May 29, 2025

SHORT STORY REX May 2025

1 “The Horse Hand”, Zebulon House

Sometimes, in the course of one’s journeys, one stops by the side of the road to take a picture. I don’t know, to try and capture a moment or something. In this story, however, it’s our protagonist who gets captured, as curiosity gets the best of them via a vis a bizarre roadside sculpture “which I understood just as a hand of wood”. But the hand belongs to a three-hooved horse, and they ride off in search of the “fourthhoof” [sic, nospace, like that]. But who’s riding whom?

I hadn’t known that it was the Horse’s hand. I hadn’t known about the Horse. I mean, there are horses—and there are some, on Gifford Road—and then there are horses. And then there is the Horse. I often drove my car down Gifford Road, and I had known about the horses. Black, bay, dapple gray, fewspot, frame, roan, dun… I was interested in horses, and you knew that. You might have told me.

I love the unsettlement produced by the introductory framing device (dated ‘Huron County, Ohio, April 2027’), and the profusion of lexicons in play here, heradlry and mycology and lots more that surely went sailing straight over my head

2 “Circus Skills”, Seán Padraic Birnie

It was a bad year. The seas were on fire. I lost my job. My dad got ill. A minor injury to his groin had gone septic: it wasn’t looking good. And I was ill myself; everybody was ill.

There’s something extremely zeitgeist-y about the desperate staccato of the voice here, the nightmare logic of this narrator and his search for gainful employment. “I needed to show willing, my case worker told me”—and as this phrase ‘show willing’ did not previously form a part of my Yank vocabulary, it soon began to exert a strange distortion on my sanity (semantic satiation, I think they call it? like when you say the word lunch a bunch of times in a row and it stops sounding like a word at all?), as those two words ‘show willing’ show up again and again and again in this headlong, paragraph-long rush of a story

3 “Biografía” and “Subasta”, María Fernanda Ampuero

I read Ampuero’s two short story collections out of order, first 2021’s Sacrificios humanos (Human Sacrifices) and then 2018’s Pelea de gallos (Cockfight), so it’s been interesting to retroactively see the progression, the way author's selection of targets and the execution of the execution, if you will, has evolved. And I dare say there’s no better means of comparison than to look at the two stories that open each collection, “Biografía” (“Biography”) and “Subasta”(“Auction”).

It’s probably no accident that both collections begin with a story about human trafficking. Ampuero’s literary project with these story collections is to grab hold of the reader and take them somewhere they do not want to go, until they realize that, to quote the narrator of “Subasta”, they are “well and truly fucked”¹. In the story that opens Pelea de gallos, the mechanism of this kidnapping is fairly simple, a drunk woman held at gunpoint by a taxi driver, whereas in Sacrificios humanos, she is a desperate immigrant lured in by the promise of work in something resembling her field of study. That’s a difference that feels indicative of the more developed subtlety in the later collection of stories, less concerned with being shocking than with being insidious (don’t get me wrong there is plenty of shock factor all throughout Sacrificios humanos as well lol).

Ampuero’s style, notwithstanding, is similar in both collections, never bogging itself down, training straight for the jugular. And in both collections her subject matter, with a very few exceptions, eschews all trappings of the numinous or supernatural. There is no “monster” that respresents “trauma” here. The real world, with all its racist, xenophobic, patriarchal violence, has monsters enough as it is.

LONGISH STORY RECS: La vida buena, Biografía, El pequeño monje budista, Cesar Aira

I already took the book back to the library a while ago, but I wanted to quote the first line of Biografía here and couldnt do it from memory, so I tried to Google it but of course Googling a novel with the title Biografía by the author Cesar Aira turns up mostly articles that include a biography of the author Cesar Aira. Tricky, that. Appropriate, as it’s a tricky little book, about a man named Biography whose job is the creation of random lists of things (harder than it looks, he assures us) and who carries on an extramarital affair with a young amateur archaeologist working in the chaotic excavation of what purports to be a train station but which actually is…hard to explain??

Anyway for my purposes here (recommending things to readers of this newsletter) its actually kind of moot being that, of the three Aira novellas I’ve now read, only one that I know of (The little Buddhist monk) has been published in English and coincidentally is not one Id recommend starting with, as it was my least favorite of the three--it seemed to want to say something about exoticism and the othering gaze but also at the same time indulge in some exoticism and othering of its own, albeit in a silly, almost winking way, one that felt to me kind of ill-considered. Of these three, my favorite was La vida nueva, a story about the travails of an author and the publication of his first book which has the structure and well-timed heightening of a long, painfully drawn-out joke but builds to something much more poignant than a simple punchline (alas, not available in English that i know of).

Then again, in the process of looking for the first line of Cesar Aira's Biografia (as opposed to the first line of the biography of Cesar Aira) I also found what claims to be a list of Aira's 20 best books and none of these 3 are on there (which is normal and fine, the man has like 100 of them).² So i guess we all have some work to do, folks!