The social layers of a small town are revealed to us through the eyes of an adolescent girl whose parents consider themselves a cut above some others in the town, though they are not very much so, really. She is kind of a loner, doesn’t like people to classify her or say anything about her. To get a feeling of freedom her pastime is to go cycling out through the countryside. She admires the blossoming trees in an orchard and has an irresistible urge to lie down under one of the magnificent apple trees and look up towards the sky. The owner appears, a woman who has stables alongside for keeping and training horses, and chases her away. Our girl admires a lad who plays in a Salvation Army band in the town with other members of his family. She stands and listens to them and later the boy gets talking to her. They start going cycling together out in the country. The same lad works with horses for the owner of the stables and the orchard. This is a story in which so much happens, a dramatic encounter, and the subsequent lives of the characters are summarised. And that’s fine. Short stories do not have to be confined to one time or very few events. Some of Alice Monro’s stories if they appeared today might be marketed like novels, as Claire Keegan’s are, for example.
First published in The New Yorker, 2002, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in The View from Castle Rock, 2006 and New Selected Stories, Chatto & Windus, 2011
A Personal Anthology 