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Three story collections I cannot wait to see enter the world are a trio of collections that Dzanc Books is bringing out before the end of the year: Jennifer Spiegel's The Freak Chronciles (June), Luis Jaramillo's The Doctor's Wife (October), and George Singleton's Stray Decorum (November).

The short stories in this collection explore, both implicitly and explicitly, the notion of freakiness.  They worry over eccentricity, alienation, normalcy, and intimacy. What is it that makes one a freak, makes one want to embrace quirkiness, have the fortitude to cultivate oddity? Is there a fine line between abnormality and the extraordinary?  Jennifer Spiegel’s stories delve into these questions and others.

Winner of the Dzanc Short Story Contest, Luis Jaramillo's The Doctor's Wife pushes the limits of what a short story collection can be. In stylish, intimate, and devastating short flashes, Jaramillo chronicles the small domestic moments, tragic losses, and cultural upheavals faced by three generations of a family in the Pacific Northwest, creating a moving portrait of an American family and the remarkable woman at its center.

Eleven stories, all previously published in journals like The Atlantic, Oxford American, and The Georgia Review, in which George Singleton brings small-town South Carolina alive. Using everyday situations like a dog needing its annual vaccination and buckets of humorous observations, Singleton pokes and prods his readers into realizing we're all simply restless for a pat on the head.

Why? Why do we need a National Short Story Month every May. There's an understanding that there should indeed be a National Poetry Month as it's a common fact (well, at least a common belief, to be very honest, I have zero idea if it's a fact or not) that poetry collections don't sell scads of copies and I assume the hope is that by focusing on poetry for a solid month that it might help recognize the importance of poetry, of poets, and get some attention to those wonderful writers. By NO means is the following meant to be anti-poetry, not at all. I too think there should be a National Poetry Month. I just also think we need a National Short Story Month as well.

You know what the Barnes & Noble I was in last night has? A poetry section. Granted, it is stocked mostly with what are considered classic collections, but there are contemporary collections to be found on those shelves too.

You know what the Barnes & Noble I was in last night did not have? It didn't have any of the trio of finalists from the 2011 The Story Prize (Steven Millhauser's We Others: New and Selected Stories, Edith Pearlman's Binocular Vision, nor Don Delillo's The Angel Esmerelda: Nine Stories). It didn't have The Collected Stories of John Cheever, or TC Boyle, or Edith Wharton, or Dorothy Parker, or anybody that I could find, and I looked over the spine of every book from A to Z in the fiction section. While I could find both of Lauren Groff's novels, no Delicate Edible Birds and Other Stories. No Knuckleheads by Jeff Kass even though it won the Gold IPPY Award for best SSC, and is a finalist for the Foreword Book of the Year Award for SSC, and, AND, he's a local author.

If I'm not mistken there were eleven rows of shelves at this particular store, so that's 44 actual bookshelf units with five shelves apiece on each unit. This not counting the approximately 100 new titles of fiction facing out. So books covering approximately 220 shelves and I counted less than ten short story collections. And only two of these held in multiple copies--the two current Discover Great Writers selections (which, admittedly I don't thnk I've ever seen a poetry collection appear on that list).

How can this be when there are publishers like Press 53 concentrating on short story collections, when a publisher cranking out books less than 20 miles away from this particular store, Dzanc Books, publishes at least 2 or 3 collections every year, frequently award-winning collections, when there are at least six or seven big award-winning collections every single year with two Flannery O'Connor Award Winners, the Iowa Short Fiction Award, the John Simmons Award, the Drue Heinz Lit Prize, the Mary McCarthy Prize from Sarabande, as well as awards I'm immediately sorry I started this line with as I know I'm skipping some big ones. They didn't even have Jack Driscoll's The World of a Few Minutes Ago, one of Wayne State University's (Detroit) MADE IN MICHIGAN series titles from a Michigan treasure of an author/teacher.

For this reason alone I think we need a National Short Story Month. At least here on the internet until the rest of the world catches up.

Many thank yous to both the Postman and to the fine folks at Dark Sky for getting me a copy of Jensen Beach's story collection, For Out of the Heart Proceed. It arrived today and brought a great smile to my face. Jensen happens to be both a damn good writer and one helluva nice person, one of my favorite combinations in the world.

What Dark Sky has to say about the book:

In his debut collection, Jensen Beach’s characters discover what it means to be individuals, colleagues, husbands and fathers in a world that too often complicates even the best intentions with sabotage and subterfuge. What’s most striking about these stories is the protagonists’ ability to continually make right, difficult decisions despite being placed in challenging, dangerous situations. Readers will delight in Beach’s powerful, deft prose, and the surprising warmth that radiates from his people. Each story is a robust chronicle that churns and evolves and offers glimpses into fully-realized lives. To say this marks the arrival of a gifted author is true but somehow misses the mark, as the maturity and sincerity that pulses throughout this collection signals a writer whose many talents have been developed and honed over time.

And what much much smarter people than I have to say about it:

– The stories in Jensen Beach’s debut collection unfold menacingly in plain daylight. They seduce us into feeling at ease until the ground gives way under our feet. Here are people who hope to love and to protect those they love and people who fall down trying. Who burn down and stand up and heroically (stubbornly!)
begin to live again. — Noy Holland, author of What Begins with Bird

– Pithy and pertinent, Jensen Beach’s stories reach out and grab you in the opening line, and they don’t let go until the final period. This writer’s not into wasting words. He makes every one count. His fiction is both direct and vivid, and I found a surprise or two on virtually every page. I feel tremendous enthusiasm for this young writer’s work. — Steve Yarbrough, author of Safe from the Neighbors

– This book holds some of the most beautiful father and son stories I have ever read. This book is the father I never had. — Michael Kimball, author of Us

– It’s easy to let a day, or a set of days, pass by; nothing is singular about them, or so it seems . . . and then you read Jensen Beach’s wonderful collection, and you see how there is horror and joy, ugliness and beauty in the everyday, and you’re missing it. Read For Out of the Heart Proceed, and then enter your day with better eyes. — Lindsay Hunter, author of Daddy’s

Visit here and you can listen to two of the stories and read an excerpt from another.

File this one under Collections I'm Looking Forward To! It comes out in August from Riverhead Books. Watkins has published stories in such fantastic journls such as Hobart, One Story, Granta and The Paris Review and I know I've already read two of them (the first two journals listed) and loved them.

What Others are Saying:

"As blistering hot and wondrously expansive as the gritty, wide-open Nevada desert."--Donald Ray Pollock, author of The Devil All the Time and Knockemstiff

"Watkins digs and sifts...finding the bright flecks hidden in her characters' darkest moments, until each story shimmers and shines."--Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief

And from the book's back cover via Riverhead: Like the work of Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johson, Richard Ford and Annie Proulx, Battleborn represents a near-perfect confluence of sensibility and setting, and the introduction of an exceptionally powerful and original literary voice.

The first of what I hope are many guest posts this month:

What “The Man in Bogota” Means to Me – Jac Jemc

In a creative writing class in college a professor passed out copies of “The Man in Bogota” by Amy Hempel.  The story changed my mind in a million ways. 

The message of the story, the moral and the punch line is, “He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn’t good.” It was a time when I needed to re-evaluate my attitude and the line rang in my head. That sentence is so full of assumptions and contrasts.  She doesn’t write, “He wondered how we know that what happens to us is bad.”  Instead she puts the focus on what that something isn’t, suggesting that maybe, after all is said and done, it is. 

The story is short, only a page long.  It was one of the first pieces of flash I read that really made me feel it was possible to tell more in a page than in a whole book.

It’s a story within a story. It’s a story about the power of storytelling and it’s a story about survival. It was a time when storytelling was a survival tactic for me. It’s a “come-down-from-the-ledge” story.

The language is clear and plain, in a way that stuns me.  It’s a way I’m unable to write and so thankful to read. 

I remember sharing the story with my dad when I was home for a break.  “Isn’t it awesome? She’s a minimalist!” I exclaimed, boiling down what I knew of the Lish style of editing to a statement that no longer resembled the truth. I remember my dad giving me a hard time for using the word “minimalism.” We argued, laughing.

And now, I’ve taken up more words talking about what this story means to me, than the story itself allows. 

The narrator says she tells the story to try and get the woman on the ledge to ask herself a question.  I don’t know any better reason to tell a story.

Jac Jemc is the author of My Only Wife. Her work has also appeared in The Denver Quarterly, Caketrain, Handsome and Sleepingfish, among others. She is the author of a chapbook of stories, These Strangers She'd Invited In (Greying Ghost Press) and the poetry editor for decomP Magazine. Jac blogs her rejections at jacjemc.wordpress.com.

Curbside Splendor has recently published Michael Czyzniejewski's second story collection, Chicago Stories: 40 Dramatic Fictions, from which "In His Last Will and Testament, John Hughes Leaves Specific Instructions for a Breakfast Club Sequel" comes. The collection is described as "40 dramatic fictions by Michael Czyzniejewski, each told in the persona of a famous Chicagoan, from Mrs. O’Leary to Barack Obama."

Czyzniejewski does a fantastic job of getting the voices right behind his narrators--can't you just hear John Hughes pitching the sequel?

That's when it would all come out, how their seemingly perfect lives are not  so perfect, how the faces they put on aren't who they really are. There would be dramatic monologues. There would be tears. Tempers would rise, spurring at least two fights. Somebody would kiss someone--Brian and Allison jump out at me--and it's logical to have at least one of them divorced and another with cancer, whatever cancer needs the publicity, something we could donate 1 percent of the box to.

Czyzniejewski fills each of these tales with just the right blend of humor and heart, while again, capturing the narrator's voices perfectly--a pretty damn impressive job considering these stories are between 2 and 4 pages in length.

Man, after typing all of the above out, I realize the story is also available at Knee-Jerk, something I had long forgotten. You can read it here.

"Dedication" by Stephen Graham Jones was published in Smokelong Quarterly just yesterday (great timing over there!).

It begins:

This is to Tammy Carlton, who sat two seats up and one over in fourth grade, and said once "Why don't you just write a book about it?" This during my explanation to the teacher about the gum and monkeybars thing. This is to Ms. Glynnis from my sixth grade science, for reading my note out loud to the class in a voice I still hear. This is to Michael K. and Lacy and Nicholas, for paying for their order at my drive-through window that time with a squirrel scraped up from the street. This is especially to Lacy, for looking at me like she regretted that these kinds of things had to happen. This is to my dad, too, of course. I really thought you were dead that one morning. And this is to Coach Barker, for throwing the ball just far enough that I had to cradle my arms out over the track that time. This is to Wayne and Wayne, for showing me that place behind the gym, between the air conditioner and the fence with all the newspapers blown up against it. It was perfect. This is to Tammy Carlton, for having to look away when I walked into senior prom. This is to her friends, all suddenly applying lipstick, their mouths definitely not laughing. This is to the band that night, for only playing slow songs. This is to the radio all these years later, for reminding me about those songs when I least expect it. This is to Wayne and Wayne, for slipping me a beer through the drive-through window once. This is to Albert, my assistant manager, for pretending not to see. This is to Albert, for having been seventeen once as well, I guess.

This reminded me at first of Michael Martone's Michael Martone which had Martone putting together a collection of Author's Notes--these were usually found in the Author's Notes section of the journals they were published in at Martone's request, and not with the fiction or other elements.

What Jones has done is similar, but instead of using the Author's Note as his muse, he's opted to use the Dedication. It's creative both simply as an idea, and would be interesting to see him do more of them, but also specifically with what he's chosen to dedicate this particular story to--people from his past, specific incidents and how the people related to them. Some of those listed above, such as Tammy Carlton, appear again later in the dedication, creating an actual narrative that the reader can get involved with. I'm glad there was somebody out there like Smokelong Quarterly willing to publish such an interesting piece.

The idea for the EWN in 2012 is going to be various as usual. I hope to review specific short stories from both journals and collections, I hope to review a few collections as well. I will have guest posts from authors and editors alike. I'll post some old "classic" EWN short story collection reviews. I will do some "advertising." That is, do posts of collections I've not yet had the pleasure of reading but will post the collection's cover, some jacket copy and a blurb or two. I'll probably promote some forthcoming collections and I'll do my best to link to all the other blogs or website that are celebrating National Short Story Month this May. It's year six here at the EWN--I hope many other sites join in.

Logos through the years--all thanks to Steven Seighman:

May will once again be Short Story Month around here (and based on the number of people questioning me, I'm guessing around many other sites on the web as well). As always, the fantastic Steven Seighman has designed this year's logo (shoot me an email at [email protected] for this png file to use it at your own site--just please remember to credit Steven when you use it).

There will indeed be a post of three today but I came NOWHERE near what I planned to do originally.  There's only been ten days worth of posts for the daily posts of stories from a book and a journal and only one full book review and two collections I'm looking forward to posts.  There's still some time today but I can guarantee I won't be cranking out the last 21 days worth of posts all in one day.  Apologies to short story writers, readers, publishers, and lovers everywhere.

Coming this fall (September) from FSG is Frank Bill's collection, Crimes in Southern Indiana.  I first heard of Frank's writing via Kyle Minor and then recently read this at the end of a PW review of the collection: 

"Readers who enjoy coal-black rural noir are in for a sadistic treat: flowing like awful mud and written in pulpy style, these stories paint a grisly portrait of the author's homeland. You might want to have your brass knuckles handy when reading."

It sounds like something I'm going to like. In fact it's a good bet that I will as I've dipped into some of the stories he's published online and have found similarites between his work and many authors I've promoted here in the past: Dayne Sherman, Pinckney Benedict, Daniel Woodrell, Larry Brown, Kyle Minor, and really many others. Not exactly like any of these writers, of course, but with similarities to things that I like a lot about their writing.

Dark stuff, moody, short and direct sentences. And I like that he's writing about Indiana, and what I'll assume will be rural Indiana at that.  Leads me to believe there'll be some damn interesting characters in this collection. If I understand right, the stories all involve characters from a single town (not sure if it's a fictional town or not), which will probably invoke comparisons to Donald Ray Pollock's Knockemstiff. That would be some nice praise if it happens.

It's the 16th and so far this month I've written nine short stories (mostly flash) and have notes to turn one into something longer. After having a bad reaction to antibiotics last week (caused panic attacks), I took the weekend off to recouperate and watched movies for the first time in forever (Skyline - okayish if you're really bored but turn it off before you get to the last five minutes because then it just descends into farce; and The King's Speech which was actually rather good; and an old Columbo because he cheers everyone up). And now it's Monday, and I can't summon the will to write any more short stories this month.

Bad me.

I'm itching to edit the below and get to work on something longer. And as I'm my own boss (here at least), I'm going to do just that. *Although I so want to use this post's title for a story.

As the title of my first story says, 'Blow a Whistle, I'm done'.

Short Story Month Tally:

1. Blow a Whistle, I'm done (1876 words)
2. The Lies Moths Tell (1199 words)
3. The Handiwork of Commerce (1303 words)
4. Dreams of a Ragged Doll (929 words)
5. Tethered Rain Clouds (636 words)
6. Beneath Ceiling Dust and Skin (742 words)
7. 1986 (794 words)
8. The Spaceman's Halo (more a collection of ideas - 366  words)
9. In a Confined Space (1136 words)
10. The Girl with the Glass Heart (448 words)

While I can't be sure, as the month is only halfway through, and technically this is my Lit. Journal short story post for the 8th, I'm pretty sure that Michael Garriga's "Custody Battle for Chelsea Tammy: At the Toys "R" Us, Aisle 6, in a Suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, December 24, 1983" from the Spring 2011 issue of The Southern Review, is going to have the longest title of any story I read this month.

Garriga breaks this story into three parts, each told from the point of view of one of the main characters involved in the story's confrontation or action.  Chelsea Tammy of the title turns out to be 1983's hot doll--the one every girl has to have.  The first two points of view we get are the combatants, the two men doing what they have to in order to make their young daughters happy.  The third is a stockboy at the Toys "R" Us who has a big hand in what is happening in an indirect, but extremely important way.

Garriga very nicely gets into each character's head and if the story were longer than one section told from each point of view, it would be very obvious upon entry of a new section which of this trio were thinking/speaking.

From "Lewis Malgrove, 38, Attorney and Divorced Father of a Six-Year-Old Daughter":

I am a trial attorney. I make a damn respectable living through confrontation. I own a Saab turbo sedan, a closet full of Polo and Armani, and a Movado watch my wife gave me for our anniversary the year before she left me. I bought a three-bedroom ranch in Buckhead, where my Jennifer attends the finest prep school, and my wife drives the Volvo 240 that I paid for and lost along with the house when she divorced me.

From "Sam Bowling (AKA "Pin"), 31, Vietnam Vet and Divorced Father of an Eight-Year-Old Daughter":

I yank him to me and grab hold of his neck right below his bobbin apple and squeeze and it feels good and I am back on R and r in the Thanh Hotel, downtown Saigon, '72, and Chi will be my girlfriend for the week and she feeds me shrimp dumplings dipped in fish sauce, savory and spicy, and I drink cold beer in a glass and she rubs lemongrass oil into my feet . . .

From "Witness: Chuck Simpson, 19, Stock Boy and Drug Dealer":

I came from dumping another stupid fat-face doll into the big Dumpster out back--that makes seventeen total, and at forty bucks apiece, that equals . . . shit if I know, like a thousand bones I guess, way more than I make at this job of peddling dime bags to my sister's pals, though Megan looks long at me when I give her the shotgun and our lips damn near brush--I've carried a crush on her for years and will make my move when she starts high school next fall--

Each is distinct from each other--the attorney's thoughts/speech clipped short, confident, everything contingent on material issues; the vet's thoughts/speech rather manicly paced, immediately referencing Nam;  the stock boy's thoughts/speech about himself, at a lower level than the other two, the much shorter level of life experience showing clearly.

In choosing to only have one section per individual, Garriga was going to have to really map out there identities, give enough back story for the reader to become compelled to care about them, and do enough to move the story forward and not simply have it be a Rashomon tale. Good thing for the reader, he does just that. He's able to create this story about a potential tug-of-war over the last of the

One of the things I planned on writing about this month was collections I am looking forward to reading.  This was to be a one per week idea and so, per usual, I'm behind one already, so look for a second one later this week (ie, today or tomorrow).

While there's no official release date on this one yet, it does look like the collection is going to be published in 2012--I'm just not at liberty to say by what pubisher yet.  Steven Gillis' second collection, and sixth book, will be titled The Law of Strings and should contain 15 short stories, most, if not all, of which have seen face time in some great literary journals.

This would be that same Steven Gillis you just read about taking a Silver medal for his most recent novel in the IPPY Awards, and whose earlier short story collection, Giraffes (Atomic Quill Press), was a finalist for that award and others.  Gillis' stories always amaze me with their ability to pack in a ton of information about science or philosophy or whatever it is his characters are interested in, or participating in, in a seamless fashion--it never feels like he's spent two or three pages explaining things, or making sure that the readers "get" what is going on.  He does it in a manner that allows that information to flow through the characters and stories naturally.

Having all of these stories in one easy place to track them down is going to be fantastic.

It looks like eight of the sixteen stories in Cathy Stonehouse's debut collection, Something About the Animal (Biblioasis, 2011), were previously published in journals, but not "Freak Waves," the story that I happened to open the book up to.

The story combines information about freak waves, waves that are much higher than the standard wave size of fifteen meters (the height that marine architects are required to prepare for) with the story of a relationship--one that has gone in more than one way.

Lorraine has disappeared on Ray, she went to Hawaii without him, truly a sign that their relationship was in trouble, and while there vanished, her car supposedly pulled to the ocean by a freak wave. Stonehouse moves nicely between the two storylines, mixing in the facts about freak waves of the past, and in general, along with the details of Ray and Lorraine's lives.

Leaning out across the morning, he watches motionless shrubs and bushes solidify, a diving swallow turn to stone in mid-flight. The herb pots Lorraine planted are as dry as sandpits. Soon all he'll have will be an empty balcony, its peeling boards pitted with avian corpses. A hairbrush is picked clean of evidence and excuses, a roomful of paint he has no idea how to use.

He goes back inside to check the weather. There must be rain falling softly somewhere. Prince Rubert, BC: eight degrees, light rain; Maui country club: thirty degrees and windy; McMurdo, Antarctica: minus thirty-two and snow.

Scientists are divided over whether or not global warming has increased the incidence of these seemingly unprovoked tsunamis. Statistics certainly point to their increased frequency. However this could also be due to more diligent reporting. The facts is, many ships sink without a trace.

When the person she wanted to be with phoned at midnight, he picked up, of course, hoping it was her. Instead, what he got was a man his own age weeping. Lorraine had not returned. A wave had swept up, sucked a rental car clean off th highway. Ray's wife was considered missing, drowned.

The back and forth, the occasional mixing of the two--facts with the fiction within paragraphs--could very easily have come across as clumsily mixed, but Stonehouse does a very nice job of including facts, and blending them in so they're not intrusive, or clunky.

Book Review 2011-006
The Weather Stations by Ryan Call
2011 from Caketrain, 204 pages
(This copy purchased direct from the Publisher)

Most of the characters in the ten stories in Ryan Call's The Weather Stations are unnamed. I believe only three actually have names and two of these are soldiers named Termite and Anvil. Which leaves us with many characters names simply as "he" or "she" or "my husband" or similar words. At least when we're dealing with human characters. But that would leave the collection's most prevalent character out of the discussion. The weather, which is routinely referred to as such, is the biggest character in the collection.

The weather not only appears in each and every story, its presence looms over every other character. And it's not weather like we think of--it might rain today, it's sunny out, we should have wind or snow or hail--but instead the weather is an active participant. It's deciding what it will do, not simply resulting in some cause of cold fronts or high barometric pressures.

From "Our Latitude, Our Longitude":

Our joy dissolved to grief at the commencement of the weather's violent era, which issued forth across the skies and shocked us with its wildness, its cunning, and its unending hunger, assaulting indiscriminately both our land and its people.

From "How We Came to Live in the Sky":

Finally the weather withdrew its hostile presence, and we emerged from the damp caves and tunnels of our age of refuge to celebrate the miracle above our heads.

From "Consider the Buzzard"

They still fled to the caves in the south when they could, but more often than not, cloudbanks swiftly cut off their escape route, trapping the birds on the ground, in tree limbs, and against the sides of buildings, where they suffered, flattened one on top of another beneath the impressive force of thunderstorms, windstorms, tornadoes and hail.

Perhaps the most frightening aspect of Call's stories is that he makes them seem so believable. Sure it's sunny outside as I type this, but when is the weather going to decide that it has had enough of being passive, that it would like to choose its own path? Beyond making the scenarios reasonable, Call also truly puts that weather, prevalent as it may be, in the background. Yes, it's wreaking havoc on the world, and yes, it's something that we as readers are fascinated with, but it's the people in the stories, those poor, mostly unnamed, bastards trying to cope that we end up caring about.

The people coming out from the caves when there is a break in the weather. The family worried about the birds that are ending up in their yard, suffering underneath various types of storm. The couple floating above the storms. Each and every story has a human component that Call has written with such care, with such straightforward language, that we cannot help but get pulled in and root for them while they battle

Readers here may remember some EWN raving about Keith Lee Morris' novel, The Dart League King (Tin House, 2008), if not, just scroll down to number 46, which may have you wondering why there was no such clamoring for his short story collection released from Tin House just over a year later, Call it What You Want (Tin House, 2010). It was mainly due to my misplacing the book in a box of books that I had already read, something that sadly happens too often around here (though it does make for some nice surprises months down the line).

The story "Harmonica" may be the complete antithesis to Evenson's "What Body Seed" story, though there is some violence involved. What Morris does is something different though--he shows how a writer can get a reader so sucked into the world he's creating, that they might forget what they know is inevitable.

Taylor Rue buys a pack of cigarettes at the convenience store on the corner of Euclid and PIne. There are some goth-looking kids in the parking lot. When Taylor comes out the door, they stare at him and lower their voices. He doesn't have anything against the kids--it's just that they look so strange and he doesn't know what they think or what kind of shit they're capable of.

So, Morris puts it right their in our minds--there could be trouble. It might be the neighborhood, it might just be Taylor Rue being paranoid, but there's a reason he believes there could be trouble. So, Taylor gets around the corner quickly and starts walking fast, waiting until he's out of sight before he pulls out the pack of cigarettes. Very quickly after getting out of their sight:

Right when he gets the cigarette to his mouth a guy pulls up on a motorcycle. It's a beat-up motorcycle, not anything you'd wnt to have, particularly. And the guy who cuts the ignition and puts down the kickstand and steps to the curb isn't the kind of guy who can be picky about what he has or what he doesn't. He has what he has.

The guy wants to bum a cigarette from him, or so he says.

And he's approaching too fast, coming too close to Taylor. It's dark on the street, only the faint shine from a streetlight halfway down the block. Taylor has had trouble in his life before, and this looks like some. This is a lanky guy, a stringy guy, and he seems a little wild, a little reckless. He comes right up to Taylor, gets in his fact there on the dark street, and his hand starts fidgeting with something in his pocket. Taylor's cigarette is lit by this time, so he says, "Sure," and jabs the cherry in the guy's eye.

As the guy rolls to the ground cursing, in pain, Taylor walks on. Next thing you know a truck pulls to the curb:

It's an old, dented Dodge Ram, Taylor thinks, though he can't see it well in the half dark. The driver gets out and talks to the guy there on the ground. They know each other. That much seems clear. Taylor isn't a coward, but something