Brett knows the routine by now as they arrive at Tuttle Park, gathering an assortment of balls, mitts, and a Frisbee out of the trunk, though odds are he has lugged them out here for nothing. He knows Charlie loves him, but that as an only child, his son craves the company of other kids. Brett may be able to extort ten minutes of dad time at the end when they’re already late for dinner, risking Holly’s ire for pushing the whole bed schedule further into the night. When they reach the entrance, Charlie is like a thoroughbred springing out of the gate at Arlington, as he races toward the massive wooden structure that draws him here. There is no playground like it: a cave, castle, fort, tunnel network and gauntlet all rolled into one. Its sprawling warren most resembles some manmade reef set down on the edge of a fi eld, small elusive creatures darting in and out. Charlie scales a hidden stairway and manages to join a group of chasing boys, tags along as seamlessly as a pickpocket slips through a crowd.
Brett drops the jumble of sports equipment next to one of the picnic tables. Tuttle Park has always vexed him because every view seems to be obstructed, and his six-year-old is always disappearing in its catacombs. It bothers Brett less than it used to, but he is still spooked by the myriad tragedies he runs across in the newspapers—people get killed on golf courses, disappear into sinkholes, perish in their own beds when a twin-engine Cessna plummets out of the sky. Especially with children, accidents seem to lurk everywhere and require a constant vigilance. Charlie’s wearing a purple sweatshirt that says Mischief University, and fl ashes of this insignia are the only way to follow his movements. Even so, amid all the hiding places, it would be easier to track a rare bird in the wild.
My writing tends to gravitate toward certain themes: misunderstanding, romantic discord, the struggles of being a parent, conflict with a community’s prevailing ethos, and the characters’ frequent sense of exclusion from an accepted place in society. I like fictional situations where people are placed under stress, often due to their own mistakes, so that they end up reacting in a pivotal and unforeseen manner.
So here you will find: a guy unwittingly drops a torrid love note in the church collection basket; a jealous husband finds a unique way of seeking revenge against a romantic rival during a Christmas nativity play; a character who runs an independent wake up call service has trouble getting a crucial call of his own; a message written on a dollar bill and released into circulation somehow finds its way into the right hands; a father who plans to miss his daughter’s birthday party seeks the counsel of a friend who specializes in the “perfect excuse,” a condo owner is unwillingly elected president of the association’s board with disastrous consequences, a beleaguered character finds refuge in the treehouse of a neighbor and becomes an unintended spy; a man who is mistaken for someone else decides to impersonate him following the clues in the conversation. It may be tragedy of a sort but only in a minor key, the parried slings and arrows of modern relationship.
I enjoy the stuff of ordinary life, which, through a sequence of escalating difficulties, suddenly becomes remarkable and strange. I like depictions of the world that attempt to balance minor tragedies with irony and an occasional touch of humor. Also, the writers I most admire pay attention to the sound and rhythm of words, take risks with language and metaphor. It’s wonderful when the great ones create a structure of imagery beneath the surface of a story that seems to integrate it in some mysterious way.
Much has been said about the capacity of fiction to generate empathy for other points of view and science appears to bear that out. In an era of increasing tribalism, few traits are more needed than the one which compels us to hear the other voice, feel the unusual or contradictory experience. We need not agree with different perceptions but must be able to get to the root of them before any sort of understanding can take place.
By its very nature, fiction also helps cultivate and preserve language as the primary means of apprehending the world. While the proliferation of movies and videos and photographs and emojis are a marvelous addition to our lives, only language enables the recipient to bring his or her full imagination to the encounter. A novel or collection of stories uniquely engages a reader to construct a world right along with the author, to infuse what’s been created with a unique filter, to make the abstract visible in one’s own mind. If a “picture is worth a thousand words,” it cannot do quite the same thing as those words. In our rush to compress, to abbreviate, to go faster, to live more and more, this might be something we should not allow ourselves to forget.
~Tom Benz
THOMAS BENZ graduated with a B.A. in English from the University of Notre Dame. He recently won the 2017 Serena McDonald Kennedy Award for a short story collection called “Home and Castle.” The book is to be published by Snake Nation Press in the fall. In the last several years, he has had fifteen stories (…read more)