A member of the Music Festival’s Lectures Committee, Martha volunteers to open her house to Kingsley, the opera expert, much to the overt dislike of her husband Jeffrey.

(from One Story, issue 55)

You know how experimental/daring/pretentious TV shows and movies may show you events from one perspective then show them to you again from another? This first couple pages of this story do that, but there are hardly any actual events being repeated. Which is okay. This story thrives not on action, but slow unfolding. I thought something might, you know, happen at some point. And nothing big really does. If somebody called you up and told you this long-winded go-nowhere series of non-events, you’d be all dude, you’re wasting my minutes. But as a read, it’s not a harsh imposition.
That said, this story was long-winded and unnecessarily redundant at times, in ways that hinted more at carelessness than stylistic choice. Interestingly, there’s a short scene in which Jeffrey tells Kingsley his opinion that modern writers write too long because of computers. It’s sort of interesting. I’m not gonna just go blaming a computer for this story’s substantial length. But only because there’s one in the room looking at me right now. I think it knows I’m thinking about it. Gotta go.