Asakiyume mita

I'm nearly done with Betsy-Tacy and Tib, which continues to be delightful. It's not just that the things the girls get up to are both very believable and amusing, but also the way it's told, the way Maud Hart Lovelace lets in the parents' perspective or the baby siblings', and how events flow one into the next kind of like a picaresque novel, but they're not traveling; they're just living their lives.

They want to cut off locks of hair to give to each other as keepsakes in case one of them dies--which nearly happens! Tacy gets diphtheria! But they end up cutting huge hanks of hair off, not single locks, which means they end up needing haircuts. And then they make a club focused on being good, but they're so intrigued by the penance they invent for if they do bad things that it doesn't work out as planned. I read sections of that out to Wakanomori, it was so funny.

And there was a description of Tib that stuck with me:

Tib was tiny but she was never scared.
"Come on," she said. "There's nothing to be afraid of." And she flew ahead like a little yellow feather.

That: like a little yellow feather.

And then I read another short story in the next issue of my gift subscription to the Sun, "Longshanks" by Samuel Jensen.

The narrator of the story, a guy at loose ends, is in a car crash out in the southwestern desert. The guy who crashed into him was ejected from the car, and when the narrator goes to help him, he sees the guy's dressed as an elf. Renaissance fair fliers flutter about, and with probably his dying breath, the guy worries about his bag. So our narrator takes it upon himself to take the bag to the fair and to convey the sad new about "the elf," as he thinks of the guy. He thinks to himself that the elf is very tall and beautiful, and the main point of the story seems to be to set up a contrast between the narrator's dramatic/romantic ideas of how things will go and the very ordinary reality of a very ordinary Ren fair:

The elf's last words had been toward this place. Out of respect, all modern English should be banned here. Flowers in your hair should be mandatory, and the only music should be made by wood and wire. Wasn't the whole point to put the modern shit away and attune to what's underneath? There are dads here pushing double-decker strollers. The elf must have hated that.

The narrator imagines that the elf must be a pillar of the Ren fair community, but in fact he turns out to have been a creep whom women avoided. Finally the narrator is goaded into opening the elf's bag, which up to now he hasn't done, annnnnd....

I burst out laughing. Because it contained... well, you guess:


(a) girls' panties
(b) a hand transcribed copy of The Lord of the Rings, written in tengwar
(c) an M4 carbine and other supplies for a mass shooting










If you guessed c, you are right.

It felt as I was reading as if the author, having set up the contrast between the head-in-the-clouds narrator and the dusty, sweaty real-world Ren fair, wasn't sure where to go and decided to add the mass shooting angle because hey! Everything tastes better with a mass shooting! It's like serial killers, only less stale! It was so over the top. But actually, thinking about it more, it seems possible the author started with the notion of the elf as a mass shooter and then worked backward to construct the story. If the former, he seems not in super control of his storytelling; if the latter, he seems somehow ... jaded?

It's all very litfic. But it *was* well written, and for all my criticisms, I enjoyed reading it.