Your Smallest Bones: Stories

by Sean Taylor

Overview

Your Smallest Bones is a collection of short fiction built on the sounds we make when we run out of sounds. Can you hear them yet? All you have to do is help an ex-lover push a grand piano out onto a frozen lake. You have to break both of your thumbs in perfect symmetry to grow up. You have to bind mattresses like books, with all the classics penned to them, just to get some sleep. You heard them with the smallest bones, inside your inner ear. Somedays, there is perfection in the quiet of your hands pressing play on the braille love letters of a blind man. Somedays, life sounds like an earthquake detector while you're in the shower. Then you hear your neighbors sounds. On the day of her husbands funeral, a woman recreates a stick-up from her favorite western. The sound of an eccentric marriage nearly lost to the mislabeling of coconut juice. Or in a tea garden after a conversation with a child, a man finds heaven as he timidly describes hell. Can you hear it now? Across town when a pianist loses his hearing, he paints the color spectrum along his piano keys to regain his favorite lost notes. Meanwhile, a girl next door carries a prayer, from the lions she feeds, into a song, for a parrot she adopts. These stories play the out-stretched gasp, they play the shiver, the hope whisper, and the buckling fear.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780578152981
Publisher:	Seventh Tangent
Publication date:	11/20/2014
Pages:	178
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.99(h) x 0.38(d)

About the Author

Sean Taylor has published fiction in Pantheon, Instant City, The Evergreen Review, The Coe Review, Full of Crow Fiction, and was nominated for The 2012 and 2014 Pushcart Prize. His first collection Everything to do with You was published by Seventh Tangent in 2010. His second collection titled Your Smallest Bones will be released February 2015 on Seventh Tangent Press.
SeanTaylorWrites.com

Editorial Reviews

2015-03-19
A short story collection that explores its characters' sensibilities with delicacy and precision.Of these 12 stories, seven have been previously published, and two received Pushcart Prize nominations. Taylor (Everything to Do with You, 2010) sets his tales mostly in San Francisco, often among 20-somethings struggling to make it as they navigate relationships, work, and life's alarums and excursions. The opening story, "Flight and Weightless," is particularly successful: two young people were once a couple, but Maria stayed in Spokane, Washington, when the narrator returned to San Francisco. Now she's dying of cancer, and he's helping her fulfill a last wish—to push a grand piano onto a frozen lake so she can play it: "Thick spots [on the ice] sound like a chandelier reuniting with the ground." In that sentence, everything depends on the unexpected but perfect "reuniting"—the chandelier's fall (or the piano's, or Maria's) isn't a disaster but a reunion. Taylor often achieves his lapidary style through similarly unexpected but fitting conjunctions; in the same story, the narrator wonders, "Who coined winter wonderland? Were they not aware of hypothermia and giving up, and goddamn Spokane?" The "and" phrases, as they move from the general to the particular (from cold weather to one couple's breakup), nicely mirror how people personalize disaster. Some quirks, such as Taylor's frequent interest in fingers and toes, add a surreal touch to these stories. The author seems aware of the danger that such a style can devolve into preciousness or portentousness, and in "Depluralize the Pair" he both enacts and criticizes this dynamic. His narrator proclaims, for example, that relationships "always progress or end in ceremonies. Divorce or marriage." Or death, perhaps, or just tapering off? But if readers become irritated at this 20-something know-it-all narrator, the story subverts the situation by granting him some self-recognition as he gets older, with his knees creaking as he unloads the dryer: "We wanted everything to be art….We finally had to deal with something hard, that wasn't artsy or youthful or innocent."Intelligent, subtle, minimalist stories by a promising young writer.

Kirkus Reviews