Short Story Review: "Hover" by Nell Freudenberger

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While cooking cereal for her son, Jack—something her own mother would never have bothered with—the narrator notices she has to bend over to reach the pot. The stove seems to recede. She becomes convinced the floor is collapsing and lunges for Jack who’s sitting at the kitchen table. To her surprise, her feet flail in the air. They’re not on the ground. She’s hovering. A few seconds later, she lands on the kitchen floor with a thud. This is only the first time she finds herself hovering. She can’t control it or predict it. She doesn’t know why she can suddenly hover. She studies yoga, but she’s hardly a star pupil. Besides, shouldn’t this happen when she feels most free, like when she’ jogging, rather than when she’s doing housework? When she married, she expected the housework would be shared, but because her income was less than her husband’s, it ended up being left to her. Her son has been to ask questions about death. And then one day while they’re shopping, he asks her to buy her a bag of unbleached King Arthur self-rising flour. He doesn’t want bake anything. He wants to keep the bag of flour like a teddy bear. The strength of this story is not in its action or its characterization, but in its portrayal of the characters’ emotions. Nowhere does the narrator say the Jack misses his dad, but Jack asks questions—kids’ questions—about death. “What do people do after they die?” “How do dead people pee?” “Will you die?” And he becomes attached to a useless object. While I found the ending unsatisfying, I found the story engaging and moving. ______ Title: “Hover” Published in: The Best American Short Stories 2014 First Published: Paris Review #207 Author: Nell Freudenberger (b. 1975) _____ Image attribution: By Harke (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons