If you ask me, when something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can.
The story of “High Tide in Tucson” is one in which a beach-vacation decision to pick a seashell results in a hermit crab calling the desert of the American southwest his new home. Buster’s the name—though gender remains quite elusive—and he quickly settles into his new life. The story of the unwitting tagalong from the sands of a beach to the sands of Arizona is most assuredly about a hermit crab, but it is also quite clearly a metaphor for human tagalongs who suddenly become a part of your own peculiar and particular life.
Fashion nearly wrecked my life.
This quote is an excellent example of the importance of a solid opening line. Opening lines are important to novels, of course—witness the number of them that are instantly recognizable as such—but they are perhaps even more significant to the short story. Open a book and read an opening line that is less than impressive and you will likely still give it a read. Because of the brevity of the short story form, however, one may be more judgmental toward the quality of an opening. If a line does nothing for you, you’ll probably still read it, but might also figure the rest of the sentences aren’t too good either. On the other hand, if you read a real grabber right at the beginning, it is highly likely you will feel compelled to keep going. Such is the case not just in this story, but in many opening lines in many of the stories throughout the book.
My soup contains a rock or two of hard times, and maybe yours does too. I expect it’s a heck of a bouillabaisse.
Closing lines are important, too, but in this case things are the opposite. A closing line in a novel carries much greater weight than in a shorter piece of writing. That final line in the novel serves to sum up an entire world of people, places, events and emotions. The close of something short doesn’t feel that same burden. What one really wants is to feel good about what they just read. To feel as though spending a little chunk of time lost in another person’s imagination or another person’s real-life world has been worth the time taken from their own lives. A strong closing line in a short story or essay or some hybrid mixture of the two will be a summing up of the central essence of the theme with the cherry on top being the possibility of applying the experience directly to your own life. That is what happens here and, fortunately, at the end of many of the selections in this volume.
