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195 pages
$15.95
When a house burns to the ground, a man must come to terms with the limits of memory and friendship. After his father’s death, a boy lures a fellow camper into the woods and savagely beats him. These are representative characters mostly troubled men and boys in Fires of Our Choosing, the debut short-story collection by Eugene Cross, a native of Erie, Pennsylvania, who now lives in Chicago and teaches fiction writing at Columbia College.
An emerging talent whose stories have appeared in many of the best literary journals, Cross could become his generation’s Richard Ford, chronicling the mischievous, bewildered, and often devilishly funny ways of the American male. Unlike Mr. Ford’s best-known short fiction, however, these stories are not dramatized retellings of long-ago events burned into memory. Instead, Cross investigates how men and boys handle the echoes of their misfortunes, their pain and poor decisions like a ringing in the ear. These characters keep clawing at life, even when they know it’s no use.
The violence in these stories, tempered with a darkly comic worldview, is used to deepen the characterization of these men and boys. Marty, the bully in Rosaleen, If You Know What I Mean, is asked during an anger management session to recount something he’s proud of, but he can only think of having taught his hamster to fetch. The hamster’s name, for the record, is LeBron James. When a girl in the therapy session shares the story of an enduring urban legend about hamsters that she read about online, Marty doesn’t believe it. The girl counters with a line of dialogue that quietly reverberates throughout the collection: “If you can teach them to fetch, she said, it seems to me anything’s possible.”
Readers will likewise believe that anything is possible in this impressive debut. A respectable range is on display in “Come August,” written in the second person, and in the even shorter “This Too,” but they’re more like embers alongside the searing blaze of “The Brother,” “Only the Strong Survive,” and the remarkable title story, which reminds us that uncertainty matches our every step, “that wind could sweep you off the road, or else the earth could open up and swallow you whole.”
Cross is at his best when burrowing into wider perceptions and preconceptions of what it means to be a man, or a boy rocketing toward manhood, in America today or at least in western Pennsylvania, the setting for these stories. Nature serves an important role here, and animals wind up dead in a few stories, though never gratuitously. “Only the Strong Survive” is narrated by Ronny, a taxidermist who attends to the ruined creatures and tries to make them beautiful again, as he does for one customer’s recent kill, a wild gobbler:
“The coppery smell of blood mixed with the strong smell of ammonia I use to clean the workroom. I make a cut on the neck, reach down and gently pull on the sac-like crop, and when I cut it open I show Joey what the tom ate for his last meal, feed corn. I carefully clean away all the blood and dirt and grit until the feathers that remain are spotless. Although the bird was molting, I do my best to begin recreating the feather pattern Mother Nature gave him.”
A swift metaphor for a man whose own feathers are ruffled, yes he’s not keen on watching his girlfriend’s son for a few days, and must reckon with her son’s burgeoning violence as he serves a suspension for roundhouse-kicking another boy in the school’s cafeteria, but Ronny also remains captured in time and place, manipulated and posed by outside forces, reliving his own bullied childhood when he dates a single mother who was once married to his high school tormenter. The story’s ending is believable and satisfying, and like the rest of this book, it resists easy resolutions and sentimentality. The book’s cover, an image of flames rising from within a pair of empty brogans, is a compelling visual metaphor for the lives of characters who burn from the inside with rage, fear, yearning, self-doubt, and ever-aching love.
Andrew Scott is the author of Naked Summer: Stories (Press 53, 2011). His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Esquire, Ninth Letter, The Cincinnati Review, Mid-American Review, Glimmer Train Stories, The Writer’s Chronicle, and other publications. He lives in Indianapolis. Learn more at AndrewScottOnline.com.