short story long

Review of “Leave of Absence” by Christine Sneed, published in Short Story, Long

/ Keith Pilapil Lesmeister / Leave a comment

I’ve long been a fan of Christine Sneed’s work, and this story in Short Story, Long is a great example of how Sneed can take seemingly ordinary situations and turn them into a compelling story. “Leave of Absence” is about a couple who do in fact take a leave of absence from their “mid-level manager” positions and head west from Illinois to California to find themselves and to get away for a bit. The two get on pretty well—there are no major issues in the marriage—and in fact, Julie, the protagonist, likes this road-trip version of her husband who lets his hair grow long and “two-day stubble” mark his face.

The story starts with Julie in the bathroom of their recently purchased camper. She’s eavesdropping on the couple next door. What she gleans is one of those hypothetical “would you rather” situations. In this case, it’s would you rather have your head shaved or hand burned in boiling water? It seems a no-brainer, but the woman who’s being asked the question chooses the latter. After that, the couple in question—Julie and her husband Brett—go to the casino and pull slots. It’s there, at the casino, that the undertow of conflict rushes onto the scene: Julie and Brett have two kids, Andy and Lizzie, both in their twenties, and Julie worries over their wellbeing. Andy is sullen and prefers Only Fans to real-life intimacy, and Lizzie is distant and confides in Brett her life decisions, as opposed to talking with Julie, which becomes a point of contention throughout the rest of the piece.

The story is a midlife examination of this mid-fifties couple, and when they pose the question of what they want for the rest of their lives, both indicate: “I don’t know what I want.”

And that’s okay, they decide, because, “Everyone’s lost, to some extent.”

The story follows a fairly traditional story arc, but the rising and falling actions are more subtle, dictated more so by tone and pacing more so than events and actions.

So many of Sneed’s stories are like this: couples figuring out who they are, what they want, and what the future might hold for them, together and/or separately.

As they travel to their next stop along the journey, Julie contemplates her life and family and hopes her children aren’t lonesome. Maybe Julie’s biggest epiphany isn’t as much about what she wants but that despite all else, at least she has someone with whom to share and spend her time:  “You’re the only person who isn’t a stranger to me,” she tells Brett. And for now, that feels like enough.

Read the story here.

Christine Sneed’s most recent books are Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos, Direct Sunlight: Stories, and The Virginity of Famous Men. Her stories have appeared in publications including New England Review, Story, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, Ploughshares, and Boulevard. She’s received the Grace Paley Prize and the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library Foundation, among other honors and has been a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize. She lives in Pasadena, California and teaches for Northwestern University and Stanford Continuing Studies.

Review of “Time Management” by Caelyn Cobb, published in Short Story, Long

/ Keith Pilapil Lesmeister / Leave a comment

“Time Management” by Caelyn Cobb, published in Short Story, Long, is either a cautionary tale of corporate life, or it’s a reflection of what has already happened, or is happening. Probably both, but mostly the latter.

The narrative is told from a captivating POV. A third-person that uses the possessive “our” which is normally affiliated with a first-person POV. The narrator in “Time Management” refers to the main character of the story as “our girl.” This implicates readers in unconventional ways—creating a more personal realm of reading for what feels like a cool, distant telling of a story that is at once creepy, odd, fable-like, and reflective of our society’s relationship with late-stage capitalistic dehumanization of workers/people. The POV and the use of “our girl” makes it all the more personal.

While reading, I felt as if the piece was in conversation with other cautionary tales such as the television show “Severance,” and, in a way, Bartleby, The Scrivener. The three aren’t alike in format and genre, but they are, in their own ways, asking questions about how corporations, or society in general, treats women, employees, and the aging population, among other questions.

Objects play a significant role in the story: coffee/cups, cubicle dividers, a bell. These objects, among others, signify differences and, in some cases, changes in the characters. Sometimes the objects unify characters, at other times they divide.

Finally, the story is also a commentary on that one precious resource that unifies us all: time. (Can we even call time a resource?).

“Usually she only had time for sleep, chores, and staring at the wall until it was time to go back to work. Forget applying for those other jobs that her current job was supposed to lead to.”

Time is one of my writerly obsessions. I think time is fascinating—the way we attempt to understand it, define it, contain it, slow it down, speed it up: time is that wonderful equalizer, and while we have no way of controlling it in real life, we can absolutely manipulate it in the stories we write. In fiction writing, for instance—or any writing for that matter—we can massage the sentences and paragraphs to however much time we want. We can modulate how much time we take on the trip from point A to point B. It could be covered in a sentence, a paragraph, or maybe not at all. Maybe the hour-long drive exists only in the white space of a section break. (We were here, now we’re there). Or, we could move backward and show what happened yesterday. Or we can flash forward to tomorrow. These are wonderful writerly features that inform our writing, but they are impossible in real life: we can’t snap our fingers and suddenly arrive somewhere.

In “Time Management” Cobb pushes back on these ideas, delving into fantastical elements to explore what it might mean if we could actually manipulate time: would it make us happier or more successful? Would it make us a better person? This is a significant aspect of the story, and while I’d love to talk about it in more detail, I also don’t want to risk giving anything away. It’s worth a read to find out what happens.

“Time Management” is an engaging and thoughtful story on the menace of living and working in our go-go-go, climb-the-ladder work environment.

Check out the story here.

Caelyn Cobb is a writer and university press editor living in Queens, NY. She is the author of the short story collection Saturn Return, forthcoming from Whisk(e)y Tit Books. Her writing has appeared in Passages North, X-R-A-Y, HAD, and elsewhere.