"Poaching" - A Short Story by Carol Shields - Included in the Collected Short Stories of Carol Shields- 2004 - 4 pages
This year, Buried in Print, a marvelous blog I have followed for over ten years,is doing a read through of the short stories of Carol Shields. I hope to participate fully in this event.
The more I read in the stories of Carol Shields the more grateful I am to Buried in Print for turning me on to her work. There are sixty some stories in the collection,it is my hope to read and post on them all in 2024.
Buriedinprint.com
"Poaching" is the 11th Short Story by Carol Shields I have so far read.
"Poaching" centers on a couple driving throughout England. We never learn much of their history. They often pick up hitchhikers so they can learn their "story". The man calls this "Poaching".
"I am partial, though, to the calm, to those who stand by the roadside with their luggage in the dust, too composed or dignified to trouble the air with their thumbs. There was the remarkable Venezuelan woman who rode with us from Cardiff to Conway and spoke only intermittently and in sentences that seemed wrapped in their own cool vapors. Yes, she adored to travel alone. She liked the song of her own thoughts. She was made fat by the sight of mountains. The Welsh sky was blue like a cushion. She was eager to embrace rides from strangers. She liked to open wide windows so she could commune with the wind. She was a doctor, a specialist in bones, but alas, alas, she was not in love with her profession. She was in love with the English language because every word could be picked up and spun like a coin on the table top. The shyest traveler can be kindled, Dobey maintains—often after just one or two strikes of the flint. That sullen Lancashire girl with the pink-striped hair and the colloid eyes—her dad was a coward, her mum shouted all the time, her boyfriend had broken her nose and got her pregnant. She was on her way, she told us, to a hostel in Bolton. Someone there would help her out. She had the address written on the inside of a cigarette packet. I looked aslant and could tell that Dobey wanted to offer her money, but part of our bargain was that we offer only rides".
I especially enjoy the literary references in her stories, today's story mentions the early work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the playwright Ben Jonson.
The Carol Shields Literary Trust Website has an excellent biography
https://www.carol-shields.com/biography.html
Even the simplest descriptions work somehow, like the Welsh sky being the colour of a cushion. You can picture it, even though you'd not have thought to describe it as such (particularly if you've not seen the sky in Wales, eh? /laughs). The bookish and writerish bits really stand out to me on rereading these stories. I first read some of them a few decades ago, when the idea of reading about writers and literary people would have seemed quite different (now there are so many writers, from Chabon to Prose, Brookner to Brandon Taylor, who write about writers) and I still enjoy them a great deal. One passage I noted in this story was this one: "It’s only that I’d like to float my own story on the air. I want to test its buoyancy, to see if it holds any substance, to see if it’s true or the opposite of true."
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