Playing out of the deep woods

the long version

Every year, as the autumnal equinox approaches, an Accident strikes Oracle, Kansas. This year, it begins with Ruth Montgomery. In the days and weeks that follow her fall in her living room, she suffers headaches and a strange feeling of coldness. But eerier still, friends stop speaking to her on the streets as she slowly but surely slips out of her neighbors' consciousness. Many of the characters in G. W. Hawkes's second collection, Playing Out of the Deep Woods, have had accidents, of sorts. Whether their accidents are physical, like Ruth Montgomery's fall in "Always Cold," or emotional, like that of Prophet in "The Last American Living in Cuba," or spiritual, like that of Jack Armstrong in "The Movable Hazard," characters find themselves ripped from their everyday lives and plunged into the extraordinary. Sometimes moments of epiphany result, as when a young scientist unwittingly discovers the connectedness of life in the mystical story "The Foundation." At other times the result is nightmarish, as in "Pull, Ponies, Pull, My Dearhearts" when an unnamed traveler attempts to destroy a town by pulling down the ancient monolith that anchors the place. Golf provides a powerful and unexpected metaphor in several stories. In "The Shortest Hole" a skillful golfer and successful businessman is humiliated time and again by a particularly short and presumably easy hole. In the magical title story of the collection, two married couples go in search of stray golf balls and confront their most profound desires in a woods reminiscent of that in A Midsummer Night's Dream.