TELL ME A STORY

In this world we live in, everyone is potential storyteller, and every storyteller is a potential Scheherazade. Know her, the queen from the Arabian nights tale who challenges Fate through the sheer power of storytelling? Here's the, uh, story told in short: King Sharyar is a man with terrible fear. Since he fears that every woman to become his wife will commit infidelity against him, he ends up killing his wives after the first night. Everyone, actually, except Scheherazade, a great storyteller with whom he enjoys 1,001 nights of storytelling. With her power to cook up a tale she conquers the fear of the King and, in the process, with each story, is able to postpone death - her death - one more time.

Allow me to be a Scheherazade to your King Sharyar so you won't kill me for whatever reason, a crime of passion in the making if you're that horribly passionate. So here's a short story which you may want to read between the lines.

Once upon a time they lived happily ever after.
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I love short stories. Shorts are a manna from heaven dousing the fire that is my attention deficit disorder. In my novel-readings I do this: An anthology of shorts must be by my side so when the novel-going gets tough, I pick up the anthology to calm me down. But this I learned. The biggest thing that grabs my attention away from the novel is the short story itself.

I have read hundreds, if not thousands, of short stories by writers from around the globe, and each time I read a beautiful story I discovered something vibrant in myself. They are my favorite literary form because, as Charles Baxter speaks of their quality, shorts are on many threshholds, between poetry and fiction, story and sketch, prophecy and reminiscence, the personal and the crowd.

Of those I read, these are few that continuously dazzle my memory, forming part of myself: Journey Back To The Source by Alejo Carpentier, a backward travel in time cleverly told in active (instead of passive) form, as in describing the furnitures to be growing instead of the character shrinking; A Country Husband by John Cheever, a not so distant cousin to the movie American Beauty; The Ledge by Lawrence Sargent Hall, the most melancholic I have read, about the death of two boys while on a hunting trip with their father/uncle; The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, which tells of a Marine officer's romantic struggles while leading his men out of harms way in Vietnam;

The Lost Regiment by Italo Calvino, a most ridiculuously hilarious flash fiction from this master fabulist; The Writer's Model by Molly Giles, a story brimming with women power in a masculine world with totalitarian atmosphere; Bulldog by Arthur Miller which I will briefly describe as a narrative on sensation, literally, figuratively; Blue Bouquet by Octavio Paz, a horrifying tale about an accidental meeting between a blue-eyed tourist and a deranged local who collects blue-eyes and forms them into a blue bouquet;

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been by Joyce Carol Oates, a most terrifying story about teenage seduction, an excellent attempt at interplay between dialogue on one hand, and time/space at the other, an everyday tale about two kids where the potential victim moves closer and closer to her predator seducer as the story progresses; A Pie Dance by Molly Giles, a wonderful love story between a woman and her dog;

Then there are the twin stories about chicken, My Brother's Peculiar Chicken from the Philippines, and Jakob's Chicken from The Czech Republic (the authors' names I unfortunately forgot), both light in treatment but heavy in characterizations; and of course, the greatest woman shortstoryteller of them all, Flannery O'Connor, whose three works form part of the greatest I've ever read: A Good Man Is Hard To Find; The Artificial Nigger; and, Everything That Rises Must Converge.

I could go on and on and on and on. Still and all I will summon you for help to advise me of any one or more that I may have missed reading. This way we can postpone not just death but bad life in celebration of our very own 1,001 nights.