Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Short Story Month - All My Sad Captains by Joseph Mills

Literary stories are a strange thing.  They try too hard most times to show you how miserable life is.  Now, this story shows us the break down of a marriage but you never meet the wife and hear the usual yelling and screaming that accompanies a breakup.  This story is told from the husband's point of view as he's spending "quality" time with his friends.  The ending left me giggling because it was such a male thing and I could actually see it happening.  You can read "All My Sad Captains" by Joseph Mills over at Whiskeypaper.

2 comments:

Manuel Royal said...

"Literary" is a nearly useless term. All written fiction is literature.

More of a vignette than a story. Not bad, I guess. I wonder how many stories end with someone urinating. There's the Doug Wallop novel "The Good Life". That was a good book.

There's no such thing as "a male thing" except, I guess, producing spermatozoa. I think every culture determines what kind of behavior it associates with what gender.

sandra seamans said...

You're right about the term "Literary", Manuel. I use it loosely as a term for stories that are written well but don't actually tell a complete story - basically a vignette :)

Where I live this sort of behavior is common, not necessarily in the front yard but outdoors, yes. I guess it's more a country habit than a "male thing".