The Wind by Lauren Groff, 2021
The magic trick:
Throwing the reader into what appears to be third-person narration before surprising with the reveal of a first-person narrator, intimately connected to the story
If you look at the years that I’ve been doing this SSMT site – so, basically mid-2014 to present – Lauren Groff probably has to be in that elite top 3 or 5 range of authors producing the best short stories during that span. So much good work during that stretch, and “The Wind” might be my favorite of the bunch.
The story taps into some Joyce Carol Oates tension bordering on horror. But it doesn’t revel in the heart of darkness the way JCO often likes to. “The Wind” is more concerned with the people than the violence.
The intro is particularly stunning. Cold open. The reader is thrown right into a family drama. No explanation but enough information to let us know the stakes are high. The characters are referred to simply as “the mother” or “the daughter.” It’s tense, for sure, but there is a distance too, because the narration is clearly third-person and impersonal third-person at that.
Then suddenly, tucked at the end of the sixth paragraph, Groff crushes us.
What felt like third-person narration suddenly reveals itself to be a first-person story told by someone with intimate knowledge of the situation. “These were my uncles and my mother as children,” the narrator tells us.
For the rest of the story this girl introduced to us as “the daughter” becomes “my mother.” Twenty minutes after finishing the story, I’m still wrapping my head around that shift and the way it changed the entire piece.
And that’s quite a trick on Groff’s part.
The selection:
Pretend, the mother had said when she crept to her daughter’s room in the night, that tomorrow is just an ordinary day.
So the daughter had risen as usual and washed and made toast and warm milk for her brothers, and while they were eating she emptied their schoolbags into the toy chest and filled them with clothes, a toothbrush, one book for comfort. The children moved silently through the black morning, put on their shoes outside on the porch. The dog thumped his tail against the doghouse in the cold yard but was old and did not get up. The children’s breath hovered low and white as they walked down to the bus stop, a strange presence trailing them in the road.
When they stopped by the mailbox, the younger brother said in a very small voice, Is she dead?
The older boy hissed, Shut up, you’ll wake him, and all three looked at the house hunched up on the hill in the chilly dark, the green siding half installed last summer, the broken front window covered with cardboard.
The sister touched the little one’s head and said, whispering, No, no, don’t worry, she’s alive. I heard her go out to feed the sheep, and then she left for work. The boy leaned like a cat into her hand.
He was six, his brother was nine, and the girl was twelve. These were my uncles and my mother as children.
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