SSM 2011: "The Story About My Coat" by Zachary White (reviewed by David Backer)

There's something wonderful about nothing. At first it seems like nothing can't be something because it's nothing. But then we start talking about it and it's something and suddenly we start talking about everything because what is nothing except everything? When I think about nothing I think about how I (don't) encounter it every day, how I go through moments of not-knowing about all kind of things, how nothing isn't just everything but it's everywhere. It's weird. Which reminds me how my friends and I introduce any remark, begin every conversation or comment, with something like "it's weird..." or "it's so strange..." It's as if nothing for us is normal or usual.
 
Zachary White's first published story "The Story About My Coat" in the most recent Armchair/Shotgun is a story about this normal weirdness. How every day moments flux with nothingness. How it's everywhere: at the beach, in the tub, in the sunset, and "chocolate and cranberry juice and coffee, and everything catching pigment." Nothing is there too in the stories we tell ourselves and other people. Like when you find yourself telling the same old dangerous story about how your grandfather fought in a war or how you were shot once or how you met someone you couldn't lie to like you lie to everyone else.
 
Nothing is there. Like the Furies or billboards or petroleum lurking amorally, ambiguously, and ubiquitously under every throw rug and couch cushion, ready. It's a fog, a horizon, moths eating an old coat, a hole in that coat, an explanation for the existence of that hole in that coat which may or may not involve moths or a bullet wound, which is what White's story is: it's a story about a hole in a coat. But what is a hole in a coat? It's a rip in our clothes. A tear in our armor. A disturbance to our edifice. It's the word "maybe." The words "some times." The words "of course..." It's an ellipsis trailing off... It's the acknowledgement that "I lied." The assurance that "it's true."

"Of course it's true..." is the best thing to say about White's story, maybe. Of course I like the story very much. There's something strange about it. It's weird. There's nothing about it that makes sense. It's about someone telling someone else about a hole in his grandfather's coat and how it might have been made by moths or a bullet, how the bullet might have hit the narrator too, how this narrator is unsure about the story and unsure about whether he wants to even tell the story; how he's unsure--confidently, maybe--of pretty much everything...

Wait, I lied. There's nothing about this story that's weird. There's definitely something about it that makes sense. In fact, everything about it makes sense. Because it's about nothing, about how "you might imagine that, looking out, alone and quiet, it would be somehow satisfying when the fog finally broke and you could again see something, anything." The wonderful something about this story is that White makes it clear that the fog never breaks. That we just see nothing. And that everything is there in it. 

David Backer

David Backer is the editor of fictiondaily.org. He's published fiction and non-fiction in various places. He studies philosophy and education and plays banjo. He blogs here.