THE INDECENCY OF STILL BEING

There are moments when a person suddenly notices that he is still alive, and the feeling is less like wonder than like being caught somewhere he was not supposed to be. The characters in these stories know that feeling well. A passenger realizes his train has not passed a station in hours and that the forest outside has no intention of ending. A retired schoolteacher in a care home receives an email from a surgeon she cannot remember, who spent his life proving wrong a cruel sentence she spoke to him when he was a child. A pastor who turned every sparrow into a sermon for forty years discovers that the pulpit has not retired with him. A farmer sells his land to buy the last stone for the Tower of Babel, from a merchant who has sold the last stone to everyone before him.
Most of these people are trying to leave: a city, a marriage, a house, a memory that keeps returning the wrong details. Few of them manage it. What some of them find instead is harder and smaller: a way of stopping long enough to notice the person who has been waiting for them to move.
The collection moves between plain realism, parable, and dream, and closes with a long novella in which the labours of Heracles are carried out before an audience with popcorn. It is sad in places and funny in more places than it admits.
Kriger's stories take ordinary existence, halt it for a moment, and arrange it in good light so that it can be seen before it moves again. It is a little indecent to look so closely. These stories make it impossible not to.