Charactered Pieces - Stories by Caleb Ross
Review
Caleb Ross
As you likely know, book buying has been increasingly maligned in recent years as a fading nostalgic referent. You and I know that the book is the trophy, the relic, the outward icon of inner thought. The book represents the creases in our brains and the thoughts we carry. They open us to others like few things do.
––Caleb Ross
The title story "Charactered Pieces" by Caleb Ross examines the relationship between Lori, a sales clerk at a Krabel Jewelers, and her caustic mother, a former model whose career in commercials ended when an unchecked prop gun blew off part of her face. Since childhood, Lori has endured disparaging remarks about her looks from her mother.
No bond is too great that it cannot accommodate geographic separation between mother and child. To illustrate, Ross delivers these potent lines:
If pressed Lori might remember her mother’s eye color, but distance has dulled the hue. Blood doesn’t translate well through telephone lines.
Ross writes with a daring skill that explores the artifice of perfection and the presence of flaws. He shows us the woman shopping for the ideal diamond as an accessory that validates self-worth or a prop to shore up its lack.
The value of personal appearance, and how others behave based on what is seen and unseen, is embedded in this tale. The mother-daughter bond is amplified when it’s revealed that Lori has a dead sister. With a key detail, Ross digs beneath the surface of beauty’s implications and shows two characters coping with physical and psychic scars that define who they are as people.
Throughout these stories, Ross finds a phrase that so aptly describes a moment, an expression, a feeling, that the imagery is indelible. In “My Family’s Rule” he writes about a father and two sons witnessing the demolition of a hospital:
This matched rhythm of looming annihilation cues my heartbeat’s mimicked report. We’re together in these moments. Three. Two. One. The bricks and mortar peel away. Sutures, like soft spots on infant skulls, break away, letting the exterior collapse into these floors and stairs that once carried so many sick, dying, and healing.
Ross wrings tension out of a single paragraph in “An Optimist” that also demonstrates his prowess in conveying the dynamic between characters and the stark context of a situation that comprises their life.
Markus’s mother could convince anybody of anything with a single blowjob. She wrote the how-to guide. She hummed the fucking audio book. And in a town as small as ours, everyone’s had a read. But things change when a kid plants itself between two people. Never would have believed it myself, had I not been there for the birth. A guy goes his entire life blaming everyone else for his problems, then a blank slate drops from between a pair of legs and now the only thing he cares about is not being a point of blame himself. He stops smoking. He stops yelling. He curbs his drugs and almost stops swinging those fucking fists of his.
Ross’ writing unfurls characters and plot with patience, allowing the layered meanings to filter from words into consciousness and realization. His prose is compact, dense with meaning, eloquent in its brevity. He crafts stories that are powerful, accessible, and unsettling enough to draw the reader in with curiosity about how these lives will play out, prompting the imagination to extend the implications long after the final word has been read.
www.calebjross.com
Published by OW Press, 2009 - www.outsiderwriters.org
Produced in the United States of America by Main Street Rag Publishing Company www.MainStreetRag.com
"Voices" is proudly sponsored by KCPT.
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