On "Drive-By" by Robin Messing (3436 words) ****

Halfway into Robin Messing's exploration of a marriage that has settled into a peaceful kindness, we learn that Herbert just wants to be left alone. He loves his wife, but in this moment where she has lost her parents, where they are visiting her childhood home for the last time, he wants her to take the home in, to allow him some time to think on her parents by himself. Her parents, the narrator notes, weren't terribly kind or generous, but they'd become Herbert's parents, after he lost his own. He wants time to think of them himself.

But that's the beauty of Messing's story. There is no time by himself. Locked in a car with his wife, he is locked also in this marriage. He has duties he performs and things he wins for performing them--usually, unless, of course, he fails to do something he was supposed to, and then, the light goes out, and the sex promised when the nightlight is on is forbidden. Something is changing in Herbert's life. The couple has become familiar to one another--and that in turn is breeding, as the saying goes, contempt.

Contrast that to the parents who are gone. Items that Sylvia used to hate she now loves. Histories "change"--we appreciate things we didn't appreciate in the past, things we could have had at any time. What is this appreciation and familiarity? How do we reconcile what we have and don't have? Why are we never happy when we have it? These are the questions Messing poses. Read the story here at Drunken Boat.

On "The Bull's Eye" by Inderjeet Mani (6050 words) ***

Exotic settings and peoples tend to make for a certain amount of automatic interest in a story, or so I'm told. Sometimes, such things will pull me in also, but I think I'm probably more at home right here in the United States (save my love for the fiction of Paul Bowles). Mani's story is one of those exotic ones, but I'm writing about it not because of the locale but because of the sentiment. It's the story of a man who works hard throughout most of his life and who, when he gets toward the end, comes to understand--at least for him--that life is about much less than what he thought. Like the bull that is at the story's center, the protagonist lives the the moment, the dance. Read the story here at Drunken Boat (you'll have to look for Mani's name and click through).