Links to the online texts from The Sun, which will allow two free accesses before asking for subscription money (subs can be print and online, or online only, for the same price):
"Clean Breaks" by Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum (my review of her first collection, This Life She's Chosen) Lunstrum's website
Lunstrum's story is about a woman not quite adrift, but unsure of her destination, as she takes a small boat up and down the coast of the northwestern contiguous U. S. and southwestern Canada, who finds herself helping a man and his daughter in distress in another craft. He's been sold some watered-down diesel by shady dealers, and, worse, his young daughter is suffering from a raging fever. As a nurse who's taking a sort of sabbatical, she reflects on this in comparison with her own situation with her daughter, going years back, as she diagnoses and tries to stabilize the young girl.
It's a meditative story, even given the urgency of the crises before them...and those in the past. This story seems more informed by life experience than those in her first collection, and is worth the read.
"The Healer" by Rob Keast (improbably, there are at least three Rob Keasts going by that version of their first name in some sort of public life on the web, at least, but this Rob Keast does have this essay online from Writer's Digest)
The only story in this later issue is a vignette, albeit just long enough to be long for a vignette...another meditative work (The Sun does gravitate in that direction), in which a young man, teaching conversational/business English in Japan, hopes that certain rituals he engages in help a close college friend and his mother, who have some health crises back home. He's not so very sure that anything he does has any effect, but engages in the mildly ritualistic behavior, riding his local subway circuit with a kind of Shinto (I think that, rather than Buddhist) talisman, in hopes of somehow lending or engendering what amounts to good karma for his loved ones. It's a reasonable portrait of what we do when we can do little, if anything, else, in the face of peril to others...more, whether one realizes it or not, to soothe ourselves and with the wan but desperate hope we can make a difference thus. The first story I've read by Keast, and solid work, with some wit added to the protagonist's perplexity.
For more, and much more prompt, examples of Weds. Short Stories this week, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
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