[Note: I read a lot of literary journals. When i find a really phenomenal short story in one of them, I do a short write-up of adoration here.]

This one, from the New England Review, is a night in the life of a woman stranded in a weird city where she knows no one, washing dishes for a lesbian restaurateur who finds her cute enough to forgive her always being late and stoned, living with a man she doesn’t particularly like, saving money to get the hell out of Providence with only the vaguest and most unrealistic plans of how to actually do that.

I almost didnt read past the first paragraph, with its long twisty comma-ridden sentences which felt like someone maybe trying a little too hard to be Literary. But “A Street Guide to Providence” (hereafter ASGTP) really is that well-written, that literary. Told in close-third person, the story gets inside of Nikki’s head while preserving enough objectivity that we see the flaws and warts that make her so compelling. And make her make so many stupid decisions.

Nikki has pulled up all her stakes and moved to Providence to be with a boy she’s in love with. Not long after her arrival, he disappears. Skips town without a word. So she’s stuck, unable to take charge of her own life because it’s easier for her to just float along.

One lovely feature of ASGTP is its refusal to wade too far into what Nikki’s running away from. At a party, she meets a mixed-race woman - “what her mother called an octoroon, such a horrible, nasty word, and this is the kind of filth Nikki has to purge herself of.” This slim scrap elegantly implies her repressive and small-minded family life, yet spares us the need to waste space spelling out every little thing that went wrong in her life - which tends to feel like an author apologizing for her/his creation.

In the end, Nikki’s actions, even the stupid ones, even the ones that fuck over the people who have been good to her, make sense. High on ecstasy, in the middle of a threeway with two people she just met, she finally sees that she has the strength to do what she needs to do in order to move on. To make her own way in life. And even if that means stealing the life savings of one of the few non-creepy characters in the story, we feel that Nikki has come to a place where she’s finally in charge of her own life.

Moving in ways I can’t even explain. Landscape, story, main character all astonishing, beautiful, elemental. Cinematic artistry all the more powerful for being so subtle.

===========================
http://unmistakenchild.com/
===========================

Hello everyone… I am the opening act in the blog-fiction game “Consequences,” a sort of “Exquisite Corpse” game where an awesome writer writes a 250-word fragment and then hands it off to another awesome writer, and so on… See below for the complete rules and participating writers, pulled together by the steady curatorial hand of Wah-Ming Chang. The theme is “Abandoned Landscapes.” And here we go…

==============================

Abandoned Landscapes

Round One, Chapter One

I’d tried the trick a ton of times before, with generally solid results. Try it sometime: stumble out of the restaurant or bar, long after midnight and right before last call, so drunk you can’t hold more than one thing in your head at a time, and find a car with unlocked doors. Get in the back seat and shut your eyes. Half the time you’ll have a warm place to sleep and wake up with the sun harsh in your eyes. The other half of the time you’ll get a ride home when the driver, generally also drunk, arrives. They’ll be mad, and then they’ll get into it. The mysterious drunk man; the late-night mission. Worst worst worst case scenario they’ll threaten to call the cops and you’ll have to get out and find another car. Anyway I was due for something dreadful, after a couple dozen or hundred times of pulling this prank.

Birds fighting woke me up in a field of cinder blocks, surrounded by a suburb that could be post-Soviet or post-apocalypse. Sagging brick buildings. A long scorched school or hospital. Graffitid slogans from horror movies. Wind throbbing down from a lake or bay or river. Little glimpses of last night: two sturdy frat types shouting at me from the front seat, then conferring, then giggling. Landscape scrolling past for probably hours. My head hitting a tuft of soft dead grass; a door slamming; howls out windows as the car screamed off.

===============================

THE FULL LINE-UP, IN ORDER….

So exciting! Very concered about Lafayette. I want Michelle Forbes in every frame. And I’m tired of Sookie yelling at Bill and storming out.

Weirdly scary, compelling, depressing. Excellent cinematography, editing, pacing, ambient score. Wee bit heavy-handed. Very hot boy goes nuts; gets naked.

Wants to be more than a loud dumb macho action movie; is not. Only the Star Wars storytime scene feels alive. Unspecial dragon effects.

Last week, I had the opportunity to interview one of my favorite artists, Mary McDonnell. The complete text of that interview is up at the Galactica Sitrep:

http://galacticasitrep.blogspot.com/2009/06/heart-of-female-warrior-sitrep.html

Me: In popular culture, we always imagine that the robots will want to exterminate us. There’s a real fear that as soon as machines become intelligent, they become a threat to us. Why do you think people have that knee-jerk reaction?

Scandalous! I love how none of the men have any agency. And how anti-patriarchy it becomes, with its messianic look forward to Elizabeth.

“It was one of those nights, I quickly decided, when you slip into an alternate continuum, a city that looks exactly like the one where you live, except for the peculiar difference that it contains not one person you love or know or have even spoken to before. Nights like that, you go into a familiar bar and find that the staff has just been replaced; then you understand that your motive in going there was simply to see a familiar face, on a waitress or a bartender, whoever….”