The story of the month at A Curious Singularity is Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants. The story is short and seemed familiar enough that I’m pretty sure I’ve read it before. I wish that made it easier to talk about, but it doesn’t.

Most of the story is dialogue between a man and a woman waiting for the train from Barcelona on its way to Madrid. It’s all very typical Hemingway with his short, matter-of-fact sentences that don’t waste words.

We’ve got a young woman named Jig who is pregnant and she and her lover (unnamed) are going to Madrid so she can have an abortion, something the man tells her over and over is “perfectly simple.” Jig does not want an abortion but she is doing it because he wants her to and because if she doesn’t do it she knows he will eventually leave her. She is not convinced the abortion, which is only named once as an “operation” that isn’t “really an operation at all,” is simple. When her lover finally gets her to say that it is simple he knows it is false. I then suddenly felt that he, who had previously believed it was no big deal, didn’t actually believe it was all “perfectly simple” either.

Throughout the whole story they are a couple together but apart. We get hints that things weren’t great even before the pregnancy as they never seem to agree with each other. Jig seems dreamy, or at least a romantic sort, and he seems like he has no time for romance. He has a certain hardness throughout that is always met with pliancy even if it is of an unwilling kind. Jig does much of the talking at the beginning but toward the end there is an interesting flip. He starts talking more and she starts talking less, even asks him to “please please please please please please please stop talking.” He loses his edge and she becomes the hard one, telling the man in the final sentence, “There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.”

I get the feeling by the end that Jig has gone from worrying about losing him and wanting to make things okay, to desiring the whole affair–the abortion and her relationship with her lover–to be over. My sense of the man is just the opposite. At the beginning he seems ready to leave her but taking her for an abortion so he doesn’t have a kid stuck on his hands, his version of doing the right thing. By the end he seems worried he is going to lose her.

I have said “seem” and “I get the feeling” so frequently because there is nothing in this story that can be pinned down. It is a conversation of things not said and the reader can only read what is said and surmise what words and thoughts are hiding behind the words on the page. The story was a pleasure to read, not so much for the story itself, but for the amazing display of writing skill.