Nuggets: Short Story Treasures by Al Burrelli

By Al Burrelli

In this aptly titled collection of short stories, the author offers his personal observations on the human condition as well as the "nuggets" of precious wisdom the reader might extract from them. The settings of these stories are varied and range from a cabin in the freezing northlands to a baronial palazzo. In compelling scenes of betrayal, despair, murderous rage, hallucination, and violence, the moral of these tales is implicit: humanity has lost its way, and Eden appears to be out of reach. Redemption beckons, however, in the form of love and acceptance and without limitations of age. While the emotional tenor of many of the stories is dark and forbidding, it is counterbalanced by the sheer joy of the stories that celebrate young love, belated love, and the good will of rescuers and Samaritans. Eden emerges triumphant in this collection through the author's belief that while humanity creates its own brand of evil, it is also capable of engendering its own "miracles."

Find out more by visiting the book's website:
www.nuggetsthebook.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 26, 2014
• ISBN: 9781503517264

Al Burrelli

Alfonso Burrelli was born in New York to Italian immigrant parents who eventually settled on Long Island. He graduated from Hofstra College and held a Master’s degree in the humanities from Stony Brook University and a Master’s degree in Education from Columbia University. He taught English in the public schools of New York and Long Island for over twenty-five years. He wrote this collection of short stories in retirement during the last five years of his life. He was awarded a literary prize for his first short story, “The Bride Wore Red” (“Winning Writers”) and was a frequently published contributor to the “The Easthampton Star,” and to the “Letters to the Editor” pages of both Long Island’s “Newsday” and “The New York Times.” He was married to Louise Fumo Burrelli, Ph.D. (Columbia University, N.Y.) and lived on Long Island with their two children until his death in 2014 at age 81.

Book preview

Copyright © 2014 by Louise Burrelli.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2014920477

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5035-1724-0

                Softcover        978-1-5035-1725-7

                eBook             978-1-5035-1726-4

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 11/24/2014

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Contents

Foreword

1.    Neither Snow nor Rain nor Gloom of Night

2.    The Bride Wore Red

3.    The Tennis Player

4.    My Brother’s Keeper

5.    Deck Chairs

6.    Lord of the Manor

7.    Pillow Talk

8.    Spiral Staircase

9.    The Taxi Driver

10.  A Day in the Park

11.  The Hunter

12.  The Square Root of Eternity

13.  The Militarist

14.  The Dancers

15.  Farewell Felicity, USA

For Felicia and Gian Carlo.

May Deck Chairs be the blueprint for your lives.

foreword_rose.tiff

Foreword

My husband, Al Burrelli, wrote this collection of short stories during the last few years of his life. Prior to that, he had regularly fired off articulate and incisive letters on the topics of the day to the editors of such publications as Long Island’s Newsday and the New York Times, letters that were consistently published and frequently highlighted. A true intellect, he engaged in a lifelong quest for meaning in all realms—from the origin of the big bang to the existence of God—but alas, a habitual procrastinator, he did not give literary voice to the stories he had within him until his final days.

Al had no patience with long explanations regardless of the circumstances. He would always prompt you to get to the point. Predictably, as an author, he had no patience with long narrative forms and was not about to expend energy navigating the winding paths of the novel. It was no surprise that he found his vehicle for literary expression in the short story, a form that compels the writer to focus on a particular moment or event. It was a genre that suited him perfectly, allowing him the freedom of creativity to get to the point. Certainly he was aware that the concise nature of the short story would have an immediate impact on his readers; its message would be absorbed in one sitting, without circumlocution or tedium, which was exactly what he wanted.

When I think about the world Al created in his stories, the word Eden echoes without reprieve: Eden lost, Eden sought, Eden denied, Eden found. It was the realm of happiness and fulfillment he believed humanity longed for, an impossible dream that obsesses, provokes, and all too often escapes our grasp. I was not certain of what his own personal demons and angels were until I read his stories.

A few days before he passed away in his eighty-first year, wasted and exhausted from his long and relentless illness, I asked my husband if he saw a preponderance of ugliness or of beauty in the world. His answer was swift and seemed to reflect the pain, emotional as well as physical, that he had endured in his last days: Ugliness! he said. I was stunned by his answer because this was a man who was drawn to the beauty in everything, whether he saw it in a work of art or in an old battered sailboat at a flea market. I told him his answer surprised me and that knowing him for the six decades we had been together, he must have reconciled the beauty and ugliness he saw in the world, giving each its due as he had in the fictional world of his stories. Al was quiet and dozed off for a short while, exhausted by his illness. When he awoke, he said, "I have a little story in my head I want to tell you. I thought to myself, Fine, this will be short and to the point." His little story did not disappoint. As best I can recall, it went like this:

There once was a magnificent rose tree whose blooms were of the most exquisite colors and perfect formation and whose fragrance was truly remarkable. It was so beautiful that the fame of this rose tree spread throughout the land, inspiring people to make pilgrimages from distant places to view it. One day, a philosopher who had roamed the earth in search of a truth he could live by came to see this fabled tree. As he admired the beauty and perfection of what was clearly a unique creation, he was asked if he saw meaning to it and, if so, what that meaning might be. The philosopher gave thought to this question for a few moments, then, with the confidence of a wise but humble man, declared that if the universe was capable of creating an object of such incontrovertible beauty and perfection as this rose tree, then, against all objections, it was a universe fit to live in.

Al’s little story truly encapsulates the spirit of the man I knew and loved, a man who, as a young boy, contrived his own telescope so he could gaze at the stars.

Louise Fumo Burrelli

PhD, Columbia University, New York

Neither Snow nor Rain nor Gloom of Night

Neither%20snow%20nor%20rain.jpg

Tom pushed hard to open the front door of the cabin that he and his late wife, Murtha, had lived in for twenty years. It was winter again in the woodlands of northern Maine, and that meant exposure to a cold so intense that it seemed to have originated and come down from the very edges of space itself. The alchemy of ice, snow, cold, and silence never failed to disorient the senses, making it easy for someone caught in these conditions to lose awareness of time and place and find himself in a situation that was at the same time both exalting and deadly dangerous. A few animal tracks in the snow were often the only signs of the presence of life.

As usual, Tom’s struggles with the door never failed to shake loose one or two of the icicles that formed on the overhead eave. He chuckled as they fell, always coming close to nearly impaling him. He finally got the door opened, closed it quickly, and went over to the fireplace to light the kindling. After carefully piling some firewood over the growing flames, he took off his badly frayed coat and simply let it fall to the floor with an accompanying, Sorry, Murtha. He lit some candles, sat himself down in the old easy chair by the fireplace, and stared sleepily into the flames. In seconds, his head fell forward, and he slipped into a deep sleep.

**************************************

The cabin had been built by his father many years ago, a little before the turn of the century. It was a wedding gift to his new wife and was intended to be the place that would provide his future family with the blessings of home. Tom was born soon after they moved in. They lived modestly. His father was extremely fortunate to be appointed village mail carrier, a position he would hold for the rest of his life. Mail was delivered by horse and buggy back then, and Tom would often sit on the wagon with his father as he made his rounds. He remembered those years as living out a perfect idyll.

Tragedy struck when Tom was twelve. His mother, chancing a short walk to a neighbor’s house, lost her way in that treacherous wintry beauty and soon afterward succumbed to a virulent pneumonia. The burial, a little way from the cabin, was simple and lightly attended. The emotional impact on Tom was crushing. But there was more. He soon began to realize that he would be witnessing not one, but two deaths: the first, his mother’s from a fatal illness; the second, his father’s from depression and dementia.

Tom had always adored his father and, as he grew up, imitated many