"I Love You" by Ethel Rohan (2013, from Goodnight Nobody)

"I Love You" is the 14th of 30 stories in Goodnight Nobody by Ethel Rohan.  It a very said very poignant story about a lonely older woman, barely holding on to contact with reality.  It made me thing of a great short story, "Miss Brill".  It is a brief story centering on a fifty year old woman who has always built her life around her pets, she has out lived them all but for a gopher turtle which has disappeared. 

She finds an advertisement for a place that says it places monkeys in carefully selected homes.  The man on phone asks her many questions and then congratulated her and told her she is a suitable host for a monkey.  He takes her credit card information and tells her the monkey will arrive at Los Angeles International Airport by Air Freight in seven days.  He gives her all the information she needs to claim her monkey.  She tells a coworker she is getting a monkey, the coworker tells her she heard of a woman killed by her pet chimpanzee.  The woman says she doesn't like people because they have language.  On the big day, no monkey shows up at LAX and the 800 number is disconnected.  There is a small glimmer of a happy ending which I will leave untold,  Just another story of a half misfit trying to find love in a sad world.

  

"Feel free to join me for ISSM4" - Carmilla

"Baby" by Ethel Rohan (2013, from Goodnight Nobody)

"He was always felt afraid of babies, of a family, worried he would fail as spectacularly as his father had" - from "Baby"

I am more and more leaning toward not reviewing as a whole collections of short stories.  In many maybe most cases, the stories are not written toward being part of a collection.  I have have reading Ethel Rohan for over two years now (you can find my posts on her work with background information by following the link at the bottom of this page.). I do for sure see a set of common concerns in her stories and I have talked about that.  There are thirty or so stories in her latest collection, Goodnight Nobody.  I have already posted on the first story in the collection, "Baby" is the third story.  My main purpose in these posts is to help myself understand and recall her stories.  I am quite confident that if someone does an Irish Short Story Month in 2034, Rohan will be a must include writer.I am also kind of seeing if her stories fit some of my ideas about the distinctive qualities of Irish Short Stories.

"Baby" opens in the house of a bachelor, shortly after a party.   Somebody has given him a strange slightly creepy gift, an "instant baby".  All you have to do is put it in water for a while.  All the guests are gone.  He is not sure who among the guests left it but he figured it was his ex who came with her new boyfriend, much younger than him, of course.  He puts the baby in water and the next day it is huge.  He calls his buddy over to look at it.  He says it must be some sort of comment from his ex on his inability to commit.  There is no real plot, they ended up more or less forgetting about the baby while they down some beers.  

I will post on at least fifteen stories from Goodnight Nobody.