Hi all:
Don't forget to post at least once more during the week. If you only post on Tuesday nights, then the highest grade you can get on the blog is a C. (Posting more doesn't guarantee a higher grade, but you are guaranteed a C if you only post on Tuesday nights.)
"Lithopedion" (this is a real thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithopedion) is an interesting story. What do you think about it? What about that last section after the space break? How does it go w/ the first section?
You might check out other stories by Randall Brown. His website is completely devoted to small fictions: http://randall-brown.com/.
What is your favorite small fiction so far? Which did you struggle with the most? And why (for both questions)?
Feel free to use this space to ask questions.
"Lithopedion" wasn't interesting to me until I defined lithopedion. Then the first sentence caught my attention "She delivered her baby twenty years too late...". After understanding the title it amazed me that a woman could carry a child for 20 years and had no idea. The woman in this story did just that she birthed a stone baby after 20 years. After being released she reached out to her ex husband to help her close this difficult chapter of her life. They both are thinking about their relationship and how they got to the point to which they were. The woman decided that the best way to close this chapter was to return to the house they lived in 20 years earlier. As she walks through her old house she reminisced of the plans they made for their family. Eventually calling it quits after multiple pregnancy complications. Now 20 years later they are back where it all started, where they conceived their child not to start their family but to lay to rest the family they never had.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if their marriage would have lasted if they had found the stone baby earlier?
I think that my favorite small fiction so far has got to be "The third time my father tried to kill me" Squarely for the fact of how much we talked about it. I loved the different theories and responses of my fellow classmates. The fact that my opinion that the first two times his dad tried to kill him, they were more like casual mistakes from a father who has no idea what he's doing. That those first two times were genuine mistakes. But an opinion I wasn't expecting to agree to was that the third time was egged on by the son. That the son knows his father, he's gotta know how to push certain buttons to warrant certain repsonse. The question then becomes, why? Why does he say what he says to him? What's the point? Does he enjoy the pain? Does he want his father to kill him? What pushes the son to put his life in danger, knowing his perspective, his memories? It racks my brain and I wonder what my other classmates have to say about these questions.
ReplyDeleteAt first I really started to ask myself if "lithopedion" was real. It's unreal that "stone baby" could go for undiagnosed for decades! I mean really... It spuds like Somthing out of the scifi channel. The last sentence to me rally staples in the fact that this is a fact and not fiction.
ReplyDeleteI don't really have much to say just based on that one paragraph. I can see a hospital, and child's being born. "having outlived the child scheduled to be born that day" This line sets the story's intro to me. Without reading further I question what tense the author will be continuing the story.
ReplyDeleteSecond paragraph shes going into labor but wont be bringing a life into this world. She wants her body back she refuses to be a coffin, Women carry a life inside them she want this dead baby gone as soon as possible. Childbirth already is a painful experience from what ive heard, so its pretty crazy carrying the pain with no satisfaction to follow, more like the pain always remains.
Next few paragraphs, the elephant in the room makes me feel a tension and the mother stairs at her children almost mad that they got to live now much older then the unborn child.
Last paragraph I question whether she is speaking to the daughter symbolically of being a victim or if the daughter actually went through a miscarriage as well.