Monday, June 18, 2012

Through Sunset into the Raccoon Night - one of many excellent short stories by Barry Hannah.


There was a family in St. Louis I lived with, sleeping with their divorced mother.  ...The daughter, every day on the backseat of the car as she was taken to school, said, demanding: “Turn on the radio, please.”  The please just an irony in her mouth, in a flat, mean voice.  The mother obliged as if hypnotized, never pausing to find that rock-and-roll button for the brat.  One day I couldn’t bear it any longer, but when she was out of the car to school I did not attack.  Rather I started weeping because of the sadness of being around this hugely indulged vixen, and I knew love would die soon because I couldn’t stand the home life that made her possible.*






*[Excerpted from "Through Sunset into the Raccoon Night," in High Lonesome, by Barry Hannah.]

I finished the book yesterday and thought I should put it out "there" because Hannah is such a good writer, and he can make you laugh as well as push your head through a wall.  Sometimes we need that.

Here's another...


She came out into the driveway wailing as I’ve never heard a white person wail.  But you see a whole tree go over like that, and your grip on the universe goes.  A small mob of slackers came down the block and stood around the big tree over the Mercedes.  They grinned, sort of worshipping the event.  But the woods running down a hill to the east went into an exploding mutual collapse too much like the end of the world, and everyone fled back inside.
           All these old trees were like family in the act of dying; their agony was more terrible than the storm itself.  We had been confident, even arrogant, with them around us, I realized.  They’d been comforting brothers and sisters.  Now the town was suddenly half as tall.**

**["The Ice Storm," from High Lonesome, by Barry Hannah.]

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