Teaching IS More Fun Than Most Jobs

In class this week, we read T. C. Boyle's "The Hit Man." We followed that immediately with Ellen Malphrus's "Thanksgiving on the Chickenbone Express." Two completely "dissimilar" short-short stories. 1

Boyle's is the story of a hit man, who wears a black hood all his life, and had a wife named Cynthia (about whom we get no details at all), and a son who at the age of four had been taught by Hit Man "the rudiments of Tae Qwan Do, could stick a knif in a wall from distance of ten feet, and shoot a moving target with either hand." Told in fragments, written from a journalistic masculine emotional distance, and darkly hilarious, with huge metaphysical implications, and a great deal of ambiguity.

Malphrus's is the story of woman, who is given no name, in deep emotional distress, who escapes into kaliescopes and fantasies, and is leaving her husband Patrick having never let on to her family that there is trouble in the marriage. We do not learn details of the conflict in the marriage. Told in a non-linear and highly emotive feminine manner, with lots of brilliant metphors and symbols, with huge metaphysicial implications, and a great deal of ambiguity.

One of my students cracked up mid-discussion of Malphrus. Share, always share the humor in my class, I say. So, I ask, "What's funny?"

(since this is a really depressing story)

Student: "I was just thinking: maybe the Hit Man is Patrick." Class and I lose it. Then he says, "There could be a section of 'The Hit Man' entitled 'Cynthia visits her mother.'" More belly laughs.

Because that would be nearly perfect. There are days when a professor thanks Buddha and all the compassionate bhodisattvas for her job. Because this student connected the gaps in the stories in an act of fabulous critical creativity that is what Lit Geeks like me Live For, and points for difficulty that he did it with a joke.

(1)Sadly, neither story is available on the web, and the Boyle site that might have HM is a den for a trojan, so don't go there, but both stories are easy to access in print; and if you do access them in print, Class, you will find this annecdote all the funnier.