Between the Pages
by Marianne Szlyk

Fracture City.  By Steve Cushman.  Charlotte: Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2008.  ISBN:  978-1599481463.  213 pp.  $14.95

Write about what you know” might be a tough piece of advice, but for Steve Cushman, it works well in his collection Fracture City.  An X-ray technician at a Greensboro, North Carolina hospital, he has written a number of lucid stories, many set in and around hospitals.  All of them display his insight into human beings and the predicaments that arise from the conflict between reality and fantasy.

Cushman represents the medical milieu by emphasizing emotional truth rather than blood and jargon.  A novice X-ray technician narrates the collection’s opening story, “Fracture City,” revealing his own vulnerability even as he asserts to an older colleague, “It’s part of the job. . . . People die every day” (2).  Ironically, this colleague is living with his dying mother, and he is clearly taking the novice under his wing.  Cushman revisits the character of the naïve worker coming to terms with his life and its limitations in “Massaging the Heart.”  Here, another young X-ray technician learns to choose reality over fantasy.  Having briefly massaged the heart of a patient when no one else was available to do so, he lets another patient’s granddaughter (“the Stoner”) assume that he is a doctor.  He also worries about his girlfriend’s tense silence after a visit to a fortune teller.  Nevertheless, by the end of the story, he decides not only to discuss this visit with his girlfriend but also to “do the job [he was] trained to do” (119) rather than pretend that he is something that he is not.  Unlike the narrator of “Fracture City,” though, this man comes to his decision on his own.  His older colleagues have encouraged him in his fantasy, and the young woman he is trying to impress does not notice his deception.

Some of the perspectives that Cushman chooses require him to leave the grounds of the hospital.  “Me and Dr. Bob” depicts the sudden friendship between a widowed boat builder and an orthopedic surgeon who play pick-up basketball, drink beer, and take the painkiller Percocet together.  This friendship is both humorous and touching even when the narrator lets his friend sleep through a page from the emergency room.  After all, his friend has conked out with his poodle at his side.  The story ends as the narrator imagines Dr. Bob “pushing, paddling, doing whatever he thinks he has to” as he kayaks in rough water off the Florida coast (17).  The more pragmatic narrator, on the other hand, has chosen to turn back and watches from the shore.  I cannot forget “Red Snow,” the story of a fight between Gary and Liz, an LPN who has addicted him to morphine.  The ending is astonishing.  A Floridian unused to snow, Gary is unable to drive in it; therefore, he cannot escape as a nearly naked Liz, fleeing her neighbors, comes “running straight towards [him]” (107).  I want to know what comes next, but I can only imagine it and even fear it.

(If you would like to read the rest of this story, please click on more)

 

Back to home page