Pay More Attention

1/26/26

Short Story: “Nightsky” by Bud Smith

Yesterday I had to go to a training class. We learned of all kinds of horrific ways people have been killed or maimed on job sites. And then the talk went into horrific ways people have been killed in their front yards. One story was about a man who thought he could pull a stump out of the ground with a tractor. He wrapped a chain around the stump and stepped on the gas but instead of the stump coming out (or the chain breaking), the tractor flipped backwards and somehow the man was squashed flat. All his neighbors had been there with him. His wife and kids too.

I very much enjoyed this story, which is about a guy in a work training video who gets stuck on a roof and has some deeply serious problems—though it’s more like an explosion of the work training video story, blasting into the guy’s interior life as the training video context dissolves.

Two thoughts. First, lately I’ve been thinking of a story as made of at least two things—something that you know other people will be interested in and something that you’re interested in. (Which is just thinking through what the work of “beginning” and “middle” are in a story.) The opening’s job being to convey one interest to the other, and not necessarily anything else—in fact you can dispose the opening entirely, if you want! “Nightsky” I think is an example of that, sort of.

Or maybe not? Maybe those first few paragraphs are still present at the end?

The second thing is the way it blasts through a conventional narrative, format that doesn’t have a lot of character depth and then deepens it. It reminds me of Simon Rich’s “Guy Walks Into a Bar,” where a famous joke just keeps going and going. (I tried to do this myself in “Groucho’s Full Quote.”)

The overall impact of these things, especially Bud Smith’s story, leaves a sense that we don’t pay nearly enough attention to the little stories people tell—we should pay more attention to the dumb stuff around us.

Music! Music! Music!

The whole All of Us Flames album is amazing.