![]() They were kids who had been given everything and still terrified their families with an unexplainable urge to destroy. There was a cutter who had scars like tiny plastic slugs on her arm, and a guy who torched his high school gym with a bucket of gasoline, his neck and jaw still shiny and melted. “Mascots,” which appeared in Tin House in 2009, was, remarkably, Ted’s first published story, and I’m delighted to recommend it just after the publication of his excellent first novel, The Land of Steady Habits, out last month from Little, Brown. ![]() Mystery in fiction makes room for the imagination, and isn’t the chance to imagine, to wonder, one of the best parts of reading? In the work of a less capable writer, all these questions might make the story feel incomplete, but here the gaps suggest the silencing effect of pain, how some things must be gestured at rather than spelled out. We don’t even learn the exact circumstances of how a lifeguard’s nipple ring came to be rippled out. We don’t know why Peter, returning from Outward Bound, wants to show his mother “in a single glimpse, that I had changed.” Changed how? Why? We don’t know. We don’t know how Carter died, though there are clues. “People kept touching me,” he says, “hands on my back and head and neck, as though in doing so they were reaching across the divide, as if I was a creature with one foot in this world and one in the next.”įar from being a lugubrious tale of teen death, “Mascots” is a spare, airy piece of writing that abounds with wit (Heintz and Deiter - I will say no more) and pleasurable tactile details: Carter’s club kid hoodies and his “rainbow of rare European sneakers,” the translucent lime green vinyl of one of his records “spinning there continuous as a hypnotist’s spiral,” a “patchwork of family photos that cluttered the hallway wall… like the portholes on a deranged ship.” The world here is tough, funny, vibrant, wrenched out of shape.Ī word that always comes up in discussions of why short stories are difficult to write is “compression,” but this story is less an example of compression than of exclusion, of expertly deployed mystery. Subtly, through his body, in listening to music or encountering a woman, he attempts to inhabit his twin, and other people try to reach Carter through him. ![]() Not only is he in the midst of ordinary adolescent flux, but the death of his identical twin, Carter, means his physical self has become an uncanny surrogate for someone tragically lost. Remember being a teenager? Remember how the adult world, growing ever larger on the horizon, looked disappointing or disgusting one minute and then shimmered with thrills and promises the next? Peter, the seventeen-year old narrator of Ted Thompson’s marvelous story “Mascots,” is a profoundly liminal creature. ![]()
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