shortshortshort.com, March 2008

Men suffering from a midlife crisis is a thematic cliché, but in “The Midlife Forecast for Men,” one of the three March, 2008, shortshortshort.com offerings, Bruce Holland Rogers takes the cliché and adds humor to it by reporting on a midlife crisis in the guise of a television weather report. Rather than look at the traditional clichés of a midlife crisis—purchasing a sports car, dating younger women, etc.—Rogers looks at the root causes of midlife crises: the realization that one won’t be as successful as once hoped, the physical changes the body undergoes as it ages, the essential commonality of life. By casting it as a weather forecast, Rogers points out how the problems inherent in midlife crises are not unique to anyone but rather a part of the human condition.

“Inventory” is a short-short story that deals with the aftermath of a burglary as Garrett lists those things stolen from him and, although he knows the list is complete, his feeling that he has missed something, perhaps something intangible. Although it isn’t clear to Garrett, what he lost was his sense of trust in his fellow man and his sense of security after his home was invaded.

“Inventory” goes hand-in-hand with Rogers’s other March offering, “My Burglary Ledger,” which deviates from the usual fare in that it’s a nonfiction essay. In it, Rogers relates his own experience upon discovering that his flat in London had been burgled. After enumerating what was taken, and some of what wasn’t, Rogers focuses on the procedures that followed the burglary—from the police visits to replacing his computer. The essay also contains some of Rogers’s reflections on why criminals do what they do, using an incident from his own youth to put it into perspective. On the whole, Rogers has managed to write a reasonably optimistic essay about being robbed, although the robbery remains conspicuously present.