Litro: Stories Transport You is a site that is new to me. I've read a couple of the works there now and think that maybe a touch more editing could be employed (some spelling issues, or homonym issues, for one thing---and tense changes that shouldn't be there slipping in) but I've liked the works that I've read so far. One of which is Julia LaSalle's "Aerial Acrobatics."
An early line, "He was standing under the “34th Annual Model Airplane Contest” banner...", brought this reader to life as it let me know that LaSalle was taking meto a place I'd not been before--neither in real life, nor in my readings. The story also brought shipyard welding into play--another aspect of life I've never encountered physically or in my readings.
In both instances, LaSalle got just deep enough into the subject for me to feel like I understood what was going on, but not so much that I felt like I was being lectured on the topic. There's a nice little thread throughout the story about the narrator's heart running alongside her narrative, and I found myself really liking the ending: "She watched Mustafa work until she trusted him, watched him until she became a spark herself, flying through the air, first rising then falling, and finally sputtering as her spark-self bounced once on the rubber mat by Mustafa’s foot and extinguished." I'll definitely be looking for more of Julia LaSalle's work in the future and remembering to visit Litro as well.
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