The decisive moment

Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson is known for capturing "the decisive moment." He told The Washington Post in 1957: "There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever."

Minute particulars: the infinite possibility in a single moment

William Blake wrote that "he who wishes to see a Vision, a perfect Whole / Must see it in its Minute Particulars." The big, lasting things that happen in our lives – no matter how long we’ve waited or dreaded or hoped or worked – tend to happen in a moment. Moments are what we remember. The same is true in literature. A single charged moment can be almost infinitely resonant. In each of these stories, the action occurs within a small, contained unit of time – no longer than it takes to receive a gift or fold laundry or shop for dinner. Yet whole lives are revealed.

No One’s a Mystery

by Elizabeth Tallent

For my eighteenth birthday Jack gave me a five-year diary with a latch and a little key, light as a dime. I was sitting beside him scratching at the lock, which didn’t seem to want to work, when he thought he saw his wife’s Cadillac in the distance, coming toward us. He pushed me down onto the dirty floor of the pickup and kept one hand on my head while I inhaled the musk of his cigarettes in the dashboard ashtray and sang along with Rosanne Cash on the tape deck. We’d been drinking tequila and the bottle was between his legs, resting up against his crotch, where the seam of his Levi’s was bleached linen-white, though the Levi’s were nearly new. I don’t know why his Levi’s always bleached like that, along the seams and at the knees. In a curve of cloth his zipper glinted, gold.

            “It’s her,” he said. “She keeps the lights on in the daytime. I can’t think of a single habit in a woman that irritates me more than that.” When he saw that I was going to stay still he took his hand from my head and ran it through his own dark hair.

            “Why does she?” I said.

            “She thinks it’s safer. Why does she need to be safer? She’s driving exactly fifty-five miles an hour. She believes in those signs: ‘Speed Monitored by Aircraft.’ It doesn’t matter that you can look up and see that the sky is empty.”

            “She’ll see your lips move, Jack. She’ll know you’re talking to someone.”

            “She’ll think I’m singing along with the radio.”

            He didn’t lift his hand, just raised the fingers in salute while the pressure of his palm steadied the wheel, and I heard the Cadillac honk twice, musically; he was driving easily eighty miles an hour. I studied his boots. The elk heads stitched into the leather were bearded with frayed thread, the toes were scuffed, and there was a compact wedge of muddy manure between the heel and the sole—the same boots he’d been wearing for the two years I’d known him. On the tape deck Rosanne Cash sang, “Nobody’s into me, no one’s a mystery.”

            “Do you think she’s getting famous because of who her daddy is or for herself?” Jack said.

            “There are about a hundred pop tops on the floor, did you know that? Some little kid could cut a bare foot on one of these, Jack.”

            “No little kids get into this truck except for you.”

            “How come you let it get so dirty?”

            “‘How come,’ he mocked. “You even sound like a kid. You can get back into the seat now, if you want. She’s not going to look over her shoulder and see you.”

            “How do you know?”

            “I just know,” he said. “Like I know I’m going to get meat loaf for supper. It’s in the air. Like I know what you’ll be writing in that diary.”

            “What will I be writing?” I knelt on my side of the seat and craned around to look at the butterfly of dust printed on my jeans. Outside the window Wyoming was dazzling in the heat. The wheat was fawn and yellow and parted smoothly by the thin dirt road. I could smell the water in the irrigation ditches hidden in the wheat.

            “Tonight you’ll write, ‘I love Jack. This is my birthday present from

him. I can’t imagine anybody loving anybody more than I love Jack.’”

            “I can’t.”

            “In a year you’ll write, ‘I wonder what I ever really saw in Jack. I wonder why I spent so many days just riding around in his pickup. It’s true he taught me something about sex. It’s true there wasn’t ever much else to do in Cheyenne.’”

            “I won’t write that.”

            “In two years you’ll write, ‘I wonder what that old guy’s name was, the one with the curly hair and the filthy dirty pickup truck and time on his hands.’”

            “I won’t write that.”

            “No?”

            “Tonight I’ll write, ‘I love Jack. This is my birthday present from him. I can’t imagine anybody loving anybody more than I love Jack.’”

            “No, you can’t,” he said. “You can’t imagine it.”

            “In a year I’ll write, ‘Jack should be home any minute now. The table’s set—my grandmother’s linen and her old silver and the yellow candles left over from the wedding—but I don’t know if I can wait until after the trout a la Navarra to make love to him.’”

            “It must have been a fast divorce.”

            “In two years I’ll write, ‘Jack should be home by now. Little Jack is   hungry for his supper. He said his first word today besides “Mama” and “Papa.” He said “kaka.”’”

            Jack laughed. “He was probably trying to finger-paint with kaka on the bathroom wall when you heard him say it.”

            “In three years I’ll write, ‘My nipples are a little sore from nursing Eliza Rosamund.’”

            “Rosamund. Every little girl should have a middle name she hates.”

            “‘Her breath smells like vanilla and her eyes are just Jack’s color of

blue.’”

            “That’s nice.” Jack said.

            “So, which one do you like?”

            “I like yours,” he said. “But I believe mine.”

            “It doesn’t matter. I believe mine.”

            “Not in your heart of hearts, you don’t.”

            “You’re wrong.”

            “I’m not wrong,” he said. “And her breath would smell like your milk, and it’s kind of a bittersweet smell, if you want to know the truth.”

Toasters

by Pamela Painter

The neighbors are at it again is what Joey says, just what his father would say if he were here. And just like his father, Joey shuts off all the lights, peels back the curtains over the sink, and settles in to watch the show.

            The kitchen table is piled high with hot, dry laundry. I can fold it in the dark so I sit here listening to Joey describe what is flying out the Angelos’ windows. So far it’s plates, clothes, poker chips, and a fishing rod.

            “Jesus, Mom, you’re missing it. Mr. Angelo threw out the toaster. Wait’ll Dad hears that.” His excited sneakers thump the stove as he turns to ask if I remember when Mrs. Angelo flattened a whole row of my tomato plants with a bowling ball.

            I tell him it’s way past bedtime but he just gets his nose closer to the window to identify the next object and assess the damage. They keep lists—Joey and his father. Things thrown, sound effects made, and grievances screamed to the heavens as if to bring down a pre-apocalyptic condemnation.

            Tonight it started with Mrs. Angelo’s mother’s weekend visits and moved on to Mr. Angelo’s unfinished basement projects and early exits from his weekly poker game to parts and/or parties unknown. It is the same game my Harry has been losing too much money in for years and getting worse. The threadbare towels I’m folding are thin as silk and fold as flat.

            “Wow,” Joey says as Mrs. Angelo yowls one of her favorite four-letter words and the names of two forgiving saints. On purpose, I’m mismatching Harry’s socks and thinking the exact same thing as Mrs. Angelo.

            “Mom,” Joey says, getting tire of the Angelos’ show. “Where’s Dad? Why isn’t he home?”

            Tonight I’ll have to tell him. Because me and Harry. We’re at it again too.

            The streetlight from Joey’s window glints on our toaster, plugged in and safe, and I think: me and Harry should take lessons from the Angelos. I admire the way they fight—everything flying out the windows and doors except the two of them.

Bouncing

by Keith Loren Carter

Standing at his kitchen sink, blinking away sleep, he hears his wife’s scream “Oh God!” followed by terrible thumping and crashing, which he knows as sure as he’s standing there in his boxers is his baby son bouncing down the stairs, just as he’s always feared, and he drops the coffee pot and runs to the foot of the staircase in time to catch the startled body as it tumbles off the last carpeted stair, a plastic toddler gate crashing behind and hitting—Thock!—the wall, leaving a big hole that could have easily been his son’s perfect head, but instead he’s holding that head in one hand, cradling the rest of his tense pooh-clad body, staring at the tiny face, contorted in a frozen, soundless scream of fear and wonder, smooth skin turning crimson, breath held for an eternity as he hears his wife’s “Please God” echo his own prayers along with his voiced pleading “Breathe, Lorne,” when the logjam breaks at last, tears flow and cries like someone is sticking him with a sewing needle erupt out of the suddenly heaving body, threatening to rupture his membranes, and then just as suddenly the cat strolls by, blissfully unconcerned with the drama before her, and the tortured expression of his son clears as sunny as a solstice morning, leaving only a mother and a father, their lives no longer their own.

The Fish Tank

by Lydia Davis (from Almost No Memory, 1997)

I stare at four fish in a tank in the supermarket. They are swimming in parallel formation against a small current created by a jet of water, and they are opening and closing their mouths and staring off into the distance with the one eye, each, that I can see. As I watch them through the glass, thinking how fresh they would be to eat, still alive now, and calculating whether I might buy one to cook for dinner, I also see, as though behind or through them, a larger, shadowy form darkening their tank, what there is of me on the glass, their predator.

The Fish

by Lydia Davis (from Break It Down, 1986)

She stands over a fish, thinking about certain irrevocable mistakes she has made today. Now the fish has been cooked, and she is alone with it. The fish is for her—there is no one else in the house. But she has had a troubling day. How can she eat this fish, cooling on a slab of marble? And yet the fish, too, motionless as it is, and dismantled from its bones, and fleeced of its silver skin, has never been so completely alone as it is now, violated in a final manner and regarded with a weary eye by this woman who has made the latest mistake of her day and done this to it.

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