Thursday
My midlife crisis has been nothing like I imagined. No sport cars, life-defying stunts, any desire to be anywhere else but at home. Instead, nostalgia clings to everything. There’s a realization that the past doesn’t exist and an equal desire to make it be present.
In the midst of knowing the impossibility of recovery and yearning for the means to recover all that’s been lost, I picked up Sudden Flash Youth (Persea Books, 2011), a collection of 65 short-short stories edited by Christine Perkins-Hazuka, Tom Hazuka, and Mark Budman. How I love these stories! And the short-short, a form that demands stories end as soon as they’ve begun, feels like the perfect container. Faced with the freshness and suddenness of youth, the world seems unable to do anything but to call on all its forces—war, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, neighbors, bullies, teachers, priests, dysfunction, death, time—to make it go away, in a flash.
As a reader, I bring so much archetypal experience to the idea of youth that I felt as if I’d be confronted in this collection, again and again, by what I already knew. Not so.
First, there’s the wonder of the language. Remember those stars all of us looked up to? Here that night-world becomes “embers of the cigarettes they passed between them” (Shapard, p. 5); “dark as the space between stars” (Bausch, p. 21); “the star-crowded sky” (Bedard, p. 59); “the neighbors’ house…dark and quiet and…plunked down there under the stars” (Andersen, p. 172). Each story brings its own vision to youth, its own recreation of that world we’ve all inhabited.
It’s all there—summers, little brothers and sisters, chalk, notes, the twins, avatars, babies, basketball, parents and their loves, new and old cars, windows and Doors, bracelets, storms, winters, school, ADD, dreams, truths and lies, crushes, dolls, presents, BB guns, rats, dogs, cats, and of course frozen pheasants—but it’s rendered anew, so that the stories evoke both the wonder of the strange and the ache of recollection.
In “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” Frost writes, “So Eden sank to grief, / So dawn goes down to day.” I think his point is that it is that quality of the world—its inability to stay— that makes things golden. That “golden” quality exists throughout these 65 stories, and I surprised myself with how many times I ended up crying, cracking up, or some version of both.
Many of the stories end where you might imagine stories with young protagonists to end, with that sense of knowing and unknowing:
I understood… (Shapard, p. 5)
I already knew… (Kearney, p. 8)
I’ll know what to say (Painter, p. 9)
You understand, don’t you? (Weber, p. 20)
Because you know. (Konisberg, p. 32)
…you finally understand why… (Eggers, p. 34)
…learning the social skills… (Carlson, p. 37)
…anyone in the world who knows… (Mazer, p. 41)
Suddenly I understood… (Soares, p. 53)
I knew she was… (Brandeis, p. 61)
He knew [she] couldn’t… (Bacho, p. 75)
“I know,” she whispered… (Hamburger, p. 86)
And you know… (Levis, p. 91)
I still didn’t know… (Alvarado, p. 101)
For he did know… (Teicher, p. 105)
…and I did not know… (Wolpe, p. 125)
…everything I know… (Fanning, p. 141)
And this, she knows… (Kolosov, p. 151)
I knew it then… (Andersen, p. 173)
Of course, there’s that tragic sense to such knowing; as each piece ends, one can hear the Edenic gates clicking forever shut. However, set against that feeling, for me, was the remarkable ability of each author to translate “youth” into something both emotionally resonant and infinitely hopeful. One imagines, thousands of years from now, childhoods still being collected and recollected. One imagines, set against Layden’s “You. Don’t. Matter” (p. 183) another voice, a kind of mantra against the dark: I am young, I am young, I am young (Beal, p. 17).
So, in short-short, I strongly recommend this collection. It’s available here. I hope you end up loving it as much as I do.
