The Inconvenience of the Wings: Stories

by Silas Dent Zobal

Overview

The stories in The Inconvenience of the Wings inhabit a imaginative landscape so expansive in conception that it permeates the border between the natural and the supernatural, showing us that what seems beyond our ken is as much a part of the human experience as the tactile ground on which we tread. The situation of a ghostly mother spelling out hints and instructions to her suspicious son in "The Inconvenience of the Wings" is balanced by sharp observations of nature, as in, "A whippoorwill, hunting mosquitoes by the pond, gave the cry that gave the bird its name." The macabre rendering of a man's consciousness trapped by a stroke in his inert body in "The Language of Men Who Speak of What They Do Not Understand" is set against precise natural descriptions, such as, "Birch trees creak under the wind's pressure; a chorus of hounds begin to howl and keen." In "Outlaw," a group of feckless friends attempts to rob a gas station and causes an explosion worthy of a Quentin Tarantino scene, yet the description juxtaposes violence with a poetic evocation of nature: "The red maple leaves lifted skyward. Bloodgouts and furstrips and flesh hung among the branches. Then the wet sound of body parts falling....I pointed toward the blackened Japanese maples and what once had been my dog." Trapped in a vacation cabin by a blizzard, some friends solve the problem of finding one of their company dead by placing her body in the freezing barn, necessitating the digging of a passage which is described in strangely beautiful language: "We shoveled. Wind harried the snow in horizontal gusts. We channeled between the house and the barn: the snow even with my navel, the sky a vertiginous swirl, the air scented of cold."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781942515012
Publisher:	Fomite
Publication date:	04/15/2015
Pages:	180
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.41(d)

About the Author

Silas Dent Zobal was born in Bellingham, Washington, and spent his teenage years in Rockford, Illinois. His fiction has appeared in the Missouri Review, Glimmer Train, Shenandoah, North American Review, and many others journals. Stories from The Inconvenience of the Wings won the inaugural Discovered Voices Award from the Iron Horse Literary Review, a scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and first place in the Glimmer Train Fiction Open. His debut novel, People of the Broken Neck, will be released by Unbridled Books in Fall 2016.

Editorial Reviews

★ 2015-05-29
Zobal's debut collection of well-crafted short stories leaves a lasting impression.Although grounded in the real world, Zobal's stories read like fairy tales and urban legends. In the opening story, "Camp of Low Angels," a group of boys flip their counselors' controlled world upside down—hilarity and heartbreak ensue. A woman dies during a snowed-in vacation in "The Bellwether," and her companions must dig an icy channel to the barn to make a place for her corpse. In "Outlaw," an attempted Old West-style robbery of a gas station goes absurdly wrong. And in "And We Saw Light," a bare-foot woman walks singing down a road, carrying a dripping gunnysack, its contents unrevealed. These images evoke weighty themes: savagery, loss, memory, and death. Death lurks in every story: "The water spoke of what it was to be dead. It was flat, still, and empty; yet on its cold surface wore our lifeless image." The stories meditate on how people confront the inevitability of death, how they talk about it or avoid talking about it, how they remember the dead and, in remembering, keep them alive. One character says, "Let me admit that I have never believed that the dead are entirely gone." Zobal draws attention to language, sometimes via his characters, who ponder the meanings and shapes of words. In the title story, a ghost writes words for the living in spilled salt on the table: "Woodshed, read the words in salt, birdcall, bone." Zobal also experiments with structure. The tales spiral in on themselves or proceed in unconnected bursts, like the memories they evoke. Each story links to the one that came before it, sometimes by only a word or image, sometimes by a larger theme or emotion. The final story, "The Hospital," completes the chain, delivering an emotional change-up of both grief and hope for a new life.Haunting images and poetic prose flood this noteworthy collection.

Kirkus Reviews