Anne Corbitt, "The Tornado Bandit"
Some of the stories I’ve discussed recently sin at the beginning: they start slowly and pick up the pace, so that compressing or curtailing the opening pages would make the story stronger. The opposite happens with Anne Corbitt’s “The Tornado Bandit” ( One Story 129, Dec. 10, 2009). It starts out forcefully, only to turn its march into a meander that circles around for a nap at the end. It’s a story about a family, the elderly Mitty and Carl Milton, who return home from a trip to find their house trashed and a beaten, grizzled corpse lying in the bathroom. We find out three homes were affected by the killer the newspapers call the Tornado Bandit. The lives of these families are shaken. Leah Finkelstein starts watching violent movies, zoning out, arguing fiercely with butchers, and carrying around a bat. Mitty and Carl take risks: they speed around in fancy cars taken from the lot where Carl works as a salesman, they gamble, they have sex outside in the yard. Carl, uxorious for forty ...