On "Rock and Bone" by Holly M. Wendt (5553 words) *****

This tale reminds me a bit of one of my favorite stories--John Steinbeck's "Flight." It isn't for any of the plot that I'm reminded. Rather, it's the way that Wendt chooses to tell this tale--as well as the tale's setting. This is a silent and lonely film. There's almost no dialogue. It's a piece told in a woman's head and in the concrete details of the landscape and the her move through it.

Kim is on a road trip, on her way to visit a friend named Jill. There's a motorbike gathering going on, and she passes a few of these riders as she drives, coming into contact with them when she pulls off to eat or to guy gas or to take a leak. She makes a momentary connection with one rider in particular, such that when they're driving along in a freak rainstorm, she notices his bike go down miles in front of her on a Nebraska highway. One shouldn't be so absorbed by a tale that essentially recounts a woman's grizzly discoveries in somber and gruesome detail, but it's a testimony to Wendt's writing that one is. Read the story here at Memorious.