Challenge 1018

So Old It’s New

In Charles C. Cole’s A Pit Stop on a Lonely Road:
1. The classic fable features animals or plants that think and talk like people but act like animals or plants. Does “Pit Stop on a Lonely Road” qualify as a modern or, perhaps, hypermodern fable?
2. A classic fable almost always concludes with a moral. However, the conclusion to “Pit Stop” is not framed as a moral. What moral might it imply?
In Huina Zheng’s Going Out to Come Home:
1. About how old does Liang appear to be?
2. In the husband’s traditional role, in what way or ways is he useful to the family?
3. What steps must Ling take in order to assure her responsibility to the family while she is on vacation?
4. Can Ling count on Ming to keep his promise to help with the housework? What conditions of her five-day “vacation” might lead readers to expect that he will?
5. Is the moral necessary at the end of the story? Why might Ming say he doesn’t understand it?
In Riley Kilmore’s A Night in the Shining Armoire:
1. At what point in the story does the reader learn the narrator’s age? Does the information come as late news? As a surprise?
2. Is the narrator a boy or a girl? Does it matter?
3. Why does the narrator frequent a shop selling “encouragement” cards? How can the character read over customers’ shoulders?
4. Must the readers be familiar with Shirley Jackson’s novels in order to visualize the setting?
5. Does either the mother or narrator die, or do they both die? Does the story overstep Bewildering Stories’ “dead narrators” guideline?
In Quintin Snell’s Ghost of War:
1. How likely is it that Shaun McCarthy’s dead body could waste away in a conserved and yet uninspected tank for almost twenty years?
2. Does no one else notice Marilize Smit in conversation with a ghost?
3. What will happen to Johan Venter?
4. Shaun tells Marilize that he’s “going to a good place” and will wait for her. Does a “marriage made in heaven” necessarily preclude Marilize’s engaging in another one made on earth?
In Edward Ahern’s Octogenarian:
1. Of the five parts of the body listed by the narrator, what is the part called “primary”? What does it consist of?
2. Which of the five body parts is normally the site of melanoma, a potentially fatal disease that is not exactly rare?
3. Does access to four checkups a year qualify as living in a workers’ paradise?
4. Do you feel the narrator shows reasonable confidence or that he’s “whistling past the graveyard”?

Responses welcome!