Teenage Punk by Lucia Berlin, 1988
The magic trick:
A beautiful intermission section
Another Lucia Berlin gem here
It’s a very short story. It moves very quickly, and it has to because it depends on a beginning state, an end state, and a crucial intermission in between. That’s a lot to do in two pages.
There is a lot of disgustingness in the beginning. Kids in trouble. Bad smells. Divorce. And in the very end, there is a return to snark and disrespect.
But that middle section?
The narrator and her son’s friend lay in a ditch at dawn to watch a flock of cranes drink water. It’s fairly rapturous. What happens exactly? Well, you can interpret it a lot of different ways. But I’m not sure it even matters. The key thing is its beautiful contrast to the harsher world of the start and end of this story.
And that’s quite a trick on Berlin’s part.
The selection:
After a long time the cranes did come. Hundreds, just as the sky turned blue-gray. They landed in slow motion on brittle legs. Washing, preening on the bank. Everything was suddenly black and white and gray, a movie after the credits, churning
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