Blog #3

“Our Pointy Boots”, first published in Ecotone, scared me. The short story by Brock Clarke was richly detailed, but seemed stark at the same time. The characters were interchangeable. The emotions of the people returning from the army and their spouses were all roughly the same. Everything fit into a category, but it had such poignancy that I thought about it for a few days after. The image of a man threatening to fuck a boy’s dead mother for information was strongly imbedded into the speaker’s mind and now my own. There were too many emotions in this short story for me to deal with: shame, anger, numbness, indifference, and anticipation. I finished reading this with a high anxiety level. Having a younger brother in the military, one that has a newborn son at home, gave a perspective on this story that I didn’t want.