FlashFiction.Net

Author: Matt Bell
Title: How the Broken Lead the Blind
Publisher: Willows Wept Press
Year: 2009
# of pages: 55
# of stories: 10 (without sections)

Matt Bell’s How the Broken Lead the Blind seems deceptively simple at first, consisting of 55 pages, with only ten stories, of length ranging from a sparse page and a quarter to nearly seven pages in length. The ten stories, though, are carefully arranged, their trajectories minutely adjusted and sent to spin and crash together with a precision that would seem cold if it didn’t have beneath it a true concern for the human condition.

This seems to be characteristic of Bell’s writing, and the first unifying theme that stands out is that of convergence and inevitability. Bell sets his characters into seemingly intractable trajectories that challenge the reader’s notion of fate and control. The first story in the collection is “Ten Scenes From a Movie Called Mercy.” Here we have the convergence of an (unstated) murderer and a child, told through the metaphor of scenes from a move. The metaphor does allow for an escape from the perceived inevitability, though:

“Off camera, pray for editing, for the rearrangement of film. The editor could remove the first scene, just cut it out. With a pair of scissors, he could let the second scene tumble to the cutting room floor in a clatter of 8mm frames. Cellulose nitrate is highly flammable, so pray for the fourth scene to be cut short by fire. Pray to keep her safe from the person that wants to hurt her… Resist deoument, resist the solving of mysteries and the revealing of truths, because it is in these things that you may be judged.”

I love this passage; it is lyrical and reads almost like a lament, unexpected in its sudden sympathy.

As the collection progresses, these ideas of convergence become more and more complicated by the idea of communication, and a true struggle over how it occurs, if it is truly possible, and what danger it might have. One interesting piece in this is “Player Piano” In which a couple, living an idyllic life, choose to tune their piano, because the wife, “claimed it had always been the slightest bit out of tune and now she was finally tired of just living with it.” The repairman finds it is out of tune because a powerful prayer “was hidden inside. That’s why you’ve been happy your whole life.“ Unfortunately, “prayers only work if they’re secret. Now you know, you’re finally on your own.” The idea here, of this secret source of happiness being a secret sour note that must remain unplumbed is hauntingly powerful and evocative. Here we see that full communication does indeed have consequences, often dire.

The last piece in the collection was my favorite: “Excerpt from Volume H-Hn: Hair Boxes.” Here, Bell takes a step back in narrative distance, setting the piece as a backward looking encyclopedia entry. He describes a ritual that seems to be compelled, again these trajectories, of constructing a box, filling it with one’s shorn hair, burning it, and sending it to someone else. Perhaps because of the narrative distance, this story becomes not an inevitable trajectory, not an exterior compulsion, but a powerful metaphor for the persistent human need to communicate, to be understood, even if the matrix of that understanding is often sacrifice and loss.

I said at the beginning of this review that the trajectories of each of these pieces are carefully calculated, and they are, but in a way that eschews collision. In the end, the parts dance around each other with the persistence of a Swiss watch, meshing together with geared teeth. And I think that while those teeth do draw real blood on occasion, this collection has a true heart and belief that we can reach out to each other, even as it challenges us to examine our ideas about the way we communicate and interact.

About the Author

Todd B. Stevens is currently an MFA student at Rosemont College. He has studied English at Cornell and Villanova. Todd worked for many years as a bookseller. His poetry has recently been published in Mad Poets Review and Off the Coast and is featured in the anthology Prompted: Poems, Essays from Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio, which will be published early this year.

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