Our First Pushcart Pick
And the nomination goes to . . . Eugene author, Ray S. Vukcevich.
If you haven’t yet read Ray’s stories, be warned—you’re about to experience an off-kilter universe through the eyes of someone who apparently holds a weird, wonderful worldview. LAR fiction editor, Stefanie Freele, rarely at a loss for words, gets tongue-tied trying to say how much she loves this writer’s work. Instead, she does what she does—shares it with friends, colleagues, and students. His nominated piece, “My Eyes, Your Ears,” has only been in print for 25 days, but Freele is already using it as an exemplar in a short fiction class she teaches in California.
“MEYE” tells the story of a man poisoned by a retrograde curse so that he sees everyone, including domesticated animals (even ferrets), with black bars across the eyes to make them unrecognizable. Not the mice, of course. “Who ever worried about an unidentified mouse?” Of course. But wait! That’s not all! We have flying teahouses, terrorists, high school pranks gone wrong, and unrequited love. Somehow, Vukcevich ties the elements into a cohesive and effective tale in a few short pages. It starts like this:
I don’t know if I’ve told you this story before, because you all have black bars over your eyes, and I cannot tell who you are. I can see one of you is a police officer. I don’t know whose blood this is we’re standing in. Please, God, don’t let it be Caroline’s.
I realize now the trick I pulled on Caroline back in high school was a desperate attempt to get her attention. She was so perfect, so strawberry blond, so well-dressed and groomed. You could signal a rescue helicopter by bouncing sunlight off her teeth. She was just so totally Barbie it made you want to grab and squeeze her to see if she’d squeak. Her mother drove her to school. The bumper sticker on her mother’s car said, “My Child is a National Honor Society Student.”
I replaced it with one that was almost identical but said, “My Child Has Enormous Ears.”
There’s been other RV buzz on the web this fall. Over at Small Beer Press, Grant J. Gavin had this to say:
A couple of readers have emailed us to ask if the skippy viral thriller-chiller film Paranormal Activity is based on Ray Vukcevich’s incredibly creepy and wonderful story “Whisper” — which was collected in Meet Me in the Moon Room (and originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in January 2001).
The answer: while we haven’t seen the film at the moment we don’t think so. Ray tells us there has been a lot of film interest in “Whisper” over the years (along with a few of his other stories) but even though both “Whisper” and Paranormal Activity feature paranoid people setting up cameras to record themselves sleeping it seems that this is one of those cases of parallel evolution where the a similar idea is interpreted artistically from a couple of different points of view.
Either way, if you like creepy stories and haven’t read “Whisper,” now’s your chance.
We are pleased to name “My Eyes, Your Ears” our first ever Pushcart nomination. If you would like to find out more about Ray, visit his website at http://sff.net/people/RayV or his blog http://rayvuk.com
We always recommend you support authors and small presses directly whenever possible. For the other times, please find Amazon links below.
Meet Me in the Moon Room: Stories
The Man of Maybe Half-A-Dozen Faces: A Novel
Rosebud : The Magazine for People who Enjoy Good Writing Issue 23