Review: 'Flyover Country,' by Luke Rolfes; 14 stories that tug at your heart

The 14 short stories in "Flyover Country" pull strongly and insistently at the heart. In "Tornado," a boy imagines how the mother who abandoned him will be blown back by a tornado. In "Billy Ship," a young man about to have his '76 Stingray repossessed takes a temporary job guarding the sweetest racehorse you can imagine. In "Snow Geese," a heartsick teen wishes he could join the flocks of snow geese he remembers flying north, "thousands of snow geese in the wind, blowing together like feathers from a torn pillow," but it is the wrong season for such dreams.

Although some of the pieces are sketches more than stories, it is still difficult to put them down. Consider the first line and the seeming nonsequitur in the second line of "Bugs": "Mom says bugs are Satan's minions. I believe her because she has red hair with streaks of gray in it." Or consider the intriguing opening lines of "Ghostwater": " 'Heroin is never a good thing,' Uncle Bones says. His hands are on my mom's hands. They move to her shoulders. Now they're wrapped around her stomach, and he's resting his chin on her head." Who are these doubters and down-and-outers, these "stupid retards" like Joe in "Bugs"? Much pleasure awaits the reader in finding out.

Author Luke Rolfes' characters live in Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, Kansas. Often from broken homes, they seek emotional stability, a difficult commodity to find in a duplicitous world.

In "The Pitcher," a ballplayer knows that in order to keep his girlfriend, he must win each time he takes the mound. After a victory and before "the hollowness of morning" returns, his passionate nights with Eloise Ann "move as if struck by a match." A college boy in "Shells" — reassessing his view of nature — grows less certain about his relationship with his outdoorsman father.

Should their increasingly tenuous emotional or filial relationships end, these young men might become like the brother in "Three Months," who's sentenced to time in the county jail for felony assault, or like the jaded, foul-mouthed parolee Travis in "Straw Man," who has no future. Rolfes' protagonists flirt with a similar fate. You hate to imagine the days ahead.

I mentioned earlier a shortcoming. Here is another: Stories such as "Mountain Crossing" or "Cold Town" end too abruptly and conveniently. On the other hand, there's much to admire in Rolfes' first book. The author, who grew up in Polk City, Iowa, and who teaches at Northwest Missouri State, has a creative writing degree from Minnesota State University, Mankato. "Flyover Country" won the 2014 Georgetown Review Press Fiction Manuscript Contest. Travelers passing over the heart of the country should read Rolfes' book and think about the dramas below.

Anthony Bukoski, a short-story writer, lives in Superior, Wis.