I've just posted '68 Buick by Blaze McRob on Blood Read. I read with baited breath, the story is original and novel with a wicked twist at the end. Blaze McRob's penmanship is sublime as he weaves myriad strands within the time line of the short story to knit together the story of a man's life. The '68 Buick of the title represents a man's life through his disappointment and his pain.
I’m left to the solitude of my room again. More time to think, to be alone while the pain whips around me. One thing about physical pain, though: it takes away some of the mental stress. It hurts to think that all a man has after sixty years of existence is suffering. As hard as I have battled the cancer inside me, winning three times before, it’s back again; this time it’s worse than before. I’ve always taken a different approach to fighting it, never going for chemotherapy, because..well, because that would have meant I would have been weakened and unable to provide for my family. They always came first, even my wife. I never considered allowing them to go into my skull and removing the tumors. Better to use my radical anti-oxidant, mega doses of garlic, and running beyond limits that a healthy man is supposed to be able to achieve. Yes, I used the testing equiptment at the VA to gauge my progress, even enduring the rocket engine like sound of the MRI machine while it probed and tortured. I did all of this and thought I was winning. Damn it! I will win!
'68 Buick by Blaze McRob is consise in its style and on the surface is very straight forward, but deeper the author merges reality and fantasy to ask the reader testing questions of themselves. McRob, in one short story, challenges our perception of fear and how the mind dissimulates under the cruelest test of courage known to man, his own mortality.
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