Matt Bell

The titular protagonist of Elizabeth Baines' "Daniel Smith Disappears Off the Face of the Earth" probably the kind of kid you might find a little obnoxious, if you yourself are an adult. He is fifteen years old and out late at night--"later than he should be"--dressed in "air-bubble trainers" and white-boy dreadlocks, thinking of the "riff he's just been playing on Tom Dunnington's keyboard." Walking home, he thinks not about the time he's spent with his friend, but about how his friend has "got the equipment, a sound system in every room in his parents' six-bedroom home with jacuzzi," including a whole-house sound system that he has been nagging his own parents to get, noting that he himself "could construct [it] with a set of speakers and several yards of wire, at a cost to them of little more than a couple of hundred pounds," which would lead to an "immeasurably increased quality of life." While his "old-fashion hippy type" parents criticize his materialistic urges, he himself sees things a bit differently:

Dan knows he's lucky, though, fetching up here, out of all the times and places in history of the world, at the end of the twentieth century, in this city, Music City, at a point in Western civilisation when technology is giving middle-class boys like him a spin. Silicone chips on a silicon planet where life evolved out of stones dropping by from stars, talk about luck.

Despite his parents anti-materialism, Dan's dressed in the latest fashions, including an expensive jacket, "the kind they chain up in the store and have to unlock to let you try on," and the aforementioned "ninety-pound sneakers." This is all it takes to bring the story's conflict down on Daniel, in the form of two muggers:

They came out of the vacuum. Two youths just like him, a bit older, a bit taller, out late on the town, probably later than their mothers wanted. A bit less lucky: they don't have watches, they ask him the time.

He pushes up his sleeve and reads the luminous figures on his waterproof, pressure-resistant watch made for a deep-sea diver, and tells them, Eleven-ten.

And then, while his head's down, they've got him, one each arm, and they're hustling him down a cul-de-sac, tree-lined and ill-lit, with houses even bigger than Tom Dunnington's, set well back form the common world behind laurel bushes that would muffle any call for help.

There's great small touches here, amid the chaos of the mugging's beginning. Note the near parallel construction from the beginning of the story, where Daniel is described as "out later than he should be," and this passage, where the muggers are "out late on the town, probably later than their mother's," and how this forges a connection between the muggers and their victim. See how the narrator--so judgmental of Daniel in places--dips down into his sensibility for just one tiny telling phrase, the "houses even bigger than Tom Dunnington's" bit, revealing that even in the midst of this mugging Daniel is able to classify materialistic accomplishments, to see where different people rank.

The mugging that follows is fairly typical, plot-wise: the muggers prod Daniel with a knife, tease him about his dreadlocks, make him beg for his house keys and then crawl along the ground to retrieve them. But what follows is nothing short of spectacular, as Daniel "becomes aware that the attention of the youths is no longer on him." He turns and watches the two muggers trying on his coat, his shoes, and then "there is a moment in which Daniel Smith's scattered soul thuds back together in material outrage, rich-white-boy fury." The muggers sense this, sense that this boy they've cowed is now something to be feared, and as they run off into the night, something more happens, another reconfiguring of Daniel that is both magical and disturbing, depicted in a fireworks show of vivid language and structural decomposition, as the last sentence shatters itself to pieces upon the page as surely as Daniel himself has upon the street of the cul-de-sac. I wish I could share Baines' last words with you, but it would be a disservice to the story, both because they would be hard to depict properly in this blog format, but also because it might ruin the magic of reaching them yourself. You'll just have to trust me that this is the real deal, the kind of last sentence that leaves you reeling not just in the minute you read it, but also in the many minutes that follow.

Elizabeth Baines' "Daniel Smith Disappears Off the Face of the Earth" appears in her collection Balancing on the Edge of the World, from Salt Publishing. From their catalog, I can also recommend Tania Hershman's The White Road and Vanessa Gebbie's Words From a Glass Bubble, and I myself just ordered A Brief History of Time by Shaindel Beers, which I've been wanting to read-- I thought I had a review copy of it, but I must have just wanted for one. Books are 20% off right now at Salt's store, which should bring them closer to Amazon's prices, and I can guarantee you that buying the books directly from them is always the best for the press.