Patricio Pron The Peculiar State
I enjoyed the incident
below, an urban moment, and the telling of it, by Patricio Pron, in his short
piece The Peculiar State:
She heads to
Starbucks and orders a coffee and a cookie. “Tall, grande, or venti?” the
barista asks. “Small,” she says. “Anything else?” the barista asks. “Yes, may I
have a glass of tap water, please?” she says. “Tall, grande, or venti?” the
barista asks.
That’s the playing
field for the main characters in the story, a woman and a man, smart and hip
creative types living in “a borough for artists and bohemians” and privileged
in a digital, 21st century way that allows them to indulge in the game of metropolitan
hide-and-seek as a way to explore their relationship. The cold-bloodedness of the narrative is
compelling, the descriptions of the different cityscapes are well composed, but
as far as the relationship between the two main characters, I think Ernest Tubb
put it best a long time ago: “There are
two things in this world I don’t understand/One of them’s a woman, other one’s
a man.”
No comments:
Post a Comment