Short Story Friday: Frost Mountain Picnic Massacre

I love One Story. I love the slim little pages and the way the new issue arrives in my mailbox just about the time I start to think, oh, isn't it time for a new story...? The writing is consistently impressive and each issue is light as it slides easily from my mailbox into my purse. I am fond of literary magazines that are beautiful and thick and I am also fond of the kind that will walk around with me and make for good bus reading. One Story is definitely the latter. One Story is also a bit of a unique reading experience when it comes to short stories because it is the only time I read a story that is nothing more than a story. It's not in a literary magazine, or The New Yorker or a book or the internet or my iPhone or a packet of things handed out by a professor. It is just one story that I can't flip past or click away from (not that I'd want to).

It's hard to pick a favorite issue. I loved the recent "A Minor Momentousness in the History of Love", which has a fabulous title, a fabulous trailer and reminded me quite a bit of my brother (who has played a lot of tennis in his life).

But I think the issue that has stuck with me the most is "Frost Mountain Picnic Massacre." When I love a story I tend to remember where I was when I read it for the first time. I have a vivid memory of the scenery outside the car window that we passed after I finished Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies", for instance. I doubt she would not expect her stories to be associated with the distant peaks of Colorado mountains, but they are for me. Since moving to SF I've started to associate both the MUNI and BART systems with good literature. Which is why it strikes me as odd that I don't remember where I was when I read "Frost Mountain Picnic Massacre." I guess I could narrow it down. I was probably in my apartment, and it's not unlikely that I was sitting on my couch. Yet, I don't know for sure. There was a time before I read it and a time after and something fuzzy in between.

What I do remember is that I wished there was someone else around to talk about it with besides the cat. Jeff had just left SF to go back to New York and I missed him. I would have liked to have been able to say, "I just read the... strangest? Coolest? Craziest story? I just read something I didn't expect to read."

Which might be why I don't entirely remember reading it. It was an unexpected story. Narrated by a collective first person voice the story is about an annual picnic that, each year, ends in a massacre. Usually it is a strange sort of massacre, events that are bizare and frightening, but described in such a detached manner it is almost funny. Each massacre and image lingers, balancing precariously on the line between dark humor and disruptive horror.

You check out an excerpt and interview with the author, here. You can find Seth Fried's blog: here. (And congratulate him on this story being nominated for a Pushcart!)