shortshortshort.com, April 2008

Bruce Holland Rogers’s short shorts for April consist of three stories, the longest of which clocks in at just over 700 words.

In “Dear Lisa,” an advice columnist realizes that despite all the advice she has struggled to give over the years, in general, her readers aren’t really looking for advice but merely for entertainment. She laments her discovery, which leads her to have a crisis of identity as she must determine whether or not she should continue to give advice, when all she can really do is tell people what they already know when they are really looking for someone to tell them that what they really want to do is okay.

Most of Rogers’s stories are set in a nebulous world without distinct features; however, “Trellick Tower” is named for the 1972 building in Kensington which features heavily in the short story. Trellick Tower has some distinctive features which have resulted in it being a listed building, but in Rogers’s short story, the focus is more on its blockiness. Despite that, Cathy, who looks out at the tower much like a character in a Ray Davies song, sees beauty in the building which is not generally apparent

One of the sounds that everyone recognizes is that of breaking glass, whether the scary, middle-of-the-night crash of a window pane or the joyful shattering of an empty glass bottle. In “The Sound of Breaking,” Aran focuses on those sounds from a very young age. Although Rogers’s depiction of him is partly as a vandal, there is a fondness underlying the destructive tendencies as Aran takes the sounds which draw him so strongly and attempts to build something, no matter how private, out of them.