The stories in Ross McMeekin’s collection Below the Falls are both fantastic and breathtaking, and always imbued with humanity.
To me, the songs and stories on this list are dance partners. Some have hands on each other’s shoulders, talking and laughing, while some are draped all over each other, kissing on the neck. Some are simply trading glances across the room—there’s a connection, but it’s only a hint, at first. Some communicate directly, others in metaphor, others in gesture and tone. My collection of short fiction, Below the Falls (Thirty West Publishing House), is composed of stories written over a period of ten-plus years, so while the songs on this list remind me of their dance partners, they also conjure the feelings that inspired them in the past.
“People Got a Lotta Nerve” by Neko Case
In love stories, sometimes the epiphany of a character is the terrible realization that the person they love isn’t ever going to change. Hope for the future can sometimes be less of a virtue and more of a delusion. “Breakup Sketch,” a flash fiction piece, follows a lawyer discovering that her boyfriend, a stand-up comedian who tells jokes using the intimate details of their personal lives, will mine their future family for material, no matter the cost—and that won’t change. This truth was hidden to the narrator, even though it was, as they say, in plain sight. As Neko Case sings, You know they call them killer whales / but you seem surprised / when it pinned you down to the bottom of the tank / where you can’t turn around / it took half your leg and both your lungs…
“Archie, Marry Me” by Alvvays
The singer’s desire for a love sealed in matrimony—hey, hey / marry me, Archie—is so earnest and sweet that the pleasure of hearing it can almost cause discomfort. It’s the kind of song you dearly love but don’t necessarily tell your jaded friends about, because they might scoff (but then listen to it themselves on the sly). “Ripe,” a surreal, sugary love story between two characters struggling to overcome their lot in life so they might be with each other, reminds me of this song, in that the desire of the protagonists is pure and poppy and without apology.
“Patsy Touhey’s/Fred Finn’s” by De Danann
Something I appreciate about Celtic reel mashups is how they can sometimes change moods on a dime, switching from intense darkness to joyful lightness in an instant, like the shift here between Patsy Touhey’s reel to Fred Finn’s. One of the flash pieces in the collection, “Switchback,” attempts to do just that, with a chase, capture, and burial scene that flips from tragedy to triumph in one line.
“Moving Pictures, Silent Films” by Great Lake Swimmers
One of the oldest stories in the collection, “The Keeper of Strays,” follows an outcast mountain hermit who comes upon the remains of a child from town, buried in the snow on his property. The lonely isolation of the main character is interrupted in the most terrible of ways. Awake me please when this is over / oh when the ice is melted away. As he pulls the remains down the mountain to the home of the parents, he’s pulled back into a world that rejected him and away from the song he was living.
“Moanin’” by Charles Mingus
A few of the stories in the collection feature characters suffering from mental illness. The protagonist of “The Meme” suffers from a mood disorder that can cause him to distrust his perspective, leaving him vulnerable to those who would exploit his confusion and insecurity. In this case, the bully is his pastor, whose actions lead to a series of events that destroy both their lives. I think this song does a good job expressing the experience of a dark, roiling, paranoia accompanying a mixed bipolar episode like those experienced by the main character.
“Togetherness” by Outrageous Cherry
I came to this track by way of a free E.P. given out with the New Pornographers’ album Together, which included a cover of the song. The compact disc was stolen from my car, but a few years later I found the original on YouTube, and it inspired my story, “Togetherness,” which takes its name from the song. Togetherness / Is something that you promised me / That I accepted nervously / And never ever got for free. Both the song and story are explorations of what sometimes must be suffered and sacrificed for the sake of holding a community together.
“Overcome by Happiness” by Pernice Brothers
This song judges a beautiful person for being shallow while at the same time showing empathy for the fact that it is, in part, the person’s beauty—which of course they didn’t choose—that has kept the person from having relationships of any depth. Joe Pernice (a novelist as well as a songwriter) sings, Do you think you might scrape your life together / just in time to find you’ve got no peace of mind / ‘cause everybody wants a piece of your pretty white ass. My story, “Libidonomics,” is told from the perspective of a fracking mogul whose endless search for true love is foiled by his wealth, and asks whether the reader can—or should—empathize with such a privileged, unlikeable character.
“Tell Old Bill” by Dave Van Ronk
A few stories in the collection touch on alcoholism, and how it effects not just the people suffering directly from it, but also those in relationship with the addict. In “Lap Lane,” the wife of an alcoholic is preoccupied with an accidental drowning that points to her own fears that her husband is the one drowning, and there’s little she can do about it. This song tells the story of a wife who stays home while her husband goes on a bender, only to find out in the evening that he’s died. They brought Old Bill in the hurry-up wagon / well poor old Bill, his toes was draggin’ / in the morning, in the evening so soon. Both the music and the lyrics are matter-of-fact, speaking to the inevitability of the tragedy, but also the sense that her pain might come with a terrible guilt that she couldn’t do anything about it.
Ross McMeekin is the author of a noir, The Hummingbirds (Skyhorse Publishing, 2018.) His short fiction has appeared in literary journals and magazines such as Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Redivider, and X-R-A-Y. He has won emerging writer fellowships from Hugo House and Jack Straw Cultural Center in Seattle. For the last ten years, he has served as editor of the literary journal, Spartan.