Tag: Rick Bass

300 short stories:: story 181

story: “The Blue Tree”

author: Rick Bass

year: 2014-ish

where: sofa and sleepy

note: This story encapsulates the impermanence of things, things like youth, places, and moments, but also–the pleasure of reading a short story. I’m reading and rereading Rick Bass this week while pondering the destruction of Joshua Tree National Park and other parks throughout the US, caused by human hubris and malice.

a line: “He savors it, knowing it won’t always be this way. But it is now. More so than he could ever have imagined.”

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300 short stories:: story 113

story: How She Remembers It 

author: Rick Bass

year: 2006

where: Muscat airport

note: father and daughter story

a line: “And it was enough, was more than enough, to have that pink cotton candy, and to be driving on, and to simply imagine, rather than really remember, what it would have been like, riding the Ferris Wheel around and around, with the whole carnival to themselves.”

300 short stories:: story 112

story: The Lives of Rocks  

author: Rick Bass

year: 2006

where: Zanzibar, overlooking the Indian ocean and drinking Coke Light from a glass bottle

note: This story masters a feeling of loneliness so profoundly as to kill it simultaneously, and connect us deeply with the sensitive and intelligent protagonist, unwell yet alive in her snowy mountain house, calling out for the–her–children in the valley. It is difficult to pick one quote. This story says so much about the persistent fight of hope and hopelessness present when you write–and live.

a line: “She continued to send messages, stories, and drawings, as well as gems and crystals and fossils–sending several out in the same day, staggered over different departure times–and in some of her drawings, as her loneliness grew, she would make little watercolor sketches of the three of them sitting around a table loaded with food, as they had at Thanksgiving, with gleaming candelabra casting a shining light upon a roast turkey, a wild goose, and all other manner of game upon their plates; and in the tiny rolled-up paintings there would be wreaths hanging on the walls, images indicating the future, Christmas, rather than the past, Thanksgiving.”

300 short stories:: story 111

story: Pagans  

author: Rick Bass

year: 2006

where: islands

note: I might have ended up doing some needless research on diving bells…

a line: “Even now, Richard thinks they missed each other by a hairs-breadth, that some sort of fate was deflected–though how or why or what, he cannot say. He thinks it might have been one of the closest misses in the history of the world.”

300 short stories:: story 110

story: Her First Elk 

author: Rick Bass

year: 2003

where: work, Saadiyat, between meetings

note: I did not expect to like this story as much as I did.

a line: “And once they had the elk overturned, Ralph emasculated it with his skinning knife, cutting off the ponderous genitals and tossing them farther into the field with no self-consciousness; it was merely the work that needed doing.”

300 short stories:: story 108

story: In Ruth’s Country

author: Rick Bass

year: 1994

where: highline, walking and reading

note: In The Theory of Light and Matter (2008), a short story collection I found in South Korea, Andrew Porter has a story called Departure about a young guy who wants to date an Amish girl. I think reading this story along with Bass’ is quite interesting. Alas, Bass is a king of allegory.

a line: “I thought because she liked the gin-and-tonics, and the river wading, and chasing cows, Ruth would change. Convert.’”