Virginia City by Claire Vaye Watkins, 2012
The magic trick:
Beautifully spotlighting the arc of a young group’s friendships
I love this story. It almost gets there. It’s ever so close to perfectly encapsulating a feeling I recognize; the way friendships intensify and fade through specific times in our lives.
I say almost because I think it falls just short of connecting the past to the current in the way it intends. We are told about the connections to Virginia City, then and now, near the end of the story, so that we can know that it’s poignant. Some of Watkins’s magic with blended timelines that she employs so deftly elsewhere in the Battleborn collection might have allowed us to see and feel the poignancy of the moment.
But no matter. I find this a special story just for having tried to reach such a transcendent feeling.
It is rare that stories even attempt to take this kind of subject matter seriously.
And that’s quite a trick on Watkins’s part.
The selection:
Nights we went to little clubs – XOXO, the Green Room, Imperial, the Hideout. We danced together in the pulsing colored lights, shoulder to shoulder, a perfect triangle. We spilled onto the street or into some alleys for a cigarette or a joint or a bump or just some air. When it was cold, I watched the steam rise from our sweat-soaked bodies, from Jules’s bare arms and shoulders, from the wet slope of Danny’s neck. We walked home together, crunching frost beneath our feet or listening to the early morning songs of birds.
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