Once, Rebecca Rosenblum

The stories in Rebecca Rosenblum’s first collection of short fiction are set in familiar places (Vietnamese restaurants, libraries, night clubs, bus stops), and populated with ordinary characters (disenchanted students and teachers, lonely single fathers and lonely awkward women).  However common her subject matter, Rosenblum’s style is absolutely distinctive; the stories in Once are riveting in their brevity, resistance of closure, and embarrassing humour.

Many of Rosenblum’s stories are set in lacklustre classrooms and workplaces.  In “ContEd,” Isobel is a waitress who goes back to school to study Introductory Tax Preparation.  Rosenblum’s Isobel wearily explains, “I have ten minutes to find the classroom…I meant to look calm and smart, not confused and late.  The Continuing Education people sent me a map that I can’t follow, a ruler, a pen, all printed with ContEd…as I walk, I keep thinking ContEd isn’t a real word.”  “Tech Support” is one of the collection’s best, and follows Clint, an IT guy who quietly adores a colleague.  Rosenblum has a lot of pitying fun with Clint—his boss throws a calculator at his face, and Rosenblum describes Clint’s wounds as “a Yosemite Sam moustache of blood” (the scene gets even more pathetic when a co-worker holds a frozen Lean Cuisine to his bloody nose).

Other memorable stories include “Blood Ties” (the main character describes her period as being “like stigmata, except grosser and without symbolism,”) and “Steal Me,” (in which a librarian helps her gorgeous, high-school friend recover from a failed marriage).  Though a couple of stories experiment with shifting perspectives (one story is told from the collective, first-person “we,” and another splices together narration from a student and a teacher), Rosenblum’s best stories maintain an unwavering focus on the discomfort of their main characters.