Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

Photo: Tony Gutierrez/ Associated Press

It didn't make much sense to me then, what Gnut was going through, but after Pila and me had our little twins, and we put a family together, I got an understanding of how terrible love can be. You wish you hated those people, your wife and children, because you know the things the world will do to them, because you have done some of those things yourself. It's crazy-making, yet you cling to them with everything and close your eyes against the rest of it. But still you wake up late at night and lie there listening for the creak and splash of oars, the clank of steel, the sounds of men rowing toward your home.

--Wells Tower in Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

Find the book and read it. Tower has crafted sad, beautiful and often desperate characters around prose filled with shimmering detail into what can make or break an afternoon, or an entire. I don't know why short stories don't get more love from the world of readers. Short stories are not only my quick-to-consume fixes, but also my secret love and source of envy.

Sure, the novel has the reputation of the record-setting home run slugger, or maybe more aptly, an entire baseball season. Novels are big, in both scope and cast of characters. They often play out slowly, taking long-passaged road trips and perhaps even an all-star break somewhere in the middle. Novels are the long slog, dealing with the minute details of many lives at the same time as grand conspiracies and odysseys.

The short story though, is the clutch shortstop who may not be swinging for the fences in plotted ambition, but the short story/stop has a scar under his left eye where a torrent of a grounder scorched off his glove, leaving a gash when he was fifteen. Every time he squints to field a ball, he can is aware of that momentary lapse of attention years ago. He has a secret communication with his glove, with the second-baseman, with the dryness of the dirt, so that he can elevate to acrobatic swoops after a line drive. The short story is the half-inning that ends in a miraculous double play and a toss of the ball to the the nine-year old girl behind the dugout.