Where Will You Go When Your Skin Cannot Contain You Filetype:pdf

Deal Me In Lite, Week 5: "Where Volition You Go When Your Skin Cannot Contain You?" by William Gay

This week's story comes to us courtesy of the iii of clubs and The Best American Short Stories 2007. The luck of the describe is sending me back over again and again to this volume – not that I'grand complaining, mind you, simply I AM actually eager to go to the Growing Up in the Due south collection. Oh well, information technology will happen eventually.

I picked this story for my list out of the tabular array of contents because the title was incredibly intriguing. The story was intriguing, besides – information technology's one of those stories where the author sets the scene immediately using vivid linguistic communication and imagery. The reader knows something atrocious is going to happen in this story because of the word choices the author makes from the go-go:

The Jeepster drove due west into a sun that had gone down the sky so fast it left a fiery wake like a comet. Light pooled in a higher place the horizon like blood and scarlet low-cal hammered off the hood of the SUV he was driving. He put on his sunglasses. In the failing day the calorie-free was falling almost horizontally and the highway glittered like some virtual highway in a fairy tale or nightmare.

I don't know nigh you, but I vote for the nightmare, with language like that.

On the outskirts of Ackerman's Field the neon of a Texaco station bled into the dusk like a virulent stain. Night was falling like some illness he was in the act of catching. At the pumps he filled the SUV upwardly and watched the traffic accomplish itself in a kind of wonder. Everyone should have been frozen in any mental attitude they'd held when the hammer fell on Aimee and they should hold that attitude forever. He felt similar a plague set upon the globe to cauterize and cleanse it.

The story is told completely from the indicate of view of "the Jeepster" whose girlfriend, Aimee, left him for an older man, Escue. Eventually, even so, she comes dorsum, claiming Escue is crazy and has begun chirapsia her. Escue somewhen tracks her down and shoots both her and himself. This sends the Jeepster over the edge, and he sets off on a mission supposedly to retrieve Aimee'due south car, the auto she was murdered in, only soon information technology turns into a much more than sinister and gruesome mission when her family refuses to let him pay his last respects to her at the funeral home.

Did you go the impression that this is not a happy story? It's non, with a shocking catastrophe and no redemption for whatsoever of the characters. The author also uses the interesting technique where all the dialogue is presented without quotation marks. It's oddly effective in this story, but I tin't put my finger on exactly why. I retrieve information technology serves to kind of "flatten out" the footstep and events of the story, so that when the reader gets to the climax, it becomes but that much more disturbing. Has anyone else encountered this technique? Any ideas on why authors utilise it sometimes?