Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee: 44 Stories
James Tate
Language: English
Pages: 229
ISBN: 0970367252
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The 44 stories of Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee—long-awaited by fans of Tate’s poetry—will come as a welcome surprise to readers unfamiliar with his previous work. Tate seems both awed and bemused by small town life, with its legends, flights of fancy, heightened emotions, tragedies and small ruptures in the fabric of ordinary existence.
last, I stand before this stately, decorous Onopordum acanthium. It is approximately three-and-a-half feet in height and, I regret to report, in magnificent bloom. This is, I realize even more emphatically, a totally senseless execution. I would have preferred she had ordered me to cross the street and cut the throat of the neighbor’s dog. Yes, I could have accepted that order since the creature has an apparently incurable tendency to howl at the moon and kept us awake most of last night (most of
of figures. But it was Angie he was thinking of the whole time, how they had first gotten together. It always had been a kind of suicide pact, he realized now, and now that he was really dying, she was breaking the pact. It wasn’t funny one bit. What had they been laughing at all this time. It wasn’t one bit funny. 124 THE EXAMINATION D r. Shroeder, at the age of thirty-four, had every reason to be pleased with himself. The spacious new house with its solar heating system came complete with a
“you’re embarrassing Charles and Nikki. You forget you’re not at home. People act differently here.” “Are you asking me to change at my age? ’Cause if you are, darlin’, I got some real bad news for you.” “Uncle Lloyd,” Nikki said, “Princess Grace of Monaco had lunch here a few years ago.” “And look where it got her,” he said, choking at his own wit. “Like I said, a good horror picture could be made right here. 132 OUR COUNTRY COUSINS Don’t get me wrong, I like some of them pictures, too. Hell,
thought to himself: this man is not a murderer, he is not guilty, but a victim himself. The next day, it was business as usual. Darcie complained that she was too tired to go to his family’s house for dinner, as they had planned. Johnny was disappointed and embarrassed when he called to make excuses. In fact, Darcie was tired all the time for months after the wedding. Only once did she summon the energy to go shopping for baby clothes. And then when she returned, Johnny was stunned to find out
it at first. We’d be driving along in the center of town and for no good reason Skip would roll down the window and yell at some absolute stranger, something innocuous like “Hey!” or “Zow!” Skip is a grown man I should explain. He’d yell these things very loudly and I was, frankly, embarrassed, but I paid little note to it. And the pedestrians, for the most part, just ignored him. He was in town for a month or so helping me out on a job, so I felt some responsibility for entertaining him. I’d