Paul Reali Shares His Award Winning Short Stories
Podcast: Download (Duration: 48:10 — 44.3MB)
In this episode number 9, author Paul Reali reads two flash fiction pieces, both of which have a twist. One deals with a woman who realizes the man she married five weeks earlier is not what he seemed. The other deals with a woman high above the ground perched precariously in a window after a betrayal at the hands of someone close to her. Paul also reads a short story set in Buffalo about a man who falls in love with a woman who is the victim of domestic violence. When the woman and the man go missing, the plot thickens.
Paul is co-founder of Charlotte Center for Literary Arts, Inc. (Charlotte Lit), a nonprofit dedicated to elevating the literary arts in the Charlotte area. He is the co-author of Creativity Rising, a why-to and how-to guide to finding creative solutions that has sold more than 10,000 copies, and he is the co-editor of three volumes in the Big Questions in Creativity series from ICSC Press. Paul’s articles and essays have been published in more than a dozen publications and he has won several honors for his fiction writing.
The readings – in order:
How to Wake Up
In this flash fiction piece, a woman struggles with how to escape what she didn’t see coming and how to wake up in a new way.
“There are two ways to wake up.
“That’s how she thinks about it: two ways only. One: wake in fear, then find that all is well. Then laugh at herself for this irrationality, this tendency to let the dreams seep into the day, laugh at her tendency to catastrophize. Or two: wake feeling contented, safe, happy…only to have it slide away. To remember what sleep had been trying to forget.
“At least, there used to be two ways. For the past five weeks and three days, she wakes only the second way: to a calm that slowly gives way to panic.”
[The rest of the story is on the show]
The Window
In this flash fiction piece, a woman is betrayed and chooses the tragic way out, or does she?
“It’s too hot to think.
“Too hot, and too close. How could anyone work in this space? Thank God, the window is open. She moves closer, and traffic sounds float up. How far down is it—25 stories? She wonders that she can even hear the cars.”
[The rest of the story is on the show]
Running the Trees
In this short story, a Buffalo newspaper reporter meets a woman while planting trees and falls in love, but she is attached to a man and that man is bent on violence toward women.
“I’ll confess that after a time, it wasn’t about the trees anymore. It was about the girl.”
All hell breaks loose when the woman and the man go missing.
“The next two days were frantic, a blur. Covering the story, trying to get interviews, tracking down her background. The police looked for the boyfriend, whose name was actually John Smith—a generic name for an all-too generic story: abuser turned murderer. I told the police a quarter-truth about my involvement, mentioning only the trees and what I’d observed there.”
[The rest of the story is on the show]
Listeners can connect with the author at the website: www.charlottelit.org