Short simple sentences. One we were/I saw/she watched short(ish) sentence after another. The syntax of matter-of-fact. But it seems hard for the narrator to get it. A world populated by things and colors. Lots of colors. Lots of yellow—butter and paint. Green grass. Blue sky. Black birds. A red truck. This story actually fooled me into thinking it was an excerpt from his novel The Red Truck. The narrator spends a lot of time with his across-the-street-neighbor Katie and her four-year-old daughter Angel. Angel would sing and dance and ride a wooden horse. The narrator loves Katie. But it’s not straightforwardly mutual. “‘How can you know me,’ [Katie] asked, ‘when you don’t even know about simple things? Even a color, a simple color like a yellow color.’” He leaves Katie letters in her truck, she tells him to stop. Seems like she thinks he’s getting too close to her and Angel. He’s inchoate and dealing with love. Hardly able to. He pushes it a little too much. Rudy Wilson, I say this endearingly, is a B-side Lish writer. My favorite kind. (I’m bored of the Carver debate.) So the story goes on to swerve a few times, with so much feeling. So much crammed into simple sentences over 13 or 14 pages.

First published in The Quarterly in 1987. Collected in Sonja’s Blue, Ravenna Press, 2010 as ‘Horsie-Child, of Mine’