“Chicxulb” by T. Coraghessan Boyle (thoughts)

I’m publishing the review on Monday to participate in John’s Short Story Monday. I read “Chicxulb” by T. Coraghessan Boyle because Nymeth has it listed as one of her favourite short stories, and she and I have similar taste. ;) And let me tell you, this is an incredible story. Check out the opening line:

My daughter is walking along the roadside late at night—too late, really, for a seventeen-year-old to be out alone, even in a town as safe as this—and it is raining, the first rain of the season, the streets slick with a fine immiscible glaze of water and petrochemicals, so that even a driver in full possession of her faculties, a driver who hadn’t consumed two apple Martinis and three glasses of Hitching Post pinot noir before she got behind the wheel of her car, would have trouble keeping the thing out of the gutters and the shrubbery, off the sidewalk and the highway median, for Christ’s sake.

It immediately tells the reader what’s going on, sets a mood of foreboding, and tells us something about the narrator. Not to mention, it’s just a wonderfully constructed sentence.

After that hint, though, the narrator pulls back to talk instead about meteors. There’s a shout-out to St. Petersburg, one of my very favourite cities, when he discusses the last big meteor hit, one hundred years ago, in Siberia:

There was a detonation—a flash, a thunderclap—with the combustive power of eight hundred Hiroshima bombs. Thirty miles away, reindeer in their loping herds were struck dead by the blast wave, and the clothes of a hunter another thirty miles beyond that burst into flame even as he was poleaxed to the ground. Seven hundred square miles of Siberian forest were levelled in an instant. If the meteor had struck just five hours later, it would have exploded over St. Petersburg and annihilated every living thing in that glorious, baroque city. And this was only a rock. And it was only sixty yards across.

The rest of the story alternates between the narrator telling us more about what happened that night with his daughter and discussing meteors. The title comes from the meteor that crashed into the Yucatan and killed the dinosaurs, known as Chicxulb.

I’m not going to talk more about it, because the way Boyle ratchets up the tension really needs to be read in context, but you need to go read this story now. I promise-it’s so good! And it’s not that long either. So what are you waiting for?

Notable Passage
So what does it matter? What does anything matter? We are powerless. We are bereft. And the gods—all the gods of all the ages combined—are nothing but a rumor.