Her wedding called off after her fiancé breaks her neck in a careless auto accident, the protagonist spends her summer evenings scrounging in the sand for the used condoms left behind by trysting young couples on the beach, so that she might inseminate herself with the warm contents back in her car.Yet two of Ms Homes's most striking stories do not rely on the overtly bizarre.
What cannot be seen by the camera lens is what matters most: what stories do these photographs tell?
But most short stories don't have neat happy endings, or even neat endings at that.
Most of these stories do not end amicably.
It began with a picture in my mind, as most of my stories do.
The moral of many of these stories -- and unlike Mr. Ford's earlier fictions, most of these stories do have simplistic morals -- is that, in one character's words, "other people affect you".
However, unlike most narratives, patients' "stories" do not necessarily follow a logical sequential beginning, middle, and conclusion script.
Most real-life stories don't fit together with the simplicity and the elegance of fiction, but writers have a tendency to let narrative guidelines and rules affect memories, polishing them and fitting them into the story.
In most stories, I don't necessarily want to know where the characters go after the ending, but in this case I see Auntie Mei's future well.
