The Art of the Heart, by Dan Skinner

[Ulysses]

This short work by Dan Skinner is realistic and magical. Northing actually magical happens, but the author sets a mood that moves from a kind of crisp Willa Cather realism to a climactic event that feels magical. I don’t know else to describe it.

We are in rural Missouri in 1965, in a small farm town that eerily recalls the setting of the classic movie of my teen years, The Last Picture Show (I’m sure this is no coincidence). Zac Weston is a solitary farm boy, neither bullied nor much loved by his classmates at the local school. Known as “Two Tone” for his different colored eyes, and assumed to be slightly “slow,” Zac is more or less left alone, which is his goal. Rory McHenry is a few years older, and lives on the neighboring farm with a brother and four sisters. He is everything Zac is not: confident, popular, and beautiful.

Skinner goes to great pains to set the stage: the town’s isolation, Zac’s isolation, the inevitability of farm boys ending up as farmers in an economy that doesn’t allow for college or for escape. We see Zac’s fixation on Rory emerge with his own puberty, and we watch from Zac’s lonely, self-abnegating perspective as he begins to fill a sketch pad with exquisite drawings, most of them involving Rory as an imaginary angel-like super hero.

There is so much that is familiar here, but Skinner breaks the mold by making Rory McHenry into something more than just Zac’s masturbatory fantasy. Skinner supposes that someone as popular and attractive as Rory might in fact also be more: a good man, able to see beyond the confines of his own world into the soul of another. There is no cliché revelation of hidden love here; but the surprise of a straight man who can see past social expectations and recognize the extraordinary where others see only what they’ve been taught to see.