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xf_book_club2009-04-12 09:25 pm
wendelah1) wrote in xf_book_club2009-04-12 09:25 pm
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Story 79: "Strangers and the Strange Dead" by Kipler
This week's story, nominated by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bravenewcentury, is "Strangers and the Strange Dead" by Kipler. In the 2000 Spooky Awards, it tied with "Aquinnah" by Anjou for first place for best mid-length story. I suspect it would make many writers' top ten lists, as it is technically brilliant, memorable, and original.
Summary: In which dead bodies and shivering people disturb the hilltown of Bradenton, and our young, orphaned narrator serves hot beverages to the investigating agents even as she ponders the peculiar, elusive nature of their relationship.
I was in the coffee shop, late afternoon, mid-January. I liked to work the afternoon shift, from 11 to 4:30, because no one came for a bagel or a sandwich at 4:00; the most I had to do was brew another pot of decaf, refresh the cream in the creamer. That gave me time to sit in the big booth and write. I was working to save money to start at college the next fall. Technically I was too old to be a freshman - 21 - but it was time for me to get out of town. So, I sat alone in the coffee shop with my books and my paper when the door opened and the bell went off to alert me. A man stood there in the slanting light. I couldn't really see him but heard his voice: "I need some food."
I got up and moved behind the counter.
"We close in a half-hour," I said. "There's not much left. A couple muffins and some beef barley."
"Soup?" the man asked, and I looked at him then because his voice shook and his teeth chattered as he finished speaking. He was slight, swallowed by the jacket he wore. His lined face was dirty or bruised - I couldn't tell which - and his right coat sleeve was torn from elbow to cuff. At first I thought he was drunk but then I saw a drop of water run off the pull-cord of his hood and realized that he was wet and cold.
"You OK?" I asked, wondering if I should be alone with him.
He looked at me, then pointed out the window, toward the hills.
"I was up there," he said. "I need some food."
"Your car break down?" I asked.
"No. I was up in the woods."
Up in the woods was nothing in summer and even less in winter. Bare trees, cold ground, our little mountain and then another and twenty minutes' drive on Route 60 to the next town.
"You were camping?" I asked. The man stared at me, his face blank as though I'd been speaking a language he'd forgotten. I pressed on. "Were you lost?"
"Lost," he said. "Yes."
"God," I said, and scalded myself pulling the ladle out of the soup pot. I brought a bowl to the man, and he looked at it for a minute, as if he'd forgotten how to eat, too, but then he picked up the bowl - no spoon - and drank the broth down in a series of gulps. The barley and celery he pushed into his mouth with the fingers of his left hand. The fingers were shaking, still.
"Can I get another bowl?" he asked.
The smell of him hit me then. I knew it from hunting parties and schools of fishermen, times when they'd come back from a trip to the woods with no running water and no women. And I knew the smell from trips to Boston, walking past the men on the street-corners, the ones who rattled tin cans as I moved by. People who are tied to normal life don't carry that smell.
If the link doesn't work, her stories are archived at Gossamer. If anyone has a working email address for her feedback, let me know. Suggestions for next time can be made here.
Strangers and the Strange Dead.
Kipler's Fan Fiction
bravenewcentury, is "Strangers and the Strange Dead" by Kipler. In the 2000 Spooky Awards, it tied with "Aquinnah" by Anjou for first place for best mid-length story. I suspect it would make many writers' top ten lists, as it is technically brilliant, memorable, and original.Summary: In which dead bodies and shivering people disturb the hilltown of Bradenton, and our young, orphaned narrator serves hot beverages to the investigating agents even as she ponders the peculiar, elusive nature of their relationship.
I was in the coffee shop, late afternoon, mid-January. I liked to work the afternoon shift, from 11 to 4:30, because no one came for a bagel or a sandwich at 4:00; the most I had to do was brew another pot of decaf, refresh the cream in the creamer. That gave me time to sit in the big booth and write. I was working to save money to start at college the next fall. Technically I was too old to be a freshman - 21 - but it was time for me to get out of town. So, I sat alone in the coffee shop with my books and my paper when the door opened and the bell went off to alert me. A man stood there in the slanting light. I couldn't really see him but heard his voice: "I need some food."
I got up and moved behind the counter.
"We close in a half-hour," I said. "There's not much left. A couple muffins and some beef barley."
"Soup?" the man asked, and I looked at him then because his voice shook and his teeth chattered as he finished speaking. He was slight, swallowed by the jacket he wore. His lined face was dirty or bruised - I couldn't tell which - and his right coat sleeve was torn from elbow to cuff. At first I thought he was drunk but then I saw a drop of water run off the pull-cord of his hood and realized that he was wet and cold.
"You OK?" I asked, wondering if I should be alone with him.
He looked at me, then pointed out the window, toward the hills.
"I was up there," he said. "I need some food."
"Your car break down?" I asked.
"No. I was up in the woods."
Up in the woods was nothing in summer and even less in winter. Bare trees, cold ground, our little mountain and then another and twenty minutes' drive on Route 60 to the next town.
"You were camping?" I asked. The man stared at me, his face blank as though I'd been speaking a language he'd forgotten. I pressed on. "Were you lost?"
"Lost," he said. "Yes."
"God," I said, and scalded myself pulling the ladle out of the soup pot. I brought a bowl to the man, and he looked at it for a minute, as if he'd forgotten how to eat, too, but then he picked up the bowl - no spoon - and drank the broth down in a series of gulps. The barley and celery he pushed into his mouth with the fingers of his left hand. The fingers were shaking, still.
"Can I get another bowl?" he asked.
The smell of him hit me then. I knew it from hunting parties and schools of fishermen, times when they'd come back from a trip to the woods with no running water and no women. And I knew the smell from trips to Boston, walking past the men on the street-corners, the ones who rattled tin cans as I moved by. People who are tied to normal life don't carry that smell.
If the link doesn't work, her stories are archived at Gossamer. If anyone has a working email address for her feedback, let me know. Suggestions for next time can be made here.
Strangers and the Strange Dead.
Kipler's Fan Fiction
no subject
I CAN HAZ THEME?
I think Nature is a central theme to this story. The interplay between life/death - vitality/inertia seems to come up time and again. The prose takes on a strange energy as the narrator manages to co-exist, vitally attuned to what is happening around her, yet separate from what she is perceiving. Her life is not the river of this story. She is ‘writing the river’. The story seems to use this dissonance between the stillness of observation and the vitality of involvement as its recurring theme.
META:
As
Kipler addresses the feeling I think some fans have of being torn between wanting to get into the vital heart of the story and feeling contrarily that we must afford the story as much privacy as possible. What the narrator says about telling a true story, about telling only the things she could know, ties in with how she feels about death - that in their state of strangeness the dead deserve our silence and reverence. This is a meta story, but it manages the polar opposite of what most meta sets out to accomplish: it mystifies mulder and scully’s story. In it’s reverence for their story, it shows us only what we can know for fact, before ushering us away.
SCULLY EMBODIES THE THEME:
Throughout the story the living and the dead, while part of the same basic plot, seem to be held separate. Likewise, Scully can be seen to embody both the thematic elements of this story: She is ‘holding herself still and apart’ from seemingly everything. She seems to be a microcosm in and of herself. Is she trying to remain stable and unchanging while mulder is absent? (I think so.) At the same time she is moving, inexorably, relentlessly, like a current or a seasonal shift. She seems unswayed by the world around her, but she is intent on something we cannot fully understand. She is elemental within herself, worn down.
I like that Scully is really the spine of this story from the beginning and it simply takes some time for the full scope of her role to become apparent. She follows the original abductee from 1994 to 2006. She is in the newspaper article. Kipler is smart to use her as a way of conveying to us the underlying mood of the piece. Kipler has taken her own narrator’s advice and written the river. I think Scully is our river in this story. She is the element that we know in our bones, that can be spoken of and understood.
BUILDING A STORY TO THE ‘MAKE-OR-BREAK’ POINT:
Unfortunately, once I realized early on that Scully had to be the basis on which I measured what was happening, I was relatively sure that Mulder had been abducted and was being searched for. The ending wasn’t much of a surprise. Still, despite my relative certainty, I felt unspeakably relieved of some unnamed burden once mulder - the real mulder - was confirmed found. scully's quiet "i've been looking for you, mulder" was just a dynamite line.
I'd say this story was written to a make-or-break point. For scully, ‘yes you’ve found him’ is all that matters. ‘No you haven’t’ means nothing, means ‘keep holding yourself in suspension’. Similarly, by the end of the story, as a reader I felt that ‘Yes I was right in my assessment of the situation’ would mean that the story made sense and completed itself and I would feel the payoff of that. ‘No I was wrong in my assessment’ would have left the story floundering and senseless and it would have doubtlessly been very disappointing. Effectively, Kipler raised the emotional stakes. I was holding my breath the entire fic, like scully, 'waiting for something to be over'. was it mulder? WAS IT MULDER!?
I think that kind of coercive story telling, when done as well as this, is pretty amazing.
no subject
Keep it up, fangirl.
no subject
I love this.<3