Familiar locations are the comfort of those people who occupy them. When tragic losses of life invade familiar places, they turn family members into strangers and reveal how strange friends can be to one another.
Instead of rediscovering once well-known places, people end up discovering death with grim apprehension and a foreboding adherence to memory. Thus, memory, death and family collide in places that seem familiar.
These places find a home in Peter Orner's collection of short stories, \Esther Stories."" The book draws together the tales of strangers and deals heavily with the distance between them. Some stories have characters who come together by the chances of memory, while others tell of families held together by their shared places.
In the first quarter of the book, titled 'What Remains,' Orner reveals the reactions of people dealing with the deaths of those they didn't know as well as they should have. In the story ""Pile of Clothes,"" a landlord takes some shirts and pants from the closet of a renter whose name he can barely recall. Though his tenant has just passed away, she has always seemed absent. ""Papa Gino's"" shows a couples' voiceless night out. The loss of their child prompts the death of their own passion.
The next group of stories, 'The Famous,' shows the familiar places and the memories that change them. ""At the Motel Rainbow"" deals with the morning after in an abandoned hotel somewhere in Iron River, Wis. Two drifting teenagers have come together for the first time in the night but find themselves leaving separately. A social activist in a small town finds the secrets of a pool hall ace and retreats from what she sees in ""Cousin Tuck's.""
The strangers fall away and the family steps forward in the third group of stories, 'Fall River Marriage.' A mother and her daughter share sparse emotion in ""Sarah,"" a story that has its title character smashing plants to vent her anger toward her mom.
""Awnings, Bedspreads, Combed Yarns"" brings Sarah's father into the picture. Sadly all he can do is lament the destruction of the store he owned and what it stood for as it crumbles in front of him.
In the final quarter of the book, 'The Waters,' the reader meets Esther. Her stories are those of a family drawn together in the places of loss. Sometimes those places are locations and sometimes they're people, but usually they exist in the past. The memories of Esther and her family create a complete place where the things they recall possess a firmness not found in the places they occupy.
Orner is capable of drawing together places and people with terrific vitality. He endows the locations with personality, but only enough to provide greater color to the people within them.
Many of his stories find themselves playing in Wisconsin cities. He mentions Eau Claire, Superior, Rhinelander and others. This closes the gap between the locations, and it moves the reader to the places within his stories.
The greatest strength of ""Esther Stories"" is the passionate wisdom it possesses. Running through the stories are delightful revelations that can be delivered with a calm sense of grace or a reflective honesty. ""Cousin Tuck's"" has a young woman screaming, ""Forty-two years on earth and still dumb enough to be vain,"" while Orner writes, ""There is nothing like the oblivion that coats memories we refuse to remember,"" in ""Seymour."" He writes of people who are, ""gallant and not trying to seem proud"" and a girl who ""had the luxury of nobody coming before her.""
Orner creates people who are dependent upon other characters in their stories while remaining strangers to each other. This gives the book a feeling of alienation that permeates throughout. However, he matches the distance with an equal share of depth that comes from precise and beautiful passages of the value of memories. His families have communal pasts that invite the reader in. His places have shadows and whispers that allow the reader to know what events have collided there. Orner's stories relate the intimacy that people find across the divides within each other and convince the reader that those divides aren't even there.
