The Expendables: Stories - Softcover

Nelson, Antonya

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0684846853 ISBN 13: 9780684846859

Verlag: Scribner, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award, Antonya Nelson's debut collection of stories displays the off-beat perceptions, the humor, and the sensibility that have won the author not only critical acclaim but a host of devoted readers.
Most of the stories in The Expendables are about marriage -- marriage in process, about to be, about not to be anymore, possibly transgressed, and decidedly not transgressed. In the title story, a teenage boy participates in the spectacle of his sister's second marriage. In "Dog Problems," a husband muses about his wife's attachment to her dog, a bond that predates their marriage and will -- he fears -- outlast it. There is the woman in "Affair Life," happily encircled by her husband and child, who still must choose between her marriage and what is not quite yet an infidelity. Ranging in setting from Atlanta to Chicago and Kansas City, from the arid Southwest to the course of a river running through Colorado canyon walls, the stories in The Expendables show our relationship with destiny, whether resisted, invented, obeyed, or forced.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Antonya Nelson teaches creative writing at the University of Houston, and is the award-winning author of three novels and four short story collections. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, and The Best American Short Stories. She divides her time among Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico.

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The Expendables

StoriesBy Antonya Nelson

Scribner

Copyright © 1999 Antonya Nelson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0684846853

From Chapter One: Listener

"Why did you stop?" her husband asks. His hand had lifted, as it did involuntarily, while she was reading, but as soon as she'd quit it had dropped back into his lap, lifeless. "Julia?" he says, and though his hands are both peacefully draped on his lap, his voice holds the most minor of tremors, perhaps perceptible only by his wife. "Julia, is there something...?"

"It's just that man again."

Averil's hand rises when he hears her voice. It flits to his collar, to his ear, his nose, a pattern his hand has etched into any space Averil inhabits. He is blind, and when he hears his wife's voice, when his hand senses her voice on the air, he must check the other senses rapidly. He is here, they seem to tell him, he fills a shirt, a body; he can enclose himself with his hands.

"Next door?" he says, gently.

"Across the way." Not an alley, just a brief ten-foot space between windows. "I can't get used to apartments," she says, rising to pull the shades. The room shrinks, the light dulls. "But I can't stand his being out there. He just sits on his bed and..."

"And what?" Averil has a smile on his lips, his face and hand following her voice in their own bedroom to the windows, back to the rocker.

"And he listens."

"You read well. You have a lovely voice for reading, and I'm sure he only wants to hear." He crosses his long legs on the bed, fluffs the feather pillows behind him, rubs his temples with his slender fingers. The only part of him he cannot maneuver to his liking is his hair, which triumphs wildly on his head, thick and brown, a few gray strands rising even more mutinously above the rest, coarse and cantankerous. He has the ruffled yet refined look of an eccentric scholar, a chess player in the park, a musician.

"He annoys me," Julia says. She adjusts her magnifying eyeglasses and returns to Jude the Obscure, but it is not the same as before. She is self-conscious. While she reads, she begins wondering what the man heard, if he heard her voice take on the personalities of Jude and Arabella, if he heard them slaughter their pig. Now her voice is lower, her chair closer to Averil, her fingers flipping through on their own to find the end of the chapter.

After Jude, she reads him some short stories. He doesn't like them as well; they end too quickly, he says. He likes to go on and on. He loved Anna Karenina. He never wanted the party to end. But Julia enjoys the short stories and the poems. She can read them twice in one evening if she wants. If they were powerful, she can recast their spell easily. And Averil does have his own books. It isn't as if he must depend completely on her.

The man across the way, however, is still a problem.

She and Averil moved in only a month ago. From Kansas. Julia's new Chicago job, a surprise transfer, paid so much more they couldn't afford not to move. They'd always been strapped for money. For a while, Averil had had to sell cosmetics over the phone. No amount of love for their house in the country could compete with the money she would make. Their move was simple; they hired a van line, had the condominium painted, the floors sanded, the locks changed, before they ever arrived. Julia had only to stand in the hallway and direct the men. "In the study...," she would say, "in the bedroom,...down in storage," and their furniture glided into new places, filling available space. She led Averil through the rooms. His hands, clumsy and out of sync with his body in the new rooms, sought the familiar objects of their lives: the smooth round oak table he'd sanded himself, a cold marble vanity stand, the hairy surface of his recliner where his cat Sophie slept, was now sleeping.

It took him no time at all to adjust to the layout. The noise was different. Sirens still startle him in the night. Helicopters and human voices can make him clutch Julia, whose heart leaps for him. It is only then, blackness surrounding both of them, together in a shared blindness, that she mistrusts their judgment. Moving was not good, she thinks. We have done the wrong thing. In these moments she feels anything could happen, that she has so little control in the world that nothing, no place, is safe.

But Averil relaxes, slips into sleep trustingly. His breath against her throat is sweet, not like an adult's but like a child's, clear. His faith in her can calm her; if he trusts her, she must be trustworthy.

Copyright © 1990 by Antonya Nelson

Continues...

Excerpted from The Expendablesby Antonya Nelson Copyright © 1999 by Antonya Nelson. Excerpted by permission.
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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Scribner
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1999
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0684846853
• ISBN 13: 9780684846859
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 212
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande