"Loser" By: Aimee Bender

In the short story "Loser" we are introduced to a young man who seems to have been given the gift to locate objects psychically. This gift was given to him because he lost his parents when he was only eight. It was a way of trying to locate his parents. Though he never had to locate a person until Mrs. Allen asked him to find her son, who was kidnapped. I thought that this was a playful story with a fresh idea.
My favorite line from the story was when he was in his room thinking and contemplating the word lonely and how it was such a fitting arrangement of letters for the word it stood for. "He went home... and thought about the word lonely and how it sounded and looked so lonely, with those two l's in it, each standing tall by itself." (136)
Another part that I found interesting was the idea that Bender had about almost every inanimate object being displaced. Whatever objects you might have or see are probably displaced. They were most likely somewhere else before they were with you. Interesting! For example, "He felt the tug inside of the Green Star... its original home in Asia... the tug of the tree... uprooted from Virginia... and the tug of his own watch which was from his uncle." (139) I thought this idea was clever.

Posted by: Krista Behrends