Sightings

B.J. Hollars

Description

2014 AAUP Public and Secondary School Library Selection

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B. J. Hollars's debut short story collection offers ten thematically linked tales, all of which are out to subvert conventional notions of the Midwestern coming-of-age story. The stories feature an assemblage of Bigfoot believers, Civil War reenactors, misidentified Eskimos, and grief-stricken clowns, among other outcasts incapable of finding a place in their worlds. In these marvelous stories, we can join a family on a very 21st-century trip along the Oregon Trail, watch as a boy builds a brother from a vacuum cleaner, follow a sandlot baseball team as it struggles to overcome an invasion by its Native American neighbors, and experience how a high school basketball squad takes to Sasquatch roaming its court. This genre-bending collection charts a bizarre pathway through the thickets of life on the road to adulthood. Pushing the limits of realism, these stories capture the peculiar rites of passage of growing up Midwestern.

Acknowledgments

Indian Village
Schooners
Sightings
Westward Expansion
The Clowns
Line of Scrimmage
Dixie Land
Loose Lips Sink Ships
Robotics
Missing Mary

Sujets

• Short story
• Short Stories
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 25 mars 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253008466
• Langue: English

Extrait

After reading a short story, my highest compliment is Damn, I wish I d have written that. It must have sounded like a curse-fest took place in my house as I read B. J. Hollars s hilarious Sightings, a collection of pitch-perfect stories. Fans of Kevin Wilson, Lewis Nordan, George Saunders, and Karen Russell need to add B. J. Hollars to their must-read list.
GEORGE SINGLETON , author of Stray Decorum

In Sightings, B. J. Hollars brings us stories of those on the fringe but does so with an open-eyed awe that is missing from much of today s fiction. These aren t weathered, been-there, done-that, tales but fresh, exciting tales of those coming of age.
DAN WICKETT , co-founder of Dzanc Books

Each of the ten stories in B. J. Hollars s Sightings offers a rare combination of humor, insight, and coming-of-age heartbreak. Taken as a whole, the book left me awestruck, dazed, as if I d just had my own face-to-face with Sasquatch.
CHAD SIMPSON , author of Tell Everyone I Said Hi

In these amazing stories, which are rife with savagely entertaining characters, the most exhilarating sighting of all is Hollars s adept humor and impeccable prose, page after page. Readers indeed come away with the feeling of having had a true encounter with the fantastic. This unique collection, a bildungsroman at the intersection of private journal and urban legend, is not to be missed.
ALISSA NUTTING , author of Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

How I loved getting lost in the wilds of B. J. Hollars s stories. Steeped in the landscape of the Midwest, the characters in Sightings push against their own strangeness and solitude in ways that thrill and astonish. This is a wonderful, richly-imagined debut.
LAURA VAN DEN BERG , author of What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us
Sightings
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington Indianapolis
Sightings
stories
B. J. Hollars
This book is a publication of
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
601 North Morton Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders 800-842-6796
Fax orders 812-855-7931
2013 by B. J. Hollars
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences - Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-00838-1 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-0-253-00846-6 (e-book)
1 2 3 4 5 18 17 16 15 14 13
TO MY WIFE, MEREDITH, WHOSE CAREFUL EYES HELPED ME SPOT THESE SIGHTINGS
It was a small town by a small river and a small lake in a small northern part of a Midwest state. There wasn t so much wilderness around you couldn t see the town. But on the other hand there wasn t so much town you couldn t see and feel and touch and smell the wilderness.
RAY BRADBURY, The Halloween Tree
Contents
Acknowledgments
INDIAN VILLAGE
SCHOONERS
SIGHTINGS
WESTWARD EXPANSION
THE CLOWNS
LINE OF SCRIMMAGE
DIXIE LAND
LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS
ROBOTICS
MISSING MARY
Credits
Acknowledgments
This book would never have been possible without the help of a grand troupe of family, friends, editors, and supporters. I am indebted first and foremost to my co-conspirators in the MFA program at The University of Alabama (you know who you are), and in particular, to Michael Martone, Wendy Rawlings, and Kate Bernheimer, in whose classrooms many of these stories were born.
I am also grateful for the encouragement of a wide array of editors, including Megan Paonessa of Flying House, Jill Adams of The Barcelona Review, Caitlin McGuire of the Berkeley Fiction Review, Christopher Heavener of Annalemma Magazine, Mike Czyzniejewski of Mid-American Review, Jill Meyers of American Short Fiction, Brenda Miller of the Bellingham Review, Ryan Ridge of Faultline, Jessica Pitchford and Suzanne Jamir of The Southeast Review, Dave Housley, Mike Ingram, Joe Killiany, Matt Kirkpatrick, and Aaron Pease of Barrelhouse, and also Jamie Vue, for scaring the typos away.
To Brendan Todt - compass, sextant, navigator, and tireless reader of my work.
To my peer reviewers, whose straight talk proved invaluable.
To Linda Oblack and Sarah Jacobi of Indiana University Press.
To my family, old and new, and in particular, my brother, for using his own talents to support mine.
And finally, to my good friend Sasquatch. Thanks for playing Hide-And-Go-Seek.
Sightings
Indian Village
It was the summer of 1975, and we were supposed to be feeling good.
Gerald Ford had just put an end to the war in Vietnam, and even more exciting, through the hail and the sideways rain, our hero, Bobby Unser, had somehow managed to be the first to limp his way past the checkered flag in Indy. Far less impressive was my own recent limping-completion of the seventh grade, an accomplishment whose only reward was leaving me stranded somewhere in the foggy terrain of my crushing adolescence, another casualty in a long line of those already infected.
Through no fault of their own, boys who had once been stars on their little league teams suddenly found themselves stretched and refashioned, stricken with nicknames like string bean and crater face with no signs of letting up. One morning they woke wholly dispossessed of coordination - their feet suddenly replaced with clown s feet, their legs the legs of giraffes.
Our symptoms were no different than those faced by others our age, leading us to believe that our shared suffering was likely the result of some top-secret government conspiracy (someone had poisoned the water supply!), leaving us susceptible to growing older.
At the end of the school year, several of us began passing around a dog-eared copy of Stephen King s Carrie, which we devoured partially for its pornography but mostly for its self-help. We took refuge in Carrie s predicament, basking in her unbridled displays of strength. Even we boys who knew nothing of the mysteries of menstruation reveled in the possibility that we, too - while enduring the curse of our fading youth - might uncover our own secret powers.
We lived in a place called Indian Village, a small neighborhood constructed on the fringes of Fort Wayne, Indiana. Small, ranch style houses butted up alongside one another in an array of lime green and tangerine orange. They were modest homes - screen doors and back porches - with bird-covered mailboxes punctuating the property lines. The only characteristic that distinguished our neighborhood from the next (aside from the street names identified by Indian tribe) was the canvas teepee displayed in the grassy center of the neighborhood. We never really spent time there (much preferring our summer days dedicated to the icy waters of the Pocahontas Pool or the baseball field of Indian Village Elementary), but our neighborhood s theme took on an entirely new meaning when the rental truck screeched to a halt on the corner of Kickapoo Drive.
I didn t know anything about real, live Indians except for what the movies taught me - all that business about feathers and bows and arrows. And thanks, in part, to an R-rated flick I should never have seen, I d also learned a thing or two about scalping; how for generations, Indians bone-handled blades had sliced over the still-warm bodies of white men, sawing across hairlines with one hand while pulling flesh tight with the other.
This gruesome image returned to me as soon as the tall, quiet man with the jet-black hair stepped from the rental truck. He threw open the doors and gave two sharp whistles, releasing his tribe into our otherwise near-perfect lives.

It was hard to determine how many there actually were. Five or six, most likely. Mother and father and five or six Indian braves. A dog, too, who throughout the summer made it his business to do his business in close proximity to my mother s gardenias. Who knows how old those boys were, though the youngest hardly measured past my waist. However, the older ones (and most of them seemed older) were broad-chested and gaunt-faced, intimidating in their silence.
Several of us gathered at the end of the block, gripping our baseball gloves as we watched them unload boxes.
Looks like they re sticking around, Ronald Carpenter observed, spitting into the grass.
Maybe they ll play outfield, added Jim Kelp, who was regularly stuck playing outfield alone.
Despite our gawking, the Indians never bothered glancing up. They d formed a hapdash assembly line - father handing the box to his oldest son, who handed it to the next, then the next, until eventually it was placed into the open palms of the smallest Indian who huffed it into the house.
Think they speak English? one of the guys asked, propelling us into a heated debate over whether or not Indians could. Midway through Ronald s refutation ( Of course not! They didn t even come from England! ), the one girl powerful enough to momentarily stifle our idiocy pedaled back into our lives.
Georgia Ambler, who each afternoon could be found poolside in her blue and white striped bikini, had single-handedly doubled Pocahontas s male membership just by being there. Ever sin