Nothing Out of the Ordinary: Stories
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Ferrese, Anthony Robert
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Abstract
The collection of stories, Nothing Out of the Ordinary, contains five short stories and three short-short stories. These stories focus on the ways in which intimate relationships impact the psyche of the characters driving each story. “My Hole Journal,” is the story of a man trapped in a hole, awaiting aid from a Hole Worker whose job it is to get him out, but his story is more so about the ways we can find ourselves stuck. Similarly, there are two stories centered on protagonists who work in the restaurant industry, people who feel trapped in their lives. “Nothing Out of the Ordinary” is a character-driven piece which explores the complex dynamics of interpersonal relationships, in which the protagonist has recently ended a long-term relationship with a coworker who he must see every day on the job, even after she begins dating another coworker; “There’s a Difference” follows a man in a similar struggle, but there is a ghost following him around, suggesting there is more to life’s struggles than those confronting the narrator. “Her First Overdose” is a more experimental, stream-of-consciousness-type story that expresses a day in the mind of the narrator, who’s mind we never leave throughout the story, which occurs on the day of the narrator’s sister’s first overdose. “Peanut Butter” is essentially a comical meet-cute that focuses on the way we see ourselves versus the way others see us and how these perceptions might form. The three short-short pieces serve almost as introductory pieces to the short stories that follow them. One depicts a commercial for a ridiculous pill, one uses a poetic device to tell a story about a man and his girlfriend discussing bills, and the last piece of the collection moves into another form of stream-of-consciousness to detail a trip to the beach where a couple will evidently end their relationship. If these conflicts sound ordinary, that’s because they are. Nothing out of the ordinary. It is the characters in this collection that hopefully render the ordinary into the universal.