The following stories illustrate the structuring power of narrative. From myth and enchantment to the dramas of daily life, these stories draw their readers from some beginning to some end. The human condition is a process of unfolding, not a state of being. We are creatures of time. Our truths, our ideas, our necessary fictions, do not emerge for us except through the staging of our lives.
“Camp Holocaust” imagines a theme park where actors, in order to achieve full verisimilitude, transform themselves into the emaciated and demoralized Jewish captives of historical reality. The piece satirizes the commercialization of history in contemporary discourse and exposes the moral dangers of ethical tourism. At a deeper level, it critiques the glorification of “work” in American society and the famished lives that Americans lead in the name of honest labor.
“Blue Lily of the Nile” recounts a reunion between a transgendered woman and an old male playmate from childhood. As the woman explains her motives for undergoing the Change to an alternately horrified and fascinated interlocutor, a mounting undercurrent of menace lifts the story from a study in social intolerance to an analysis of human psychology and manipulation.
“The Fire” narrates another reunion, this one between a woman, her current boyfriend, and a well-off writer who had once been the woman’s lover. Their meandering fireplace conversation unwittingly becomes a meditation on the tragic ironies of life and death. As they explore the intermingling of suffering and joy, the story's
central character comes to ponder the repetition and the randomness that circumscribe his existence.
“Eclipse” tells the story of a teenage girl eager to meet her stepbrother, soon to be released from prison for homicide. What kind of person would kill another human being? She soon discovers the banality of his crime and his all-too-ordinary nature. In disgust and curiosity, she takes her education in psychopathology into her own capable hands.
“The Crimson Amaranth” makes a fairy tale out of love in modern America. Through charming and sometimes disarming descriptions, the story develops the love between a handsome and wealthy man and a once-beautiful artist disfigured by an acid-attack in Bangladesh. The piece asks us to marvel at the magic of pure intentions and the poisons of insincere hearts.
All moral philosophy that does not begin with a human narrative is a lie.