{"id":110116,"date":"2017-04-20T18:17:19","date_gmt":"2017-04-20T22:17:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=110116"},"modified":"2017-04-21T17:07:35","modified_gmt":"2017-04-21T21:07:35","slug":"dip-foleys-pond","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/04\/20\/dip-foleys-pond\/","title":{"rendered":"A Dip in Foley\u2019s Pond"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Our\u00a0complete digital archive is now available.\u00a0Subscribers can read every piece\u2014every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview\u2014<\/em>from\u00a0The Paris Review\u2019s sixty-four-year history.\u00a0Subscribe now<\/a>\u00a0and you can start reading our\u00a0back issues\u00a0right away. You can also sign up for\u00a0a free ten-day trial period<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

In Peter Orner\u2019s three Paris Review<\/em> stories\u2014\u201cStory of a Teacher\u2019s Wife<\/a>,\u201d \u201cThe Vac-Haul<\/a>,\u201d and \u201cFoley\u2019s Pond<\/a>\u201d\u2014three outrageously morbid things happen: a boy\u2019s younger sister drowns in a pond of toxic sludge; a man is murdered with a bike spoke (\u201cHis stomach was so ripped apart the police had to collect him up in a bucket\u201d); and a woman walks into a classroom and starts shooting and taking hostages. They\u2019re bite-size stories, under fifteen-hundred words, and the violence rushes in like a flash flood, though it doesn\u2019t cleanse anything. Rather, it leaves you with an aftertaste like when you eat\u00a0yogurt off an unpolished silver spoon. I devoured them.<\/p>\n

I think what propelled me through these three upsetting stories is that\u00a0the violence doesn\u2019t actually happen to the people in the stories\u2019 centers.\u00a0\u201cFoley\u2019s Pond,\u201d for instance, is narrated by a classmate of Nate Zamost, the boy who\u2019s two-year-old sister is fished out of the pond; in \u201cStory of a Teacher\u2019s Wife,\u201d the narrator hears about the man who was killed by a bike spoke from a friend at a boarding school in South Africa. The remove is greatest in \u201cThe Vac-Haul\u201d: the narrator only hears about the shooter on the radio, while he bides time with his job for the sewer company.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Orner writes with a concise acidity, but that\u2019s really more an affect of his narrators than it is any needling about Orner\u2019s prose, which flows smoothly through these tragedies. The narrator of \u201cFoley\u2019s Pond,\u201d for example, has an almost inconceivably acrimonious response to the death of Nate\u2019s sister, called Babs:<\/p>\n

Remembering it all now, what comes to me most vividly is my private anger toward Nate. Foley\u2019s pond had always been a secret place and now everybody in town knew about it. It was wedged inside a small patch of woods, between where Bob-O-Link Avenue ended and the public golf course began \u2026 A fantastic place, Foley\u2019s, scragged, infested, overgrown, and gloomed long before Nate Zamost\u2019s sister wrecked it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read \u201cStory of a Teacher\u2019s Wife<\/a>,\u201d \u201cThe Vac-Haul<\/a>,\u201d and \u201cFoley\u2019s Pond<\/a>\u201d and subscribe now<\/a> for digital access to everything we\u2019ve ever published<\/em>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Caitlin Love in an associate editor of<\/em> The Paris Review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Orner writes with a concise acidity, but that\u2019s really more an affect of his narrators than it is any needling about Orner\u2019s prose, which flows smoothly through these tragedies. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":973,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1188],"tags":[16304,28453,19907,8583,28451,28452],"class_list":["post-110116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-the-archive","tag-archive","tag-foleys-pond","tag-from-the-archive","tag-peter-orner","tag-story-of-a-teachers-wife","tag-the-vac-haul"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThree Bite-Size Stories by Peter Orner<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Reareading three stories by Peter Orner: \u201cStory of a Teacher\u2019s Wife,\u201d \u201cThe Vac-Haul,\u201d and \u201cFoley\u2019s Pond.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, 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