Out There by Kate Folk, 2020
The magic trick:
Slow-paced with intention
Day two of Kate Folk here on the SSMT site.
I was pretty sure I didn’t like “Out There” at first. Way too on the nose about modern dating app life.
Oh, I soon realized, this isn’t really on the nose at all. This story is weird. All the turns I assumed were boring old 90-degree angles are, in fact, very much askew.
Then I was finding that the story was a little bit slow and perhaps not really going anywhere.
Oh, OK, I finally saw, this story isn’t aimless at all. It had a definite end in the mind from the very first sentence. I should’ve trusted the process from the start.
And that’s quite a trick on Folk’s part.
The selection:
The early blots had been easy to identify. They were too handsome, for one thing. Their skin was smooth and glowing, and they were uniformly tall and lean. Jawlines you could cut bread with. They looked like models, and they had no sense of humor.
I met one of them several years ago. My friend Peter had invited me to a dinner party hosted by a tech founder he’d grown up with in the Sunset, and with whom he’d once followed the band Phish around the country, selling nitrous poppers to concertgoers. Peter and I didn’t really hang out, beyond the meetings we attended in church basements for people who no longer drank. But I was bored, and it was a free dinner, and Peter made it sound as if he’d already asked a bunch of people who’d said no, which took some of the pressure off.
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