The Awful Possibilities by Christian Tebordo

Imagine a high-school shooting updated with hip-hop attire, an organ theft gang operating out of cheap motels, and a public speaker who mutilates his friend’s flesh for a new wallet—Christian Tebordo tackles these and other dark tales in his first collection, The Awful Possibilities.

The Awful Possibilities
By Christian Tebordo
Featherproof Books

Tebordo, who currently lives in Philadelphia, has published three novels that also deal with stranger-than-reality scenarios, the kind you must immediately share with those around you. In fact, these stories are meant to be read aloud. The narrator often speaks to the reader in confessions, shifting between the first, second and third person perspectives, mirroring how stories are uttered in conversation.

Much like the set pieces found on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Tebordo inflicts a divergence between subject matter and tone in his stories, a high-brow language for low-brow situations. In “Three Denials”, a man has a petty argument over semantics with his wife over their wedding vows, specifically the phrase “my other self.” Since the narrator is younger, he deduces that she is, in fact, his older self. The wife disagrees. He eventually considers that her lack of understanding may be due to her “restricted blood flow.” The wife then says, “Maybe we could work this out if you’d just untie me.”  

This may seem like absurdity for absurdity’s sake, and in various sections of this collection, it is. The stories in The Awful Possibilities signal that society craves glimpses of marginal people in everyday situations, that we are all voyeurs. Much like the subjects of YouTube videos or photoblogs like “People of Walmart,” the names of the characters aren’t important. Context isn’t important. Their shock value is. Most importantly, we want to laugh.

This collection wants to be unconventional and succeeds. Each story is preceded by a series of handwritten postcards entitled “Perfectly Banal – Postcards I sent home when we were last on vacation together so that you would have something to look forward to on our return.”

In one such postcard the character asks, “Which is more redundant—redundancy or the act of calling something redundant when its redundancy has already been acknowledged?”

Tebordo never answers the question. Readers looking for answers will find this collection lacking. There are no morals here, only possibilities.