Call, Ryan and Christy. Pocket Finger. Baltimore: Publishing Genius, 2008.

A lot of the new fiction I read online these days does good work with language and image, but not good work with character or story. Sometimes it's simply bad work, these things haven been lately short-shrifted in a, oh, post-whatever world. Call me old-fashioned, but when I want language and image I can go to poetry. I want my fiction to take me somewhere and show me some people I don't know and let me spend enough time with them that I can watch how something happens in their lives that makes me reconsider me own.

I also want brilliant sentences, and all of the images to be inscrutable. Too much to ask?

No! says Ryan Call, a buddy of mine who just released this great chapbook illustrated by his sister, which is appropriate as the story is about two siblings living quietly in the margins around a sick mother and a very sullen and terrifying father. I think what makes Ryan's book work so well is that he's (or his narrator's) directing all his best sentences, all his close watching and description, at this father and not at himself, and so what results is this close relationship between the observer and the otherwise distant observed, which the goings-on of the narrative then work to develop:

What Father had suffered during his brief absence, what he had inflicted upon others in his derangement, my sister and I could only imagine. We each held for his abilities a newfound, horrified respect, and with this respect we carefully guided him away from the estuary when he grew distraught by his failure to draw a single bite. [. . .]

My sister distracted him by locking her thumbs together and flapping her delicate hands softly about his face to coax him onto the pathway home. And I pressed lightly my tiny head into the small of his back and motored him along, occasionally losing my footing in the fetid mud, sobbing, filthy.

Pocket Finger is the exact sort of thing I would love to see in The Cupboard, but alas the good folks over at Publishing Genius got it. You can read the whole thing online if you like, or if you don't like, like I don't like, they'll mail you one with color images and a nice handwritten note. Go buy it, it's only like four bucks.