My favorite writings are the short "Mystery Stories" by Sharon Krinsky because each one of these stories are only about five sentences each yet provoke so much thought. I love cats so "The Talking Cat" grabbed my eye. I noticed that the entire first sentence is "I went to a performance." That sparked off something in my head that said this is a really important fact. A person there is talking about a woman and her cat and the main character meets the woman and the cat after the show and the cat tells the man that they have a very nice rapport. The woman was apparently jealous. This is really thought provoking for me I wonder what implications are there based on the fact that a person was talking about this woman and her cat at a "performance." I wonder maybe if it was a comedy routine and they were a part of a joke, or if it was a poem about them, or maybe he was playing music and just mentioned them in passing. And the stranger getting along with the cat made the woman jealous which I suppose is a normal reaction but it is also strange that the cat shook hands with the main character and talked to him. It is a very interesting writing.
One of the stories I felt almost touching was "Morning News" by Jerome Stern. The reason why I say that I find it "almost touching" is because initially my mind filled in all the holes with a very romantic touching story but then I reread it and filled in the holes with something dreadful and less touching. To be specific the story is about a man who learns from a doctor that he has some terminal illness but that is only assumed by the reader based on what he says. This story does a wonderful job of leaving out every detail that is not essential for the idea of the story so that the reader will assume the rest. I thought it was touching because I assumed that he must have some sort of normal natural terminal health problem like cancer and he doesn't have long to live and now he has to tell his wife. But when I reread it I realized it could be anything such as liver failure from drug use and the drugs in his body will kill him soon or maybe he has an STD from cheating on his wife and he will die from it and has to explain it to her. However, these details don't change the overall meaning of the story but it is fascinating that an author can leave so much up to the reader.
I loved the story called "Wallet" by Allen Woodman. I felt like this story was the most anecdotal out of all of the short fiction writings and yet it still managed to be more about the thought provoking aspects than the story itself. It was about an old man that lost his wallet from a pickpocket and decided to plant a decoy wallet in his pocket to set up the pickpocket to steal from the old man again so he can catch him. Once the pickpocket takes the wallet a security guard catches the thief and then finds the wallet to be empty so the old man got in a car with a driver ready for a get away. This is fascinating because the story is simple and quirky but the aspects of this story that the person that got robbed was the one that had a get away driver and had to get away from the security guard which is a huge juxtaposition between him and the actual thief. I also imagine this to be deeper than just a vigilante act and when I think of old men I think of people with a lot of regret in their life and they try to take action to make up for those feelings so in that regard I felt like the thief was ironically becoming the victim of this old man's pent up feeling all his life. I also like that these writings are all short and that my thoughts consist of at least ten times the amount of words than what are written in each story. I believe one word is worth a thousands others!
Great responses here, well done!
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