SOUNDTRACK:
[READ: December 20, 2022] “Moving Parts”
This year, S. ordered me The Short Story Advent Calendar. This is my fifth time reading the Calendar. I didn’t know about the first one until it was long out of print (sigh), but each year since has been very enjoyable. Here’s what they say this year
Like we always do at this time: the Short Story Advent Calendar is back for 2022. We had such a great time last year working with our first-ever guest editor, the one and only Alberto Manguel. This year, however, we’re bringing things back to basics. No overarching theme or format, just 25 top-class short stories, selected in-house, by some of the best writers in North America and beyond. It’s December 20. John Elizabeth Stintzi, author of My Volcano, makes hay while the sun shines.
This was a crazy-on-the-surface story that had some lovely metaphorical reality underneath it.
When the narrator gets to college, her left pinky disappears. At the college ice breaker she says that her second interesting fact is that “I lost my left pinky finger after I moved in.” When her parents came to visit her father had made her a pinky out of wood to strap onto her hand. It fit perfectly.
She went home for holidays abut every time she returned to college a new part was missing–her ear, her foot.
The following year, though, when her brother came home from college for Christmas, he was intact.
By the time she moved to New York for a job, she had only one lung and would soon lose her tongue.
One year when she went back home, her parents gave her a box that had all of her missing parts. She was able to attach them all and be whole again. But as soon as she left they all faded away once more.
Later, she meets a woman, Tijana, who truly understands her. I love the way the author intertwines their stories.
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