shortshortshort.com, June 2008

Many of Bruce Holland Rogers’s short shorts focus their attention on the anonymity of life in the big city. His first two stories for June fall firmly in this vein, although in very different ways.

“Monologue Number Six” focuses on the anonymous phone call everyone is forced to listen to on public transportation when a young woman, anonymously identified in the story as “Young Woman,” mistakes the number six bus for a phone booth. The girl’s phone call, as she reveals one-half of the conversation about her relationship with her potentially abusive boyfriend, is repetitive and uninteresting and distances herself from her two traveling companions. Her side of the call is so banal, none of the other passengers on the bus are moved to listen or respond, even when she makes shocking accusations, but they are so inured to this one-sided eavesdropping that none are moved to explain the inappropriateness of the call and its location to the Young Woman, either.

Just as Young Woman and her friends were traveling with each other but not together in “Monologue Number Six,” the two main characters in “I’m Not Saying It Happens Like This” are traveling with each other but not together as they leave the city. They are separate from each other and from the strange buildings and landmarks they pass, only coming together with each other, and potentially others, when they leave the confines of the city for the hills beyond. Nevertheless, the story is not an attack on the anonymity of urban life or an idyll on rural existence. Instead, it merely presents a dichotomy between the two without offering to pass judgment.

The final story for June is “Well and Truly Broken,” which does have the rural setting the first two lack, although it doesn’t follow directly from either of them, standing on its own as all of Rogers’s short shorts do. It is also one with distinct elements of the fantastic in it as Rose and her sisters look at a fairy laden wood. The girls are taken with the fairies, although the glamour only remains for Rose, who lives her life under the precepts laid out by one of the faeries, who Rose wishes to join. Rose undergoes a different type of loneliness than characters in other stories by Rogers, one which is self-imposed, and one of which she is not only aware, but happy for. This story, longer than most, works quite well and is very satisfying.