Since I purchased Comes this Time to Float and I’ve been floating on the writer’s gifted writing ever since. So many diverse, unusual, inventive tales that’ll keep you glued to this page-turner. Varied characters speak in diverse voices emitting love, aggravation, paranoia, magic, mortality, bravery, naivety, wonder, otherness, and much more. Read for yourself this unputdownable collection by Stephen Geez, novelist, short story guru, teacher, musician, and deep sea diver. Escape into the fictive genius of Geez.
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Come read with me as we float through life-moments of nostalgia. Experience Stephen Geez inventing internal adventure for you. Enter other worlds of living, experienced by captivating characters, some familiar, some strange.
The first story, “SIDEKICK,” is fast-paced and charming, a delightful potpourri of different personalities in the process of self-observing, a little raconte wherein the roles of “Superhero” and “Sidekick” fascinatingly switch places throughout. Fact is, especially when you, the reader, realize Geez has deliberately left the sidekick unnamed, you feel sure he is presenting a kind of positively split personality; “the sidekick,” who weakened exhibits strengths, “the superhero,” who strengthened by the sidekick, exhibits weaknesses. (And, by the way, the superhero remains nameless, too.) Thus, if you strip away the clever dichotomy Geez created here, this could be the complex, outward, real-life happenings, challenges and successes motivated by the internal consciousness of the main character(s). Both nameless but, at once, memorable.
Next, presented in a literary voice, “VENEER” is a disarming bauble evoked from the in-brain thoughts of an elder Southern woman. A stubborn one, who the author thinks out loud for. She’ll be damned if she’ll let anyone take advantage of her vulnerability. Even if it means saving her life from an oncoming flood. “Anybody lays a hand on Iris Heidway, he’ll be lucky to get it back,” she mentally warns. Then, listen to this visually alive description of what Iris, peeking out her window, saw: “A county van packed with busybodies turned around, then rocked and swayed its way back up the hill, splashing through a frantic gravel-washer streaming down the rutted road.” Geez’s descriptions of the waters’ onslaught is crafted to give you the you-are-there feeling of the threat of the attacking flood. You need to get your feet wet, so to speak, immersing yourself in the story, to get the charming essence of the old lady’s character and inner ‘onery thoughts as she wields her firearm. A humorous kind of paranoia. I’ll leave the picturesque describings to you, the reader, to deliciously discover as the flood impinges and her suspicions of Caroline’s boy – come to save her despite herself – crest.
More disarmingly delightful stories float into focus, such as another bauble, “LUNATIC,” a sad but unusually vibrant tale. It’s overall feeling is of the elusiveness of the characters inhabiting these tales. Each, in some way, has special powers, ethereal viewpoints, otherness. Following which is “ATTENTION PAY,” a charmingly-woven story told by “Foster boy,” a mentally-slow person. This one is empathy-soaked about the vulnerability and hidden depths of mentally-challenged people trending toward a love relationship. Then, find yourself in “HALFWAY HOUSE,” a surprising story of love and loss and love again. Of days in a florist’s with a former prison inmate…attracted woman, skittish ex-felon.
Most unusual, of Geez’s inventions, is “ABOUT FACE” in which Jeremy didn’t know who that was in his mirror. Himself recognized. And unrecognizable by those who should’ve known him. Impersonating other, more courageous parts of himself. Avenging, with a temporary new face, wrongs actual, wrongs never imagined. A Self, from now on, questioned. In this story, you don’t simply “float,” you get vacuumed into Jeremy’s otherness. Then, before you can recover your Geez-manipulated Self, along comes “HOLLER SONG“. The way the writer has scupted 70-year-old Retta’s speech will charm you into curiosity about what’s further in store. “A lifetime of second thoughts” is but one of the disarming, charming phrases Geez sprinkles liberally into this regional-focused story. It’s the language you’ll enjoy. It’s English, but not. It’s Geez’s characters’ ways of speaking. A delicious euphonious romp recording pointed feelings of Lurlene, TJ, Tetta, and Cammie.
Then there’s “VAPOR GIRL,” about a daring duo, Tamoo, a young woman/girl, and Carmon, a young man/boy on an exciting, word-rich adventure in an exotic place. You must go through this experience yourself, without my review diluting its delicious effect. And next, you’ll love this richly-worded story, “BAND CALL-OUT“. As in all Geez stories (including in this diversely gifted writer’s long fiction which I’ve enjoyed reviewing), he has a way with words that turns them into real-world sounds and you-are-there experiences. An Accomplished musician, Geez’s characters Fuse, Mo, Ray-Ray, and Metal enfold you in the atmosphere of real-life gigging music men. Turns out the location where all this musicianship takes place is a surprise, which I won’t disclose so you can enjoy discovering it de novo. And, always, it’s the language that’s unique to this story, as is true of the other original tales in this collection. Colorful, disarming, always immersing you in lush characters’ experiences.
After that comes “READY FOR COMPANY,” about “Widowed sisters in their seventies….”: A story dedicated to the details of living amid household things in chaos, the essentials of cleaning, the repetitiveness of dailyness. And more. You need to experience Margie, Babs, their nephews, and the exigencies of family visits…and only as Stephen Geez can tell it.
Then, if you experience a bit of deja vu, that’s because “KRAB KAPER” could give you flashbacks to the main character in Stephen Geez’s novel, FANTASY PATCH (about pharmaceutical manufacturing and the medical advertising industry). Dante Roenik, Ad Agency Creative Director, is featured therein. In this short story, there’s Taj about the Hermit crab. And there’s Geez saying, “Lettuce just leaves a bad taste,” a pun-fun play on “lettuce leaves”. As to the hermit crabs featured, note: “Living creatures are not toy prizes, they should be entrusted only to those who truly want them and will properly care for them.” Returning to the Fantasy Patch hero: This ethical awareness didn’t stop Roenik from staging a crowd-pleasing, crab-tweezing, publicity stunt: “Kids for Krabs”.
After which, there are more little stories, so moving they keep you reading, like “BLIND IS LOVE“. This is a startler that lovingly explicates tragedy and a day that returns interminably. Tugs at the heart. Next comes, “KITTY MAKES THREE,” in which a writer struggles with inventing so-called “listicles”. Like “Ten Ways to Do This,” etc. Carlysle J. Katt belongs to Katie and, because of the first person narrator’s invasion, the cat was out of the house. So our hero, being a listmaker, now conjures, internally, #1 on the list of “How to Flush Out a Scaredly Cat.” At first, this feels like a story about a freelance writer inventing How-to lists, then about the tearful, fearful search for a missing feline. Though, finally, it’s about love.
Moving even deeper into communicating the outer expressions of deep inner-experience is “TAILWIND,” a surprise “flight,” a soaring trip, a metaphor for the emetic waves of certain severe therapies. And the ways certain humans brave the worst while sharing the best. That’s Willie and Jack just plain flying like they always did, together in their plane. Just plain (sic) wonderful.
Emerging from that touch of grief, here’s another bauble, “FAMILY TREED,” a feast of family-folk language. A day in the life of seemingly mismatched genotypes. The tree a metaphor for human branches connected. Then there’s “BUS BOY,” yet another soul-charming tale that’s richly descriptive. Language Geez uses ensnaring you, the reader, in an aura of “you are there” yet again. I love Andre’s mother’s words, “…proud of him…bring in some money, help out, maybe get some insurance to share her car. Teenage boys cost a lot.” That’s “Moms” to Andre. This is a journey into the cerebrations of a pissed-off busboy, judgmental of elder employees, jealous of waitresses’ tips, on the tip-end of adolescent self-inflation. A day in the life of a newbie busboy watching, complaining to himself about everyone else, ultimately learning it’s okay to grow up, feel responsible, to help Moms.
Here it is, “COMES THIS TIME TO FLOAT,” the title story which starts, staccato. Pointedly spurting out statements. A master of description, Geez has light “stabbing” the gloom, leaves “reaching” as a coupe “scrapes…penetrating dark forest deep….” He anthropomorphizes the speechless varieties of nature. And the visions of an elder woman in the arising “worms” of her garden of memories. He speaks in “pine pollen,” “evergreens,” “pine cones,” and “a forest floor carpet.” And in such bon mots as these: “…as they body-surfed the rapids, there in the river where she learned how to forget fear….floating through these moments of trusting the other to watch for rocks.”
Despite life’s scary challenges, the rapids float on, a metaphor for the turbulence of living. And also for the certainty that, no matter how far flowing the water, nor how rapidly far the rapids travel, water always mingles with its beginnings, never losing touch with its essence. Another metaphor for the fact that humans are always in touch with all their prior life experiences, all their feelings. In the end…. Well, you need to dive, courageously into the natural flow of these stores Geez has floated for you using the vast variety of his fiction-writing gifts.
Finally, these last few Geez morsels are to be savored: “THE AGE-EATER” is about turning elders into youthful selves. About a magical, selfless being who, nostalgically eats bygone decades, gifting youthfulness back to decrepit, physically-deteriorating older folks. A second vivification, minus the problems long-ago-faced, re-experiencing the youthful pleasures long mourned. A magical story you must discover for yourself; this writer’s exceptional invention. Geez, it’s Geez’s genius.
And, the closing story in this rare collection, “TIME AND SPACE,” carves a key point that binds all these stories together: “And it’ll break your heart that a machine can outlast a man.”
About this unusual, experiential collection, all I can say is, “Geez, it’s Geez at his best.”
Book Bytes by Borel 