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This is a story where I really first "got it." I felt like I nailed the emotions, the sub-plots, the meaning behind what it took to write a really good, effective story. Lots of autobiographical stuff in here, a habit I'm glad to have outgrown. This one is always going to be special to me.
"Fences" first appeared in the O. Henry Festival Stories, where it earned Honorable Mention (I think of it as 3rd Place) status. It was reprinted at Fictionwise. It's also the first story I ever got paid for -- 100 dollars! I think I bought more books with the money...
| Fences Canton woke with a gasp, his ears cold and the taste of metal in his mouth from the worn-out space heater two feet away from his bed. It must have dropped below freezing again, he thought, staring at the scratches of frost crisscrossing the two mismatched windows of the guest house. The bedroom he left behind five years ago had been offered to him on an almost daily basis since his return home, but Canton couldn't share a roof with anyone else right now. He needed the space - such as it was in his parents' eight-by-ten renovated storage shed - that the guest house offered. It wouldn't be much longer until he was back on his feet again. The promise he'd made about the fence for the horses pulled him out of bed at ten minutes after seven. This was the first big task he'd been given since he came back, and he knew his father had grudgingly assigned the job to him. Mom had been afraid to ask anything of Canton since his return, and Dad liked things to be "just so" when it came to one of his projects. He pulled a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt on over his long johns. The icy linoleum's touch seeped through his woolen socks, and he could have sworn he saw his breath puff out in front of his cheeks. Buttoning a flannel shirt over his sweatshirt with some difficulty, Canton reviewed his father's instructions about how to put in the fence. "The whole fence has to be level, both on the horizontal and the vertical planes," Dad had said more than once. "If you get off-center more than an inch or two, you might as well give it up." Canton had taken enough math classes in college to understand what his father meant the first time, but he had sat through the repetition of the instructions in silence. The space heater shuddered and fell silent when Canton clicked it off. He left the chill of the guest house, surprised at the relative warmth outside. For some reason, the small guest house was always cold.
Continued... |
First published in: What the critics said about "Fences": |
