Page 18 - Gears and Ears October 2014

Gears and Ears

Journal of the Rotary Club of Lake BuenaVista
Page 18
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Bright Shards of Someplace Else by Monica McFawn

Bright Shards of Someplace Else is Monica McFawn’s first collection of
short stories, and it’s already won this year’s Flannery O’Connor Award for
Short Fiction. Perhaps it was her idiosyncratic voice, or her flair for
distinctive characters that the judges recognized. Or maybe it was her
empathetic power. Eitherway, McFawn has talent. In these 11 stories she
manages to range from fantastic to satiric to poignant.

The first piece, “Out of the Mouths of Babes,” is about Grace, a loopy
nanny whose new charge is a 9-year-old boy with eczema. She listens to
the mother’s description with a touch of weary cynicism: “He was a young
rash, an articulate and bratty rash, a high-maintenance and oh-so-special
rash.” Grace skips the “awkward joviality” of “the first one-on-one
discussion” and hits the liquor cabinet.

But this boy is special. Before long he is on the phone, negotiating
Grace’s cellphone overcharges down, handling her gambling debt, her
legal troubles and her feud with her sister with a disconcerting skill. The
boy seems to “have

been born foreseeing all the complications and all theways out,” Grace muses. But she surrenders to his
power and the result is an eerie journey for the reader. . .

In a second story devoted to a horse, McFawn describes Snippet, an 11-year-old pony rehabbed by the
two female founders of Heart’s Journey, an “equine rescue nonprofit.” Known as the “Painting Pony,” he
was “trained to lift a brush in his mouth, dip it into a bucket of paint, and press it to a large sheet of paper.
Then he broke his leg.”

As Snippet hangs from a sling in the barn aisle, his front leg in a cast, his owners and vets consider his
fate. Is it time for Snippet to cross the “Rainbow Bridge ... animal rescuer parlance for the interfaith zone
where dead animals go, the sphere where old, unsteady horses are restored to an eternal youth?” One of
the women, Marti, squeezes her eyes shut and watches the flashes of light: “They were bright shards of
someplace else, she always thought as a kid, evidence of another world peeping through.”

Those brilliant flashes are echoed in McFawn’s final story. “The Chautauqua Sessions,” brings us a last
moment of shimmering grace, a masterpiece of emotional acuity. The story tracks a washed-up lyricist who
has reunited with his more successful rock buddy for a chance to refresh his musical life, only to face the
possibility of being upstaged by his druggie son. He can’t write without accidentally quoting his son’s
words. “It’s as if his lovely phrases have colonized my mind and pushed everything out,” he says.

Embedded in these tales of ordinary people — a new employee forced to fire an incompetent coworker at
Journey’s End Memorials, a company which makes “videos of deceased loved ones to play at funerals;” an
actor on his way home after a performance full of improvisations; a mathematical theoretician working for a
company that sells butterflies to be released at weddings and other events — are carefully observed
human details and momentous surprises. Like the ceremonial butterflies, these characters are all “centers
of possibilities, small little suns whose linear rays represented every possible flight, every downward dive
their life cycle-end might take.” - Source: NPR Reviews