Short Stories

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[close] The short stories of Richard Scharine can be best understood by referring to a quote from William Faulkner. "The past is never dead. It's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity." The stories that follow the title piece of The Woman in the Third Floor Front are divided into four groups: "Utah," "Law and Order," "Past Lives," and "Close to Home." Yet all of them have a similar premise--that the quiet surface of our everyday lives has beneath it a tumultuous series of events which may have formed us and determined our actions without our even knowing of their existence.     It may be as simple as the trifling pieces of evidence in "Scene of the Crime" that show a presumed accidental death to be the surface of a horrendous tale of incest, murder, and suicide. In "Chinaman's Chance" the triumphant celebration of the 100th anniversary of the intercontinental railroad at the time of the Vietnam War brings together a woman who is a descendant of the owners of the railroad and a man whose ancestors built it, revealing the possibilities and penalties of being a foreigner in a strange land. In "I'll See You in My Dreams" we discover the personality of a woman in the walls and furniture of the house she died in 20 years earlier. In "Maria and Marta," a phrase in a foreign language uttered by a dying woman will require a fifty-year retreat across two continents during two world wars to be understood.     Similar examples can be found in Scharine's two other books of short stories: The Past We Step Into and Harvest.

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