Week in Seven Words #365

courtly
He tips his hat and wishes me a good afternoon. It's sunny out, and he's serene. It really is a good afternoon.

dab
Fingerprints of sunlight on faded brick and joyful murals.

felinity
In the gap between brownstones, there's a fenced off dirt plot, studded with rocks. Two cats inhabit it. One sprawls on a bed of sunlight. The other watches me with menacing alertness.

horseplay
Kids seize each other in headlocks outside the department store in front of the mannequins and pink placards, as they wait for their mom to finish shopping.

neighborly
In their community, neighbors, friends, and coworkers will show up with trays of food in the days after childbirth.

neonate
She sleeps in a warm crescent against my stomach.

slumberous
With classes cancelled for the day, the campus is silent. A building with a crenellated tower casts a shadow over the grounds.

Week in Seven Words #364

chip
A sunlit, sterile store displays several rows of small devices.

flourishes
During the subway ride, she asks about each stop and what you could see in the local neighborhood. A proprietary feeling for the city comes over me. It doesn't matter if a subway station is grimy and rundown; I look on it with fondness, because it has become my grimy and rundown station.

miniature
The furniture from centuries ago looks doll-like, as if the people then were not only smaller but more delicate and fragile.

motorboat
A high-speed boat skips like a stone across the river.

neonatal
The baby wears a striped hat. She squirms from time to time in her sleep. Her sleep seems intent, energetic.

posing
They dab, dance, and toss their hair on the videos they make with a lip-syncing app.

postpartum
It's a quiet ward, which is surprising. The hospital room has a dim evening glow. For the moment, the baby is being weighed and measured in the nursery. A nurse, who strikes me as sincerely caring, quietly speaks to the mother, both about what to expect in the coming hours and about a maternal health issue that needs to be monitored.

Good Short Fiction: At Hiruharama (Penelope Fitzgerald)

Title: At Hiruharama
Author: Penelope Fitzgerald
Where I read it: The Oxford Book of English Short Stories (edited by A.S. Byatt)

Synopsis
In explaining how there came to be a lawyer in the Tanner family - a successful lawyer who helped the family emigrate out of New Zealand - the story shifts to a previous generation. A young man comes from England to New Zealand with the expectation of getting a useful apprenticeship, but winds up working as a servant; a young woman comes to New Zealand expecting to be a governess, but also winds up working as a servant. They meet, he courts her, they marry and settle in a remote spot in the countryside, Hiruharama, where the nearest neighbor is an eccentric man who comes over for dinner semiannually. When the young woman becomes pregnant, her husband tries to figure out how to deal with the fact that they will be miles away from any medical help when she goes into labor.

Some reasons to read it

• The story's matter-of-fact tone. I didn't really know where the story was going, and what it would lead to aside from the major event of childbirth. I kept paying attention to the details, delighting in the amount of thought put into the characters' home, their lives, the husband's plans for the childbirth... and at one point I was so startled by what had happened that I skipped back a few paragraphs and did some re-reading.
  
  
• There are surprises, little and big, along the way. They sneak up on you. And the words "Throw Nothing Away" take on significant meaning. A person can prepare for eventualities, but there are developments that can't be anticipated and details that in the stress of the moment may be overlooked, with potentially disastrous consequences.
  
  
• Some of the smaller surprises include the use of racing-pigeons to notify a doctor in the nearest town that the labor is underway. I loved that detail. There's also the eccentric neighbor, Brinkman:
  

  Like most people who live on their own Brinkman continued with the course of his thoughts, which were more real to him than the outside world's commotion. Walking straight into the front room he stopped in front of the piece of mirror-glass tacked over the sink and looked fixedly into it. 'I'll tell you something, Tanner, I thought I caught sight of my first gray hairs this morning.'

  
  The timing of Brinkman's appearance is hilarious, as is his general obliviousness and the calm polite way in which he's received.
  
  
• I like the way Fitzgerald portrays the relationship between the husband and wife. There aren't any grand declarations of emotion, but the quiet details convey much about caring and love.
  
  
• The story is thoughtful, playful, and sneaky. It stuck with me after I read it, and from time to time I still turn it over in my mind.
  

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Other recommended stories from this collection include these three and Nuns at Luncheon (by Aldous Huxley).