Memory always needs a marker

I bow down to The King.

Stephen King.

Teaching is just four - relaxing - days away, which means it has crept back into my mind as careers are wont to do.

My freshman are reading short stories this quarter, so I thought I might liven up my break with some by Stephen King.

My history with Stephen King began as me being a hater for much of my life, but has come full circle to me now calling him the Jane Austen of horror.

I shouldn't - then - be surprised to find his short story collection, Just After Sunset, to be fabulous.

Writing this is filling up the halftime I'm taking in the middle of the collection because I just read a short story that was so meaningful I have to take a moment. Let it marinate. I can't let any other words mess with the ones currently floating around my head.

The story: "The Things They Left Behind"

It is about a man who didn't die in the twin towers on 9/11 because he was playing hooky from work. A little less than a year later, artifacts from his now deceased co-workers show up in his apartment. They don't talk to him really, but when they are around he begins to remember them and then - later - also knows how they died.

I won't tell you how it ends. At 29 pages you can read it for yourself. I will say that throwing the objects away does NOT get them out of his apartment for long...

I find that after reading the story, I don't want to read anything else for a bit. I just want to think for a bit. Kudos to King, because isn't wanting to pause your reading to let the words resonate with you the mark of a successful tale?

Then again, I could be touchy because I teach a group of young people to which 9/11 means barely anything. I want to yell and say, "The world changed that day; don't you understand?"

They don't. Perhaps if they read this story they could begin to.

"The things I want to tell you about - the ones they left behind - showed up in my apartment in August of 2002.I'm sure of that, because I found most of them not long after I helped Paula Robeson with her air conditioner. Memory always needs a marker, and that's mine."
Stephen King