Hello, Horse: Stories

Hello, Horse wowed me. 

The wowing wasn’t that ambiguous, deadpanned kind made famous by Andy Warhol. It was plosive, exhortative. A colleague at my part-time day job vents with a crude and emphatic, “Christ on my crack!” The eleven stories of briefly controversial, Vancouver-based author Richard Kelly Kemick (I Am Herod) elicit that kind of wholehearted “wow.” 

Kemick’s “many-tentacled tales” (to quote from “Ghost Town,” one of those stories) are born performers. They do everything but tap dance.

Restless, exuberant, meandering, funny, inventive, and really quite bonkers, they’re long in form—with the longest, “Satellite,” running to fifty pages—and deeply enthusiastic as writing. 

Either Kemick is one of those rare, savant-like authors whose outpouring is naturally (and enviably) stylish, or he tempers what seems to be a natural, baroque extravagance with careful, word-by-word revision. Whatever the case, readers will notice—and ought to appreciate—those sentences.

Consider “Perfection,” a characteristically oddball piece set at a dog-racing track outside of Tallahassee:

By the time we returned to the track, the veterinarian was waiting. “You know,” he told her,
tapping his watch, “vet techs are a dime a dozen. Six months and they churn you out like butter.”

“Bit of a mixed metaphor,” I said, to which he told me to go fulfill myself sexually. 

I watched her follow him to the kennels. She had all the trapping of beauty but was actually quite
ugly. Yes, she was thin, had distinguished features, with skin so soft and pale you’d paint your
bathroom that shade. But she was also anaemic, had a brutal bone structure, and skin so white it
was if light no longer touched her, like one of those creatures who lives at the bottom of the
ocean and whose heart beats once every hour.

Or, from “What Descends When The Lake Thaws,” a tale of failed, desultory would-be heroism that unfolds in the Dominion of Canada, circa 1864:

Brother’s pinky snaps off. Went to piss, gloves off, pissed, gloves on, and an odd look on his face. Exposes his hand, fingers frostbitten into talons, and from the stump: no blood, just a bit of crude.

And there’s “Sea Change,” a satirically comical effort that takes place during a teacher’s conference at an all-exclusive in Havana (originally built as the Soviet embassy in 1954), where two married attendees debate the merits and pitfalls of a tryst:

During the twilight of her undergraduate years, Rebecca had filled an elective with a Philosophy
of Architecture class. She’d long forgotten the majority of it (how many names did a column
need?) but could still vividly recall the professor: a gentle, bald man who had a stomach so round
and tympanic he seemed drafted by a compass.  

And from the same:

Even the term “affair” seemed too resplendent, with its implications of indulgence, largesse, protracted pleasure. But what other term was there? A liaison? Too French. A dalliance? Too English. An encounter? Too extraterrestrial. 

In “Satellite,” where nuns and acolytes play fierce games of hockey at a convent that was formerly an upscale hunting lodge (before some distant war turned the globe into a hellish nuclear winter of violence and deprivation), a simple, poignant statement portrays both the teenaged protagonist’s innocence and the mounting harshness of the world around him: “Seeing the deer was the first time I ever saw an honest face.”

And while genre-hopping and linguistic virtuosity are the immediate—and arguably telltale—qualities of Kemick’s writing, the stories are not all literary backflips and Yurchenko Double Pikes. 

They’re often love stories. Pained, awkward ones, yes. And true, love is often unrequited. Unrealized. Or else lust, also one-sided and diligently sublimated.

The magician’s assistant in “The Great and the Gone” pines and moons, for example; and when one young man leaves Parks Canada with his handsome co-worker, he’s smitten and lustful. And the narrator in “Patron Saints” chases love with an artist whose absence is his defining trait. 

Elsewhere, as in “The Unitarian Church’s Annual Young Writer’s Short Story Competition” and “Hello, Horse,” the young protagonists (an age group the stories often feature) find themselves, true to form, striving to make sense of their inner world—moody, restless, impassioned, angry, reckless—as well as an environment, whether Saskatchewan or Florida, suburban Ontario or Manitoban cabin country, whose complex rules, properties, and contradictions register as lifelong puzzles.

All in all, Hello, Horse gallops and canters, dazzles and makes a splash. Prepare to be wowed. 

Brett Josef Grubisic

Brett Josef Grubisic resides on Salt Spring Island, BC, where he's currently at war with his sixth novel. Previous novels include The Age of Cities and My Two-Faced Luck.

• Brett Josef Grubisic

  https://miramichireader.ca/author/brett-josef-grubisic/

  

  September 8, 2024

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