named her sister Monica.
Like Lori and her mother, the stories which follow could be described as charactered pieces, off by a quarter of a degree when measured against our straight-edged conventions. Then again, the best our straight-edged conventions ever gave us was the story-telling equivalent of a plastic injection molding assembly line, so why not crack the mold and let bits leak out in unexpected ways?
“My Family”s Rule” – that no one reveal what they want for their birthday – falls by the wayside after the mother deserts the family for a man with two cars. But on the father’s 40th birthday, the boys give their dad an unexpected treat, front row tickets to the demolition of the local hospital where generations of the family have been born. Himself a demolition man, the father regales the sons with tales of toppled buildings while they watch the hospital come down. But afterwards, the father makes a tearful admission: he witnessed something everyone else missed.
“An Optimist is the Human Personification of Spring” is my personal favourite – a narrative interspersed with fortune cookies. Alex works a shit job in a Chinese restaurant, but can”t afford to quit because he has to prove he”s employed so he can continue seeing his son. One of the reasons I liked this story is that it reminded me of time I spent at the local Family Court. There were only two kinds of men at Family Court: complete assholes, or men made to look like complete assholes. Alex falls into the latter category, a nice guy, but utterly hapless. The restaurant has run out of siu pak choi and the manager orders him to run out and get some more from the local grocery store. The store has been robbed and the owner beaten. The police order Alex away from the scene. Frustrated and humiliated, Alex pulls the keys from the ambulance ignition and throws them into the snow. Without spoiling the ending, let me say only that it would have been in Alex’s interest if he had left the keys in the ambulance.
“The Camel of Morocco” is a grotesque story about Abel, a contractor whose incompetence may have caused the collapse of a mosque, killing members of 21 families. While working there, he learned of a custom that involved milking camels and mixing the milk with their blood. Abel isn’t in the desert, of course; he’s in suburbia where he finds himself at a zoo with a dead camel and a sharp blade. Yum.
With “The Camp” Ross confirms parental abandonment as a recurrent theme in his stories. Here, the abandonment is compounded by a son’s death, a presumed dorm-room suicide, given the puzzling note he left behind and the coat hangar in the throat. Naturally, the son’s college bills the mother for the cost of the coat hanger.
“Refill” continues the dark, slightly “off” humour with the story of Bob or Bill, an office drone who’s run out of antidepressants. Ross is dead on as he enumerates all the ways Bob or Bill converts what ought to be a positive situation into further validation of his depression. This culminates in the observation that when he tried laughing to see what it felt like, “It hurt my chest a little.”
Finally, we have “A Chinese Gemini”, a drunken Vegas hookup that follows a visit to The Bodies exhibit. This story is a nice bookend to the opening story. In “Charactered Pieces”, the characters preoccupied themselves with covering over their imperfections. Here, everything is on display in a kind of hollow morbid honesty.
Taken together, these seven stories offer a sharp view of “charactered pieces”. Call them white trash, if you like. Accord them the same value you might assign to any other unwanted commodity or defective product. Or recast them as something more, as Lori does behind her jewelry counter. The chapbook leaves the reader teetering on an awkward fulcrum between a cheap sales trick and a compassionate way of seeing people. Maybe that’s where all good writing sits.