Welcome to Litsy!

I loved everything about this feminist collection of #shortstories by award-winning #Canadianauthor Audrey Thomas. The richly-evoked settings vary from Ghana to Galiano Island to Mexico and Scotland. The prose style also varies, including stream of consciousness, multiple viewpoints & epistolary, sometimes enigmatic, always with carefully crafted sentences. Best is that they are about women‘s lives & seem to live on almost like novels in my head.

He and his first wife had been so shy, so horribly reticent about their bodies. It had nearly killed him. It would, in the end, have killed him. She had written him long, hysterical letters, proclaiming her love, her unhappiness, her desire to try again. Or presenting him with past hurts like unpaid bills.

She had been thinking of failures & suicides & had gone to mass on Palm Sunday in hopes of finding something positive—if only for a second, if only for an instant, if only, even, an aura or a whiff of hope for her salvation. Outside the Parroquia women and men were braiding palms into elaborate patterns. She bought a small crucifix and went in, covering her head, but the mass was a disappointment.

“Wait a minute, I want to buy a balloon.”
“What colour? I‘ll treat you to one.”
“Red,” she said, “yellow, I don‘t care.”
In a sudden rush of delight he bought them all. Eighteen, twenty, he wasn‘t sure how many. The balloon seller thought he was crazy. Loco loco.

-from the story A Monday Dream at Alameda Park

(Image: Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park by Diego Rivera, from the internet)

I‘m trying to decide whether to have cookies for breakfast or something more nourishing. What do you say? I‘m definitely starting with tea and another story from the tagged book.

#SundaySentence

When Margaret looks at me I tell her she resembles a whisk broom.

(Internet photo)

My sweetie has given me a short story advent calendar for the previous four years, but this year her surgery got in the way. I‘m making my own one-short-story-a-day-in-December regimen by combining my buddy read (with Shawn) of the tagged book, and a collection of Japanese stories gifted to me by my dear friend Kathy.