Author: Ron Parsons
Publisher: Aqueous Books
Pages: 252
Genre: Short Story/Literary Fiction
Format: Paperback; Kindle
Old friends
uncomfortably reunited and lovers who cling to their distance from one another;
disappearing fathers, fiercely loving grandfathers, and strangers who pass
through and radically change lives...These are among the characters who
populate the rugged Midwestern landscapes of the mesmerizing fiction world of
Ron Parsons. In his debut collection, THE SENSE OF TOUCH (Aqueous Books; May 1,
2013), Parsons captures people of various ages in the act of searching for
meaning and connection and themselves. Firmly set in South Dakota, Minnesota, and Michigan, the lush but often brutally cold heartland
of America, the eight stories explore universal
themes--loneliness, betrayal, transformation, hope--in fresh, sometimes
fanciful, sometimes comical, sometimes jarring, and always moving and memorable
ways.
In THE SENSE OF
TOUCH, readers will meet:
* Naseem Sayem,
the brilliant, troubled, and mystifying young man at the center of
"Hezekiah Number Three." A native of Bangladesh abruptly transplanted
to the stark white suburbs of Rapid City at age nine, Naseem never fit in and
eventually moved on to study physics at MIT--where, shortly before graduation
and after shocking news of his father's infidelity and abandonment, he
apparently unraveled and vanished. Three months later, he reappeared out of the
blue on his stepmom's doorstep, holding a three-legged cat. Naseem's long
search for belonging reaches its apex in a hot air balloon floating over the Crazy Horse Monument.
* Waylon Baker,
wheat farmer from birth, and Evie Lund, his wife of twenty-four years and
counting, even though she had chosen to live far away--in the alien world of
the Twin Cities--for eight years. The odd couple at the heart of
"Beginning with Minneapolis," Waylon and Evie can't bear to live
together or to divorce because they still love each other with a passion,
reignited when they find themselves deep in the dirt, in a hole Waylon dug in
his wheat field to serve as Evie's grave.
* The nameless
narrator of "The Sense of Touch," a serious, young freshman at the University of Minnesota, fleeing yet still attached to his youth in
Texas, haunted both by its predatory demons and
its romantic dreams. His liberation comes through an alluring muse: his
fiction-writing teacher. A ravishing, wild-haired, Memphis-born
African-American graduate student, Vonda speaks directly to him when she makes her
dramatic pronouncements. Like, "Our masks are not worn, people. They're
grown, day by day." And "Never trust anything, not until you can
touch it. With touch, you know you know."
The old friends
in "The Black Hills," long separated by distance and tragedy, who
unexpectedly compete for the affections of a lovely, vulnerable, and married
Lakota woman...the young woman who, in the midst of a Halloween blizzard,
stumbles into saving an elderly piano teacher's life and faces hard facts about
her own snow-bound relationships and emotions in "As Her Heart Is
Navigated"...the exceptional grandfather in "Big Blue" and the
playboy reformed by someone else's grandson in "Moonlight
Bowling"...and the professor of dead languages facing the mysteries of
mortality in "Be Not Afraid of the Universe"... Through Ron Parsons,
they all come to life, vividly and with emotional resonance, and work their way
into the minds and hearts of readers.
Book Excerpt:
They were relaxing
at the top of a waterfall, in a small, still pool where the mountain waters hit
an upward slope of folded granite. It was sort of a rounded bathtub, carved out
of the rock throughout the centuries by the rushing river, a river so hidden
that it was without a name. Just below were the falls, about a 30-foot drop
into another, much larger pool of clearest water that was gathered for a
respite, a compromise in the river's relentless schedule downward, between
split-level decks of flat rock. Further on, the river reanimated and released
into a sharp ravine, pulling westward, down through the rugged mountains and
faceless forest--the Black Hills National
Forest--gaining
force until it joined with the rush of the Castle River, near the old Custer Trail, and was
swallowed into the Deerfield Reservoir to collect and prepare for the touch of
man.
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