Grand Slam is a short story written by James Jandak Wood, which was published in the November 2018 edition of the literary magazine The Normal School. It is the tale of a man whose unexamined belief in stories he has been told is disrupted by that killer of long-held dreams: facts.
An excerpt from Grand Slam:“My father was so adept at flying and had been over German territory so many times that Wantanabe, the navigator, slept until they were right above the viaduct. There were searchlight beams and bursts of antiaircraft fire, but my father sailed right through them like he was dancing the bunny hug.The bunny hug, by the way, was an intermingling of bodies deemed unacceptable; a dance considered scandalous by society – that is by old, white men like President Woodrow Wilson who banned the Presidential Inaugural Ball in 1913 worried that invitees would be bunny hugging on the dance floor. Believe it.”The Normal SchoolNovember 2018