Have I mentioned that I love short stories?  Short stories saved my sanity during the drudgery of the semester of British Fiction 330, Physics 101, Calculus 112, Chemistry 110, and Cell Biology 240.  Passed one, failed two, dropped one, and scraped by in one by the seat of my periodic table. 

Short stories are made even better when they are by an author new to me than I enjoy and given by a friend whose taste I admire (thank you B.!). 

What an interesting piece to begin a book of shorts with!  Having invented my own game in one of my first short stories, I really thought the game in “The Vision” called Mafia was brilliant.  The premise of the game is a 15 person village that contains 3 spy/mafia players that kill people with their eyes while the rest of the village sleeps.

Well, that’s not it exactly but as one of the main characters says, “It’s harder to explain than it is to play.”

I don’t know if I really understood what was going on here, exactly, because that Doe girl really got me confused about love themes and all that hokey-pokey-philosophical-jargon-enjoy-the-story-already stuff.   But that’s a good feeling.  I want to feel a little ‘off’ at the end of a story, or in the middle even…as long as it’s not in the beginning, for the most part.  That just makes me not want to read any further.  This story began with a great, little vignette about a childhood memory of playing kick ball and a kid who was legendary in those ways we’ve all known someone we’ve went to public school with to be.  A kid who lives just outside the box and, best of all, doesn’t mind or seem to care.  I thought the whole story was going to be about this incident of the kick ball game but again, surprised.

A whole story of pleasing surprises like getting up on your birthday and discovering it’s not only the weekend but also the daylight savings time so you get to sleep for an extra hour.  That would be surprising since DST always happens on Monday and my birthday is in February.

You just never know.