I found one particular element of this short, from In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction, Judith Kitchen & Mary Paumier Jones, Eds, particularly interesting. Bruce Berger opens this story with a curious and striking line; one that also creates a seemingly understated metaphor. He beings with a strongly worded metaphor — a promise to talk of nightstands and hexes against the long dark? –, yet he seems to veer from this course before even beginning. This story makes no secret of the author’s ignorance in the matter. He begins his narrative in the second line with this admission, For reasons unclear to me, I keep a piece of litter I found… The entire story is a fantasy, we follow the author into an imaginary world, whose purpose neither we nor he knows. Yet are we left with any more understanding at the end? Why is he haunted by [her] eyes? How does that give him solace? In fact, it doesn’t seem all that clear that Berger knows any more about his reasons for holding on to this scrap than he did at first. Is that ok? What about discovering something new through the writing?
I found this progress and understanding materialize in the penultimate paragraph. The entire fantasy world that the narrator has conjured up is summarily torn down, revealing that the very desert that so amazingly preserved his snapshot, is less and less able to keep what we throw away…