It had been six months since Drew was laid off from his job as an analyst for Rimland Containers, and already the notion was growing that he could be stuck in that limbo for the long haul. His lingering resentment made it hard to keep up certain social pretenses. The sober habits of professionalism ingrained over the years—the six-thirty wake up, the unwrinkled shirt, and close shave had almost completely fallen by the wayside. It stood to reason that gym shoes and a worn flannel shirt would suffice when he didn’t expect to see anyone except a clerk at the pharmaceutical counter or a neighbor walking his Malamute. People cut him some slack in the beginning, gave him time to absorb the blow, imbued with the knowledge that catastrophe was often without fault, and, on occasion, wholly random.
But appearances mattered and empathy had a fleeting half-life. After a while, the initial support of Drew’s friends seemed to be morphing into an unspoken indictment. Some of his more distant acquaintances took their aloofness further and seemed to be calculating how long it would be before his and Zoe’s nest egg ran out. He’d gotten so that he could detect the faintest slights, though they were often so rapid and ethereal that he usually failed to note them in real time, only feeling their mild sting as the encounters unspooled later in recollection.
EXCERPT
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)