As this shenanigans is called ‘a personal anthology’ and short stories are resolutely about (or connected to) trauma, I wanted to share a story that reflects a shock I got this summer. A friend of forty years – who lived abroad – died suddenly of cardiac arrest and I was talking to her within the same hour she passed. It was such a blow to all of us who knew, loved (and worried about) her and I keep thinking of Bullet in the Brainever since. My dear friend was a medical practitioner and I tortured myself wondering if she knew what was happening in the ten seconds or so before falling unconscious? The slowing down of time, those last frantic flashes and ticks. Here too, inside a lean but taut 1,885 words, a man suffers a bodily trauma he’s no hope of overcoming. Unlike my friend however, he goads the situation into being in the first place. He’s a completely unpleasant character, who happens to be in a bank, in the midst of an aggravated robbery, and he can’t keep his sarcastic gob shut. When the inevitable happens Woolf experiments with time and space, physics and memory, to give us a ‘film of my life’ that’s fairly unforgettable. Incredible idea.
First published in The New Yorker, September 1995 and available to read here; collected in The Night in Question, Knopf / Picador, 1996
A Personal Anthology 