Short Stories 366:147 — “Lightning Bugs in a Jar,” by Greg Herren

[image error]I have to admit I love a good revenge story, and if there’s a single sort of anti-hero motivation I can get behind, it’s one of comeuppance or vengeance. That probably doesn’t speak well of my character, but the real world isn’t often fair or balanced, so I enjoy seeing such things righted in fictional ones. Now, that’s maybe overstating what’s going on in “Lightning Bugs in a Jar,” the latest Greg Herren story from his collection Survivor’s Guilt and Other Stories, but it does share a similar vibe.

We meet a literary writer’s wife as she’s trying to do a bit of tidying up after a “meet and greet” her literary husband has hosted with local students. He’s loud and very opinionated, and it’s late in the evening, and the young writing students are completely captivated—literary hero worship—but all the woman wants is for them to leave so it can all be over. While she picks at the mess and tries to school any facial responses from lines she’s heard her husband say hundreds of times, we get pieces of the history of the couple, and two things become clear: the author is not a particular good man, and his wife has come to the end of their relationship. There is a lot of loss and pain in their shared history, but for every loss or pain along the way, there is an admixture of complete callousness or selfishness on the part of the man, and so she is cleaning up, and hoping the students leave on time because she’s got something special planned for after the event.

I think the slice of this tale I liked the most was the wife’s agency, and how in a very real (and very dark) way, she takes back control of her life from a pattern of being secondary-to that has lasted since her marriage and motherhood began. This is a woman who is so completely, thoroughly, done, and if her conclusion and eventual plan is a particularly dark choice, well… this is a Greg Herren story, and in keeping with the rest of the stories in the collection, it’s about a survivor, just not necessarily in the way one might think.