Some writers are masters of the short story, others won’t touch them with a ten-foot pen; some readers graze on them compulsively, others think there is no meat on the bones.  I’m omnivorous myself — short, long, fiction, history, politics, international, natural history, cosmology, though the short-story is not my “comfort” read.  It’s a form I have to remind myself: sometimes a nice treat.

And why not turn to one of the best,  Elizabeth Pearlman?  Her 2015 offering, Honeydew is  a collection of 20 short stories, the shortest 5 pp (“The Descent of Happiness”) and the longest 22 pp (“Castle 4”),  all a magician’s brew of everydayness, quiet lives, small surprises.  Tracings of ennui are common.  Erotic hopes briefly appear, and disappear into the ordinary.

“Tenderfoot” is the name of a pedicure parlor in a small college town, the proprietor of which is past-something woman (49), whose work can be watched from a high dormer window by a youngish art teacher Bobby Farrady, recently separated.  He asks for a pedicure and one thing doesn’t quite lead to another. While it doesn’t we get a back-story from Bobby about his separation from his wife and a failure of moral courage which merges back into the pedicurist’s own story

“Puck” and “Assisted Living” are two stories linked through their location, a small-town antique shop,  with “everything from Regency teapots to hat pins from the 1940s” where sometimes “men bought pendants for women not their wives.” We can almost see the black and white film setting.

Dare I say it? Many observations and the manner of telling, are those a woman might make.

“Muffy settled herself on the striped love seat and Rennie prepared for skimpy strings of conversation”

or

“In her teens she’d developed an awning of a bosom.”

One I was particularly struck by,

“She was destined to become desirable.”

The stories are both a pleasure to read and a class in how to turn everyday, small events into stories: no gunplay, no erotic exotics, no car crashes or maiming –with one heart-freezing exception.  The one-sentence answer to “what’s the story about” offers no clue to why we find them so interesting.   Faded hopes, committee work, apartment building neighbors, even in their sadness, are marvelous miniatures when looked at the right way.

“Daphna wanted to … mean so much to us.  it was…inappropriate.”

“Also doomed,” I added.

“Indeed,” Sylvia said,”We mean so little to each other.”

“What the Axe Forgets, the Tree Remembers,” is the one exception to the quietness of theme and behavior, though it too, begins there.  Gabrielle, a sedate older woman, joins a local committee trying to stop female genital mutilation. What she learns is difficult for her and difficult for us to read, made more so by the light nonchalance of the tone, and frankly, by the sexual stirrings found.

Elizabeth Perlman, in any of her volumes is worth a read.  Why not start with her most recent and work backwards?