Buddy System

Meanwhile, over at Facets literary mag., Katherine Holmes, a poet and fiction writer published in the Fall 2004 issue of The King's English, has a story called "Buddy System" that's worth checking out. The narrator is a graduate student marooned in Duluth, Minnesota with a neighbor named Dana who can do everything -- including get out of snow drifts -- better than our heroine. Yet even Dana is vulnerable to crimes of passion slash violations of the municipal code, and briefly becomes in her own mind the object of a police manhunt. (Sorry -- "personhunt" just doesn't cut it.) The most interesting aspect of the piece is the narrator's distance from the subjects of her story, and her surprising narrative lurches. Holmes should probably have dropped the unnecessary narrative frame, and the piece could have used another editorial pass, but I found it nonetheless an intriguing piece.