A rainy morning in a west end town…
I don’t always get to things as soon as I should. I have friends who send me things to read or discuss, and I set them aside meaning to give them proper attention, more than just a quick cursory glance and a comment. What this usually means is that sometimes months can pass before I do anything, which is not good. However, I do usually get to things. . .
A while ago Jeff VanderMeer emailed me a copy of a new story of his “Three Days in a Border Town”, which is due to appear in Deborah Layne and Jay Lake’s Polyphony 4 later in the year. For some reason, though I’ve read and enjoyed Jeff’s collection Secret Life and a handful of his stories, I just didn’t get around to reading the story. In some ways I think that might have been a good thing. Why? Because this morning I got to have one of those special moments when a reading experience synchs up in an unexpected way with your environment, and makes the story resonate even more.
It’s cold and wintry this morning, dark clouds looming overhead and freshly fallen rain on the streets. I start work early, so it was still dark when I sat down in a warm cafe to have breakfast, looking out at neon reflecting off the wet street, to read “Border Town”. It’s a touching, eerily beautiful piece of work about a loner coming out of the desert in search of the world’s only surviving city, a woman who has lost everything she holds dear and travels from dusty border town to dusty border town looking for a hint, a clue as to how to get to her goal. Along the way VanderMeer gives tantalising glimpses of a fallen future world, an environment ravaged, and a civilisation living in its own ruins. It’s great power, though, is that VanderMeer doesn’t lay things out in deadening detail, instead leaving the reader with the room to imagine what lead to this, what might be behind there, what that might mean. Powerful, romantic stuff. And somehow, the desert of the story complemented the empty streets of my morning perfectly, resonating. What more could you ask of a story, or of a morning?