Sydney Avey
Dynamic Woman — Changing Times
365 Short Stories (Details)–Week Twenty-two
Vivid details do more to stir emotions than snappy dialogue or clever exposition. This week I’m tracing the emotions I feel when I read a story to their source, a vivid detail.
“How Beautiful with Shoes”, by Wilbur Daniel Steele, 50 Great Short Stories, Edited by Milton Crane
She set the pail down on the ground beside her bare, barn-soiled feet.
…”if there was emotion in her it was the purely sensuous one of feeling the clods of the furrows breaking softly between her toes.”
The soles of our feet are sensitive. Throughout this story We feel Amarantha’s simple pleasure and ultimate terror in our feet.
- “Sent”, by Karen E. Bender, NarrativeMagazine.com
Details about an infant in jeopardy heighten the poignancy in this story about the fragility of human life.
“Adam lifted the sheet. Right on the mattress, beside her wrestling brothers, the newborn infant was sleeping. Her arms were over her head as though she were celebrating…She was a baby, and I held her to me, her breath, frail as a butterfly’s, against my heart.”
- “Patchwork Elephant”, by Emma Torzs, NarrativeMagazine.com
The un-parented son of “a delightful furious drunk, and “a murky-eyed NASCAR addict” becomes the nineteen-year-old “on his knees in a grimy kitchen in front of his train-hopping pregnant girlfriend, begging her to keep their baby.” You get the picture.
- “A Thousand Acres”, by Jane Smiley, Writing America, NEA
In vivid detail, Smiley equates the lines of tile her father laid to improve the stability of the soil to the way it improved life for the generations that followed.
“I imagined a floor beneath the topsoil, checkered aqua and yellow like the floor in the girls’ bathroom in the elementary school, a hard shiny floor you could not sink beneath, better than a trust fund, more reliable than crop insurance, a farmer’s best patrimony.”
- “Delicate Wives”, My Father’s Tears, by John Updike
In my article on Intimate Details published by FaithWriters this week I listed medical as an intimacy. Updike takes it a step further. These details that take place in Les’s mind help us feel his misdirected desire.
“For what was more majestically intimate even than sex but death? He imagined her motionless profile, gray with collapsed blood pressure, cradled in his arms.”
- “The Accelerating Expansion of the Universe”, My Father’s Tears, by John Updike
Uncle Wilber’s accent, “a soft, mild wheeze formed, possibly in patient conversation with animals,” brings me nose to nose with a horse.
- “The Three Day Blow”, by Earnest Hemingway, 50 Great Short Stories, Edited by Milton Crane
The wind blows and two men reveal their proclivities as the whiskey gets less watered down with each pour.
Thanks for these wonderful prose extractions….good writing is always a pleasure to read…and lifts our souls