My Lord Bag of Rice: New and Selected Stories.

I read Carol Bly's My Lord Bag of Rice: New and Selected Stories (Milkweed, 2000) in the first part of the year, having nabbed a copy from the magazine's bookshelf. I felt as though I was seated on a bus next to a usually circumspect stranger who, because she doesn't know me, confides more than she should--though in a low tone so others won't hear.

Bly's characters, at least to this Midwesterner, seem familiar--like a neighbor raking his lawn, or someone you often see walking down the sidewalk. And she portrays them at first from a respectful distance. But she slowly leads the way into their lives, and to moments of decision and extraordinary transformation. We meet a "thirty-three-year-old divorcee" named Mary Graving while she is quietly getting tipsy in a VFW bar. At the very end of the story, after she has been insulted by her mother-in-law and gotten into a fight with a troubled woman, we learn the reason for her presence at the VFW. She is celebrating her decision not to commit suicide.

Another story concerns Jack Canon, the town's funeral director, a man cut off from physical life, yet possessed by desire for it. "By accident, he found out what was wrong with him," writes Bly. "The sheriff held several puppies on a pillow in his, lap; his hands kept passing over the little dogs and the dogs kept rearranging themselves in a whining, growling, moving pile of one another. As Jack looked on, he felt that he was losing confidence because he wasn't touching other live bodies enough; he watched in an agony of envy as the puppies wandered with their fat paws into one another's eyes and ears and stomachs--he got the idea they were gaining confidence from one another every time they touched."

Months after reading these passages, I find that Bly's characters continue to live out their complicated lives in my mind. I remain interested in the moral questions that irritate, befuddle, and inspire them.

Anne-Marie Cusac is Managing Editor of The Progressive.