The Summer issue (#51) of Glimmer Train arrived the other day, and while walking from the mailbox to the house I unwrapped it from its plastic sleeve and scanned the back cover where the included stories and authors are listed. Happily surprised, I recognized a name from one of my linked weblogs and sat right down with a cup of cold coffee and the book out on the back porch.
The story is titled, “The Hero of Queens Boulevard,” and it is written by Michelle Richmond who is an author of two books and many other published short stories, a reviewer, and keeper of several websites including Michelle’s Daily Dose, Fiction Attic, as well as several others for her books and manuscript consultation services.
I loved the story and here’s why:
It is simple, straightforward yet skillfully blended with imagery that seems to tell an almost lighthearted tale while quite gently uncovering multiple physical and emotional conflicts that are tied in with the events to result in a life-changing frame of mind for the protagonist. Isn’t that what good narrative is supposed to be?
The Hero of the title is the protagonist and first person narrator, a teacher who threw in the towel at a point in his education where he felt that the research topic for his PhD was leading him further and further into questions without answers. He wanted things in black and white, yes and no, and the high point of his teaching from then on was a single day teaching dialectic philosophy. His wife is a young lawyer who believes, of course, in all the in betweens. “Guilty’s a matter of perspective, just varying shades of gray,” she says. This difference in perspective affects many areas of their life together, and brought up in the very first page is the wife’s desire to have a baby, and his unwillingness to accept being “ready” to become a father.
Getting ready for his one happy day of teaching dialectic philosophy, he is in a fine frame of mind when he almost becomes involved in an accident, watches it unfold in slow motion in front of him, and surprises himself as he gets out of his car and helps a little girl and her mother to safety by getting them out of the overturned vehicle.
He continues on to class, and delivers his lecture, but the effect of what he has just gone through slowly changes his views on philosophy, time, space, and his opinion of a parallel universe. He is seeing gray.
Michelle Redmond has, in my opinion, wound together some heavy duty topics and life changing events into a very realistic, very human narrative that leaves a reader satisfied with a resolution, but carrying within him the same questions faced by the protagonist. This short story was filled with dramatic events and the possibilities of earth shattering decisions; but it was done so softly, gently, that it undeniably stays with you.
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