In Lauren Green’s “Russian Roulette,” our newest edition to our New Voices catalog, we meet a narrator on the periphery of sorrow. The first line tells us all we need to know: “The summer of ’93, I learned everything I know about grief from watching the way Barry Colker’s mother dressed herself for work each morning.” Green’s prose is gripping and sharp, as the narrator enables Barry’s destructive mourning. Read on.
“Sometimes I shut my eyes when I’m driving,” he said. “See how long I can go before I have to open them again.”
“Why?” she asked.
“I like games of chance.”
The summer of ’93, I learned everything I know about grief from watching the way Barry Colker’s mother dressed herself for work each morning. Mrs. C. worked only five days a week, but even on weekends she would come downstairs in her starched white nurse’s uniform, with the green cross over the breast pocket. When I asked Barry why she did this, he said that since his mother had lost track of time when his brother killed himself, several years before, dressing for work at least guaranteed that she’d be properly outfitted five days out of every seven. All things considered, he said, five out of seven weren’t bad odds.
Barry and I were always talking odds. We spent entire afternoons trying to calculate the probability of hitting a Wiffle over the Rosenberg’s fence. We watched the Russian roulette scene in The Deer Hunter so many times we could perform it. Barry once tried to convince me to steal his father’s hunting rifle and play a round with him. I asked if he’d snorted too many Smarties or something—playing Russian roulette with a rifle doesn’t work.
That summer, California was going through a dry spell, and my mother was in one of her phases—new boyfriend, don’t bother her unless it’s an emergency—so I spent most of my time at the Colker’s condo on the corner of Cedar and Avalon. The community pool perfumed the air there with smells of sunblock and chlorine. In the distance, the bone-colored peaks of the San Gabriel Mountains chipped away at the sky.
Mr. and Mrs. C. hardly spoke to each other, though they weren’t ever anything but kind to me. During dinner, Mrs. C. would sometimes look up, blinking and dazed, like she’d just stumbled out of a dark theater. Then she’d ask if I had called my mother to let her know I was staying the night.
Mr. C. had long, scraggly hair and a wide, flat nose. He moved stiffly, like a toy soldier. After Hank’s suicide, Mr. C. grew obsessed with taking things apart and putting them back together again, the way he’d been taught to do in the army. He would hole up in the garage with his junk car and a stopwatch, timing himself disassembling and reassembling, then disassembling again. He mumbled to himself as he went, mostly about bolts and gaskets.
Mr. and Mrs. C. never seemed to mind that I was always underfoot. I think they were simply glad to have two boys playing Slaps around the kitchen island, talking girls and drinking blue-raspberry slushies like nothing had happened. Barry said he thought his parents loved me more than they loved him, and I said love was the sort of thing that was easier to extend to people you didn’t know.
Written in startling vignettes much like her debut collection of short stories, The Physics of Imaginary Objects (2010), Tina May Hall’s debut novel, The Snow Collectors, draws upon the depressed and desolate. Set in a snowpocalypse, Hall takes readers deep into the icy reaches of both past and future. The very first line reads, “I found the dead woman at the edge of my woods on the last day of January.” What follows is both dark (the obscurity of long-forgotten history, the opaqueness of grief and death) and light (the sun on the snow blinds us, but its whiteness conjures a glimpse of irrefutable purity). Amidst this indomitable setting, Henna, our grieving narrator, a loner in a tight-lipped community, seemingly falls into a backyard murder mystery. She soon embarks upon a strained romance with the investigating town sheriff—his family its own uncanny cast, not to mention his peculiar ancestral home. The irregular local library, too, provides enough intriguing atmosphere to keep the reader invested in Henna’s clandestine sleuthing and researching. The tone, overall, is one of uncertainty, with hints of treachery.
RICK BASS is the author of over 30 books of fiction and nonfiction, and a winner of the 2016 Story Prize. He lives in Montana, where he is the founding board member of the Yaak Valley Forest Council. His stories, articles and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Narrative, Men’s Journal, Esquire, Gentlemen’s Quarterly, Harper’s, New York Times Sunday Magazine, Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Tin House, Zoetrope, Orion, and numerous other periodicals.
