tumble home

After seeing the movie Fight Club I decided to read the book. Somehow, reading Chuck Palahniuk's minimalist style led me to discover another minimalist, Amy Hempel. In college, my focus was on short fiction – and screenplays, I guess – but mostly I wanted to write short stories. Amy Hempel's first collection Reasons to Live taught me that I had a lot to learn. The first short story she ever wrote, "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried", was published. The very first.

Let that sink in. The first fully formed thing she wrote saw a wide audience. Would you even want that? I'm so glad my early stories are lost forever. I was learning how to write AND I had no idea what to write about. But, obviously, she knew both right from the start.

I continued to read through her collections as they were published. She's a master of the short short story, giving you just enough to form a world, maybe just a small spark from it, and then letting your brain do the rest. Her novella Tumble Home changed me as a reader and a writer.

The first time I truly remember laughing out loud while reading happened during her story "Sportsman", which is in Tumble Home. She writes:

"We put up a detached garage," the doctor said, adding, for the nth time, "it doesn't care if you park in it or not."

Later on the same page, she cracks me up again:

"Doctors can't say 'Oops,'" the doctor said. "Doctors say 'There.'"

But the story from Amy Hempel I think of most is "The Man in Bogotá". During my life, I have tried to think through different things that have gone wrong, or happened to me, that I wasn't quite sure how to process. "The Man in Bogotá" offers one possible way of thinking about a loss, or a defeat, or a hardship. It does not work for every possible negative thing that can befall a person – some things are so totally terrible – but it tries to present one way of reframing a situation after it's over.

Hence why I'm going to share it with you all. It's a short short story – coming in under 250 words, which is less than what I'm writing here – but it is full. Meaning: there's a lot going on in it. More than just the punchline at the end. I could go on and on, but instead, I'll just share two versions: one, a spoken word version you can listen to; the other, the full text.

The Man in Bogotá
By Amy Hempel

The police and emergency service people fail to make a dent. The voice of the pleading spouse does not have the hoped-for effect. The woman remains on the ledge – though not, she threatens, for long.

I imagine that I am the one who must talk the woman down. I see it, and it happens like this.

I tell the woman about a man in Bogotá. He was a wealthy man, an industrialist who was kidnapped and held for ransom. It was not a TV drama; his wife could not call the bank and, in twenty-four hours, have one million dollars. It took months. The man had a heart condition, and the kidnappers had to keep the man alive.

Listen to this, I tell the woman on the ledge. His captors made him quit smoking. They changed his diet and made him exercise every day. They held him that way for three months.

When the ransom was paid and the man was released, his doctor looked him over. He found the man to be in excellent health. I tell the woman what the doctor said then – that the kidnap was the best thing to happen to that man.

Maybe this is not a come-down-from-the-ledge story. But I tell it with the thought that the woman on the ledge will ask herself a question, the question that occurred to that man in Bogotá. He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn’t good.

indoor animal is curated by a human: Tim Papciak. On Mondays, he shares one link to one music video to help spark creativity in himself and in other creative types. On Thursdays, he recommends a book, movie, show, art piece, or link to some dusty corner of the internet that he believes either 1.) adds to the human experience, or 2.) serves as a coping mechanism in the year 2025. Note: this is not, and never will be, self-help content.