Yesterday I read short stories of Mary Gray Hughes collected in The Calling.  The stories are beautifully crafted and powerful in their evocation of life’s big and small moments. Hughes has an authenticity of vision and expression that is amazing given the diversity of characters in her stories.  Ranging  widely in gender, race, and age, each person created by Hughes is genuine and compelling, their situations are very real, and their challenges are quiet yet profound.

Whether it is a young boy transfixed by a love he does not understand, an elderly woman left alone, reckless but unsure, a judge misunderstanding the nature of his adversary, a father losing his sanity and his daughter losing her certainty, a daughter realizing both the gulf and the bridge between herself and her mother, a young priest losing faith, or a frontierswoman struggling to hold onto life, both of the mind and the body, Hughes’ characters and landscapes are revealed to us through precise yet subtle portrayals.  These portrayals not only build beautiful stories but are also mirrors to our own selves, leading us to know more about our capacities, our frailties, and our shared humanity.

The magic of Hughes’ story-telling is in the details: she knows that life is understood not in the big picture but in the pieces that make up a life, in the moments of connection or loss, of beauty or sorrow, and of surprise or redundancy.  Hughes gets every detail in her stories just right, from the color of rest home walls (light green) to the voluble hitchhiker (we have all known someone like him) to the shack of a poor man (no light save what comes in through cracks in the ceiling and the peephole in the wall). Hughes never glides or glosses over the surface of her characters and their situation, she takes her time and goes deep into their selves and into their surroundings, bringing up the details that will ensure our understanding.

With her careful and exact imagery (“the corners of his mouth climbed up like roses on the trellis of the wrinkles of his face“), period and place-perfect dialogue (“That’s right,” Vesey said, “the truth never hurt anyone”…”If it doesn’t hurt,” Simmons said with satisfaction, “it’s not the truth”), and sharp observation of human nature, unsullied by sentimentality (“There was no forgiveness, she knew; there was only the crocodile“), Hughes creates stories that rich, true, and hypnotic.  I will reread this stories again and again, and will find even more to see and to understand in the details Hughes weaves into transcendent moments of life.