This is an older story that I’ve recently returned to revise. My initial thought was to write a series of generationally interconnected short stories that revolve around the lives of people who might have lived in Decatur, Illinois. I spent the first twelve years of my life in that city and growing up there, seeing life from that perspective as a little boy, has informed nearly every aspect of my life. I will never forget the love and the poverty that I witnessed in that sinking blue-collar city.
Just before I wrote this, I had learned about the Ice Houses that were used prior to refrigeration and imagined what that work would have been like to go and carve up a frozen river or lake, transport those cut ice sheets for storage and sale in the warmer months of the year. What a merciless enterprise that must have been!
This story is about miscommunication between proud and deeply flawed men. It could have been a longer story that had dialogue and deeper character arcs, but there was something really compelling to me about presenting a narrative almost purely in the psychological experiences around an act of brutal murder.
Not much physical action really happens in this story:
Man wakes up and goes to work
Man plans to murder his boss and then does it.
The psychology and some brief backstory provide a more tragic scene for the reader. This is a situation of total misunderstanding. There is no communication between Sven and his daughter Sophronia or between Carl and Sven. We don’t really get to see any deeper conversations between Carl and Sophronia other than the anecdote passed on by the narrator (who may not be totally reliable). I’ve always appreciated the ambition of this story, what it was trying to be, which was, of course, Quentin Tarantino Meets Franz Kafka.
Author’s Note
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This is an older story that I’ve recently returned to revise. My initial thought was to write a series of generationally interconnected short stories that revolve around the lives of people who might have lived in Decatur, Illinois. I spent the first twelve years of my life in that city and growing up there, seeing life from that perspective as a little boy, has informed nearly every aspect of my life. I will never forget the love and the poverty that I witnessed in that sinking blue-collar city.
Just before I wrote this, I had learned about the Ice Houses that were used prior to refrigeration and imagined what that work would have been like to go and carve up a frozen river or lake, transport those cut ice sheets for storage and sale in the warmer months of the year. What a merciless enterprise that must have been!
This story is about miscommunication between proud and deeply flawed men. It could have been a longer story that had dialogue and deeper character arcs, but there was something really compelling to me about presenting a narrative almost purely in the psychological experiences around an act of brutal murder.
Not much physical action really happens in this story:
Man wakes up and goes to work
Man plans to murder his boss and then does it.
The psychology and some brief backstory provide a more tragic scene for the reader. This is a situation of total misunderstanding. There is no communication between Sven and his daughter Sophronia or between Carl and Sven. We don’t really get to see any deeper conversations between Carl and Sophronia other than the anecdote passed on by the narrator (who may not be totally reliable). I’ve always appreciated the ambition of this story, what it was trying to be, which was, of course, Quentin Tarantino Meets Franz Kafka.