Finished Confrontations (a very good issue that was, too) and moved onto this Glimmertrain. I’m a third of the way through and have come upon a real winner–of the Very Short Fiction Award. Now I’m usually woefully lost as to why some of these become the creme de la creme, but on this one, I have nothing but admiration for this writer.
The name of the story is A History of Everything, Including You and it’s by Jenny Kennedy and despite her MFA in CW, this is her first published story. I’m sure it will not be her last. It is written in first person pov, and it starts out like this:
First there was God or gods or nothing, then synthesis, space, the expanse, explosions, implosions, particles, objects, combustion, and fusion. Out of the chaos came order. Stars were born and shone and died. Planets rolled across their galaxies on invisible ellipses and the elements combined and became. (p. 73)
In the next two paragraphs the narrative brings the world up to include man’s evolution:
We fell in love. We talked about God and banged stones together, made sparks and called them fire. We got warmer and the food got better.
And onward:
We got married. We had some children. They cried and crawled and grew. (…) We got sick and searched for cures. We invented lipstick, vaccines, (etc.)
And in a brilliant move, it becomes personal:
You were born. You learned to walk and went to school and played sports and lost your virginity and got into a decent college (etc.)
Then the relationship between the "you" and the narrator becomes established, and we fly through a marriage of ups and downs in the next page. And then, the death of the partner.
It’s a beautifully drawn image, concise, relative, and loaded with emotional depth even in its brevity.
I wish Jenny Kennedy a very successful writing career–she’s obviously got what it takes.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology