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I love a bon mot, a witty saying or a good turn of phrase. I’m on the lookout for them in this week’s stories.

“Drawn Onward,” by Matt Madden, One Story Issue Number 182

The title and the story are both palindromes, meant to be read forward and backward. Told in graphic story form, star-crossed lovers pass like trains in and out of each others’ lives. This is my first experience with this form. My first take; our kids’ brains really are wired differently. Think about putting together a difficult 1,000 piece puzzle. Now think about constructing a 3-D version of that puzzle with three different visuals. You got it.

“Between Ship and Ice,” by Chelsey Johnson, One Story Issue Number 181

How much do you really want to know about what goes on inside another person, figuratively and literally? The Norwegian landscape provides the perfect terrain for this story about a conflicted father and his pre-teen daughter. I loved this turn of phrase:

Maybe the whole time in Minnesota he had been a tourist with a father visa.

“We Can’t Go Home,” by Jacky Ievoli, The Bohemyth

I had given my best friend away in marriage, but I still hadn’t kissed a boy.

…and she’s not eager for that experience. As it turns out, the BFF is better off in law school than in a hasty marriage. The number of bright young women who see singlehood as the better option appears to be growing. 

“Foreign,” by Allison Grace Myers, Crazyhorse Number 83, Spring 2013

A self-centered Texas teenager is eager to experience foreign culture and sex as the rite of passage she feels will make her interesting to her peers. She judges their lives too small to understand. In her rush to create a story for her life, her true experience is unexamined disappointment. Now she has a story to tell, but it’s not real and no one cares.

She still wants to tell them, though—that’s the worst part. She hates how desperately she wants them to know.

“A Taste for Winter,” an iStory by Lois P. Jones, NarrativeMagazine.com

Seven words at the end of this postcard tell the whole story:

I am not asked to sit down.

The black woman (a caregiver?) will not get her promised seat at the table. The sentence construction reinforces the emotional distance between the caregiver and her lover and his rich aunt. The two do not conspire to exclude her. Social convention will care of that.

“Regrets Only,” Ordinary Life: Stories, by Elizabeth Berg

Back to Berg. I enjoyed her cultural references in this story about a gay man who wants to hold out hope to his dying mother that she may yet have five Catholic grandchildren albeit post mortem. He engages a female friend in a caper she brands “too Lucy-and-Ethel.” Nailed that one.

“Beyond the Wall,” by Ambrose Pierce, Classic Short Stories

 He made daring incursions in to the realm of the unreal without renouncing his residence in the partly surveyed and charted region of what we are pleased to call certitude.

Today’s writing teachers would tell us to use simpler language, but I love the rhythm of this sentence and its cheeky tone.