Short Stories 3: The Meaning of Frogs

I am currently running a bit of a promotion for my short story collection Fluctuation in Disorder, so it seemed like a good idea to do the next post in the series taking a brief look at each story. (The stories are all available individually at €/£/$0.99 if you want a bite-sized sample rather than the whole collection.)

But getting back to that promotion: the e-book version of Fluctuation in Disorder is available from Smashwords at a 50% discount until Pancake Tuesday, so you might be tempted to go for the whole stack rather than the single literary pancakes…

The Meaning of Frogs

V finds a frog's corpse while taking a disconcerting walk along the seashore. This discovery proves strangely disruptive to her reliance on work for meaning, as she finds herself diverted into providing a 'funeral' for the deceased amphibian. 

An experimental story, that formally draws heavily on both visual art and music. 

V works in a bureaucratic organisation, and when attending a conference, her assured world comes unexpectedly into proximity with the potential for other ways of being. V is on a border—my favourite place for characters—between a state of being where she accepted things as they appeared to be, and a state of being where, however she may decide to act, she knows that the acceptance is a choice, and the appearance is constructed, not natural. The yes creates one circumstance, one reality, the no creates another; V compares this process of acceptance or rejection to the myth that a bear licks its formless cub into the proper shape for a bear.      

Like 'Hallowtide Boar', this story was influenced structurally by a piece of music—in this case, Nielsen’s 5th Symphony. This piece was especially attractive for two reasons. One was that it has what the New York Times called a “craggy profile”, because it has so many “false climaxes”, and I was trying to find a new way to present a narrative. The other was the      disruptive role for the drum, what the Guardian described as “a battle between the orchestra and the renegade side-drummer”, and in this I saw resonances with V’s repeatedly disrupted relationship with her ordered life within a system of things—demands of her job, the corporate environment—that had previously ordered it.      

I listened several times to the  drummer’s improvised musical assault when I was writing the last scene of the story. Unlike the drummer, who is, in the final bars, “silenced by the full forces of his colleagues” in the orchestra, V is not (necessarily) re-absorbed into her accustomed way of living. She remains in a state of oscillation, between the varying consequences of yes and no.

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