“A Stone Watermelon” by Lois Braun

One of the benefits of the current renaissance of the short story is that no one style is likely to attain hegemony over another. A spate of articles declaring the ascendancy of minimalism soon elicits a defence of alternative styles. Besides, with so many first-time writers practising the form, a diversity of approaches reflecting particular places and individuals is assured.

Lois Braun’s stories emerge from a mostly rural and domestic place, where people make habitual and sometimes surprisingly intuitive adjustments to adversary forces. A recurrent figure is the woman alone: widow, deserted or divorced wife, or just someone left for a time on her own. These women cope with the exigences of home, children, various animal appendages, and, of course, men.

Employing the classic triangle of husband, wife and lover, “Three Crows Dancing” begins familiarly enough with spilled cereal and window-cleaning, then convincingly reaches a climax of spilled milk and blood. Deftly folded into the human conflict are images of bird and animal life, as well as those of land and sky, all impressions of things coming sadly undone. It isn’t just the crows whose “tattered wings beat slowly,” but also the heroine’s.

“Golden Eggs” at first seems to examine this milieu even more narrowly, as a harried mother prepares breakfast and attempts to clothe her brood of 12 (!) children (all girls). However, the story works a marvellous turn on the tale of the golden eggs, where the small miracle of providing coats for all is performed through a mother’s ingenuity. But, like many fairy-tales, a sacrifice has had to be offered. The children troop off wide-eyed and happy; only she knows that the price of her invention may mean another pregnancy.

Braun’s best qualities are revealed in her longest story, “The No Place Bar and Grill.” I like the way the steady repetition of the bar’s full name complements the ballad-like quality of the story. This is a family melodrama of a father, mother and son, uprooted from their Oklahoma home and trying to rebuild their lives around the title establishment in Kingdom, North Dakota. Braun’s lively dialogue and adept use of nature are nicely exhibited here.

Truman didn’t answer until Artie was out of sight. Then he said, ‘I wanted to freeze the poison out of my veins. I wanted to see snow falling instead of pesticide. And I really wanted Artie to come back to us, here. I wanted him to come back different.’ A dragonfly with wings clicking landed on Truman’s knee. Its blood-coloured body was long and slender and virile. Straight wings intersected the body near the head. ‘I wanted to teach him how to fly. Why does he have such hatred for my airplane?’

With its bar-full of colourful minor characters and episodic structure, “The No Place Bar and Grill” suggests Braun has the makings of a novelist.

There is another aspect of Braun’s work that shouldn’t go unnoticed. It’s evident in the genies and devils of “Golden Eggs” and in the abandoned house of “The Stone Watermelon.” Here, and in other stories, she introduces the ghostly into the realm of the seemingly normal. I’m confident that Braun’s ultimate purpose is to invite us to accept the union of the material and spiritual. “Dream of the Half-Man,” with its story within a story about the collision between a motorcyclist and a drunken driver, is worthy of Jan Brunvand’s folktale collection, The Vanishing Hitch-hiker. “Fish Pedlar” plays an eerie yet touching variation on the motif of the woman alone.

The last and shortest story, “Hunting Clouds,” uses the image of the stone watermelon from the title story and transforms it. Initially, it was suggestive of the petrification of living organic values attached to a home. “Hunting Clouds” is a taut yet serene story of a man and woman who bump into something while boating on a lake. In this story, the watermelon becomes an image of renewal and of the link between man and nature. The night-boaters eat their gift from the water and return to shore accompanied by the strains of a Billie Holiday song. On such a strange and beautiful image Braun brings this thoroughly accomplished first collection of stories to an end. ♦

Howard Curle works with books, but reserves special passions for film and fiction.