“And Now You Must See Me Here” / West Branch Magazine

On World War Two and the cutting of summer lawns.

Check out “And Now You Must See Me Here” by David Ryan in West Branch (2,400 words). In it, you’re treated to a very-short-story-within-a-short-story. You’re handed WWII in a take-out bag.

The opening is an evocative reflection on the life of a sixteen-year-old immersing himself in the work-world as a mower of lawns at an Illinois condo complex. We meet Duke, the older, sun-blasted “lawn boss,” who assigns his handful of mowers to different sectors on the property.

The descriptions of the job, the kid’s older co-workers, the beauty and the horror (“dog crap alley”) of the physical setting, and the gathering feeling of the inescapable monotony of the daily-grind puts us right in the narrator’s cut-grass-stained shoes.

When he’s calling in sick with some regularity, Duke sits him down for a talk.

Then we’re in what feels like a paragraph that won’t end—Duke’s reflection on where he was at sixteen, as an underaged soldier in a fox hole in Normandy during WWII. Duke seems to be attempting to help his young employee reframe his introduction to the adult world of work, the adult world period, into something less dismissible.

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As a reader, you won’t want that endless paragraph to end. It’s worlds away from the condo complex, and it’s a story-within-a-story that would succeed as a short on its own.

In it, life is literally war. In just 1,400 words we get Duke’s voice and a string of keenly observed circumstances that could flesh out the better part of a novel. The idea of life as a waking dream is revisited…

“The present is just a dream that—like sleeping dreams—lies compulsively.”

…the idea of salt replaced in a body that’s toiling is revisited. It is, like the narrator’s description of the condo complex, beautiful and horrific, but at a much higher magnitude.

And in the story’s clean and clear close, a very satisfying summation: That “consequence comes whether you do anything to deserve it.”

It pushes our narrator out of the mini-war-torn-country of his hometown. Maybe Duke’s intention? Maybe just another point plotted on Ryan’s “vast, black baffle of chance” that is the world.

God, do I love a great short story.

West Branch is a “thrice-yearly Magazine of Poetry, Fiction, Essays and Reviews” out of Bucknell University. They post a number of fiction pieces under “latest work” on their website, so go there for an even better feel for what they’re looking for.

They’re open for submissions through April 1^st. They reopen on August 1^st. They’ll consider stories of up to thirty double-spaced pages. Check their submission page for specifics as there are a few of them and you want to get that right.

Thanks for the story, David Ryan. Thanks for the read, reader :)

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