Stolpestad by William Lychack
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Stolpestad by William Lychack
Its the end of your shift and you are about to return home to your family. Then you get a call on the radio, saying you need to help out with a dog. You nag a little, but do your duty and go to see the boy whose dog is severely injured and which obviously needs to be put down. You contemplate your actions, reflect on your past, try to come to terms with what youre about to do. You are going to shoot the dog in the head; the correct method when destroying an animal. But instead, you shoot it in the throat, which doesnt kill it but merely wounds it critically.
This is the story of your life, the main character of the novel by Lychack. Your name is never revealed; instead it makes the reader feel like one is listening to a story about oneself told by a tird-person limited narrator, who does not seem to be a part of ones life, yet is present observing, noting every step, every action, every twitch in ones eye.
This unusual narrating is what makes the story so bizarre. Ordinarily we meet this second-person view only in non-fictional literature or in epistolary novels, but this is neither a self-help book nor a confessional letter; this is a short-story about you who seem uncomfortable in your own life.
To clarify: you is a police officer – potentially named Stolpestad. He has a wife, two sons and a house with a porch; he lives in a town, which is dominated by tenements, mills and traffic lights and where gossip travels fast.
His descriptions of the environment are colorless and are marked by the routine, which he compares with his own life.
The only times the story lets us perceive him as a nuanced person are when he recalls his childhood and feels empathy for the dog before he shoots it.
He watches it, imagines the boy running towards him and begging him not to do it, he tells her, “hey girl,” (l. 83, p. 3) as if hes trying to comfort it before he ends its life.
He also reflects on his past on his way to the dog as he is passing by memories: ” back to all the turns you were born, your whole life spent along the same sad streets [] but there are days you idle slow and lawful past these houses as if to glimpse someone or something – yourself as a boy, perhaps” (l. 11 – 13, p. 1).
After his deed of mercy and the end of his shift, he decides to drive around time instead of going straight home to the family that awaits him (l. 50, p. 3). It obviously isnt the first time he defers his return: “… and still its the long way around home, isnt it?” (l. 89, p. 3). So, he drives around aimlessly, ending up an hour from home to buy a sandwich from a vending machine while he knows his wife is waiting with dinner.
He goes to the bar where a couple of drinks turn into many more and where he overhears the “same