A TINY FEAST- Chris Adrian

http://www.davidsbookworld.com/2009/08/20/a-tiny-feast-2009-by-chris-adrian/

This post is about the second story to be discussed in Torque

Control’s weekly discussion schedule. It’s not actually due for
discussion until the 30th of this month; but, as noted in a previous
post, I don’t know whether I’ll be online for the next week or so,
which is why I’m blogging about it now.
The story in question is ‘A Tiny Feast’ by Chris Adrian, and was
published in the New Yorker (and is available to read online: click
the story title). After one of their periodic arguments, Oberon
presents Titania with the gift of a human changeling. We join
them in a hospital, where the child is being treated for leukaemia;
the story chronicles how the faeries try to deal with the alien
world of mortal medicine.
I think this piece is wonderful, in more than one sense of that
word. Adrian does a superb job of working through the
ramifications of his fantastical idea. Most obviously, perhaps,
there’s going to be humour in the juxtaposition of traditional
faeries and modern society – and so there is: witness, for
example, the method Titania finds for playing a Carly Simon LP,
before ‘[singing] to the boy about his own vanity’; or the times
when the faeries’ glamour drops, and the medical staff become
dazzled by the very presence of Titania and Oberon.

Yet there’s another, less playful, side to ‘A Tiny Feast’. Adrian

makes some telling observations (‘The doctors called the good
news good news, but for the bad news they always found another
name’), but the heart of his story concerns the emotional
trajectory of the characters, and Titania in particular. At first, the
boy is just another changeling to her (she never even gives him a
name); gradually, though, she comes to care about him – but the
story-logic by which the faeries live has the final say. It makes the
tale not only a fine piece of fantasy in its own right, but also a
striking metaphor for how we may react to the terminal illness of
a loved one.

http://www.pkwy.k12.mo.us/north/teachers/pomerantz/Short
%20Story/Handouts_Short_Story/Author%20Project/Excellent%20Example%20Trends
%20Essay%20(no%20comments).pdf

Trends in Chris Adrian’s Short Stories As columnist Drew Nellins wrote on the literary blog
Bookslut, “No one writes like Chris Adrian.” Adrian’s unique experiences have caused him to
develop into an interesting and completely original writer with a style all his own. After
graduating from the prestigious Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa and publishing
his first two stories in The Paris Review and Story magazine, Adrian did not turn to writing as
a career; instead, he entered medical school. He currently works as a pediatrician at Boston
Children’s Hospital and, despite identifying as an atheist, is enrolled in Harvard Divinity
School (“An Interview with Chris Adrian”). His experiences with medicine and religion have
evidently contributed greatly to his writing, as disease, death, and supernatural powers are
elements that frequently appear in his fiction. Through his short stories, Adrian uses
supernatural elements to provide unique insight, conveys important messages through his
titles, and includes the presence of disease and death as an inevitability. “A Tiny Feast,” “A
Better Angel,” “The Sum of Our Parts,” and “Why Antichrist?” all include overt supernatural
elements that provide greater insight and a unique perspective. All of them tell very human
stories—the plots include a dying child, a dying father, depression, and confusion over sexual
orientation, respectively—but the inclusion of aspects such as faeries, angels, a spirit that has
left its body, and the Antichrist allows Adrian to tell those stories in original ways. In “A Tiny
Feast,” Adrian tells the story of a faerie couple whose human changeling becomes ill with
leukemia and eventually dies of it. This allows him to describe aspects of the experience—
such as the “surfeit upon surfeit of love... that ought to be able to move mountains” (“A Tiny
Feast” 6) of which humans are capable—that an ordinary person might not notice, but that
seem remarkable to a faerie. It also allows him to demonstrate the way that the parents of
dying children feel isolated from everyone else. When the faeries talk to humans,
“[e]verything was filtered through the... normalizing glamour” that hides their true magical
nature (“A Tiny Feast” 2). This parallels the way that experiencing the fatal illness of a child
is an utterly lonely experience; parents dealing with it can communicate no more effectively
with

https://thepvacreativewritingreview.wordpress.com/2016/10/13/what-fools-these-mortals-be-an-
analysis-of-chris-adrians-a-tiny-feast-by-addison-antonoff/

Chris Adrian’s “A Tiny Feast” follows Titania and Oberon (if those names
sound familiar, good! hopefully you’ll catch all the references I make to
Midsummer) as they take care of a changeling (Boy) who is diagnosed with
cancer. At rise, Titania and Oberon are talking to Dr. Blork and Dr. Beadle
(which is used in Shakespeare to mean parish constable!) about Boy. The
doctors try to comfort the two as they explain treatments.
Cue flashback to the arrival of Boy in their lives: he has a gift from Oberon
to make up for a fight (apparently it’s easier to kidnap a child then to spring
for a pearl necklace). They fight a lot, by the way. The author describes the
care taking of Boy, and how they saw him more as an object than a creature.

Back to the hospital (just a heads up, we’ll be here a lot): Titania complains
about how ugly the hospital and the workers are. These workers cannot see
her magic – she has made the room beautiful. That doesn’t help much with
her mood. Actually, she’s about to turn a social worker – Alice – into a cat
when Oberon reenters the room. The “glamour” slips for a moment, and the
social worker sees the true Titania. Alice sees more and more as Oberon
and Titania start fighting.
Cue another flashback: At first Titania treated Boy like a pet, much like his
Beastie. Gradually, he becomes more like a son to her, even tries to call her
mommy. Which is good and all, until your child starts dying.

Again, in the hospital: a barrage of treatments. Titania doesn’t understand

any of it. Oberon makes Doorknob (not a name from the original play) try
some of the medicine. Doorknob goes nuts and Oberon knocks (heh) him
out. Luckily, the medicine has a better effect on Boy. Arguably. He can at
least sleep better, but when he wakes up, he’s hallucinating.

One day, a good day, he wakes up and says he’s hungry. Titania sends
fairies off to get cheese sandwiches. They bring back a large selection. Boy
picks one from the hospital cafeteria. Titania reflects on singing to him, and
how his lack of discipline pissed off Oberon.

They can’t go home. Titania takes him on walks through the ward. He is no
longer allowed to eat solid food. Oberon feeds him, Titania gets pissed, Boy
throws up. All healthy, functional trademarks of a family. Time goes on.
Boy keeps asking Titania for food. Just one, tiny feast (what is the title,
alex?). She’s about to feed a chocolate bar to Boy when Oberon returns and
says he has something better. They all cook a tiny meal together and the
boy devours it.

Flashback time: Boy went missing, and Titania, fire-eyed maid of smoky
war that she is, is about to bring an army down on his mortal mother.
Luckily, they find him asleep. Anyways, back to the hospital.

Titania tells Oberon that Boy was a terrible gift. The cancer has gotten
worse. She admits that she thinks that when the boy dies her love for
Oberon will die, too. The doctor talks about letting Boy die, and Titania
loses her glamour. She commands that the doctor do all mortally possible
to save her changeling. Boy dies. The fairies build a bier out of the room
and they all take him back to the fairy home. Beastie died of grief.

What visions have I seen (compelling things we can learn from):

https://vector-bsfa.com/2009/08/30/short-s tory-club-a-tiny-feast/
Seconds out, round two: this week’s short story is “A Tiny Feast” by Chris
Adrian. And the commentary round-up begins with Perpetual Folly:
I hate cancer stories. There are too many of them and it is too easy to make
them overly sentimental and melodramatic. But this one is different. This one
is so highly original (in a Shakespeare-derivative way) that it overcomes all
of my objections. I think this is one terrific story.

Patrice Sarath:
loved this story, for the fantasy and the heart and the humor and the
humanity and the sorrow. If you love good fantasy, you will pick up a copy of
the April 20 New Yorker. You will not be disappointed. For some reason I
always get my New Yorker way the hell past the time the rest of the country
does (maybe it has trouble clearing customs? Thank you Rick Perry) so it
might not be available on newsstands anymore, but do your best.

I hope that this is nominated for a World Fantasy award, as well as an

O’Henry and any other literary award out there. I wish that the Year’s Best
Fantasy and Horror were still being published, because this story would
have pride of place. Thankfully there are other Year’s Best fantasies. David
Hartwell and Katherine Cramer, are you listening? Please read this story
and reprint it. Please.

Jacob Russell:
Chris Adrian’s “A Tiny Feast” is an almost miraculous realization of the
mystery of death, of the power of its visitation, of how it astonishes us into
recognition of love–how is it possible for anything to be at once, “so
awesome and so utterly powerless?”

Oh, and how do we account for the strange ways of medicine and therapeutic
care, the magic of which is not love… but indifference?

Paul Debraski:
The supernatural quality of the story takes the edge off of what is, in fact, a
story of a child dying of cancer. But since the point of view is that of
immortal beings who simply cannot comprehend the details of medicine,
cancer or suffering, it takes some of the pain away from the plot and focuses
it on the parents’ frustration. The immortals feel grief for the first time and
don’t know quite how to deal with it. And when they finally do return home,
they feel just as lost as they felt with their new feelings.

I really enjoyed this story, it was quite odd, but very well done. I also
appreciated how it showed the suffering that parents go through at a
distance, allowing the suffering to seem more real for being so confusing. I
can’t imagine what cuased the full inspiration for it.

And three Torque Control readers, first David Hebblethwaite:

I think this piece is wonderful, in more than one sense of that word. Adrian
does a superb job of working through the ramifications of his fantastical
idea. Most obviously, perhaps, there’s going to be humour in the
juxtaposition of traditional faeries and modern society – and so there is:
witness, for example, the method Titania finds for playing a Carly Simon LP,
before ‘[singing] to the boy about his own vanity’; or the times when the
faeries’ glamour drops, and the medical staff become dazzled by the very
presence of Titania and Oberon.

Yet there’s another, less playful, side to ‘A Tiny Feast’. Adrian makes some
telling observations (‘The doctors called the good news good news, but for
the bad news they always found another name’), but the heart of his story
concerns the emotional trajectory of the characters, and Titania in
particular. At first, the boy is just another changeling to her (she never even
gives him a name); gradually, though, she comes to care about him – but the
story-logic by which the faeries live has the final say. It makes the tale not
only a fine piece of fantasy in its own right, but also a striking metaphor for
how we may react to the terminal illness of a loved one.
Chance:
“A Tiny Feast” by Chris Adrian is a darkly comic rendering of the cancer
ward. Anyone who has logged a bit of time in the foreign world that is a
cancer ward[1] will recognize a lot of these moments (the one that hit home
the most for me was walks with the iv stand), the strangeness that Titania and
Oberon feel and their alien reaction is not far from what any family feels. It
is their comic frustration that makes them their most human.
[…]
While it encapuslizes the helplessness of a parent with a sick child- that’s
exactly the problem – Titania and Oberon have been too normalized at this
point. It was the jarring conflict between our world and theirs (and mine and
the cancer ward) that made this story work for me.
A Tiny Feast:

Themes within short story:

 Terminal illness of a loved one

A parent’s love and protectiveness over their child is powerless against the brutality of death
 Tells story with an aspect of supernatural being such as allows him to present new perspectives
on familiar and fundamentally human situations.
 Comments on the prevalence of death and disease in our world to depict their inevitability and
establish them as situations that are inherent in the human experience.

Background:

 Chris Adrian, after graduating from Writers Workshop, entered medical school.
 A little feast, is about the treatment of a child suffering from cancer, an endearing story of being
poisoned to recover and the perpetual battle against leukemia.

Points:

 Parents of dying children feel isolated from everyone else. Parallels how difficult it can be for a
parent to communicate no more effectively with someone than a faery can communicate with a
human.
When the faeries talk to humans, “everything was filtered through the... normalizing glamour”
that hides their true magical nature.
 The child is described as a ‘terrible gift’ because of the immense sorrow and pain he has brought
with him but also imbued with the love they have for him.
 ‘ One tiny little feast’ refers to how little the boy can eat due to his infection and how ‘A tiny
feast’ is enough to satisfy the boy and help him through the pain.
 The ward was “almost the ugliest place she had ever seen’ due to the prevalence of suffering
around her.
 Juxtaposition of two parallel worlds that sometimes collide; the magical world created by the
faeries and the real one in which the faeries. The lack of knowledge that one side possesses.
“ you have poisoned him masterfully”.
 Motif of’ poisons’ that refer to the cancer treatments for Boy
The prevalence of death in our society has established its significance as an inevitable force that is
inherent to the human experience. Chris Adrian’s A Tiny Feast incorporates supernatural elements to
create a magical world that functions to parallel a parent’s psychological state when their loved ones
suffer from a terminal illness. This disillusioned world where both the magical universe and reality
coincide is an analogy to the stages that parents experience from “anticipatory mourning” where
despite all the love and care a parent can provide, death will always prevail. Thus, it is clear how
Adrian enlighten the readers to realise the inescapable reality of death through the experiences of
those whom are affected by it.

In A Tiny Feast, Adrian explores the tragedy involved with the loss of a loved one to highlight the
oppressive experience associated with death. After graduating from the Writers’ Workshop, Adrian
entered medical school and worked as a pediatrician where his stories were used to convey the
experiences he had with medicine and death. From the onset, the two main characters “Titania” and
“Oberon”, the fairy queen and king, is an allusion to Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s dream that
draws upon the magical unrealistic nature of that world to juxtapose the tragic reality of the illness
their child suffers from. Adrian presents these two contrasting worlds to parallel the psychological
progress the parents have to go through. With reference to Knapp and Hansen’s Helping the parents
of children leukemia, the first stage of anticipatory mourning is denial. The parents are in such a state
of shock that they have not accepted reality as it is which is shown through Adrian’s portrayal of the
fantasy world. When these faeries talk to human, the juxtaposition in ‘everything was filtered
through the… normalising glamour’, demonstrates the parents’ isolation as they are able to
communicate no more effectively with someone than a faerie is able to communicate with a human.
Thus, Adrian explicates the relationship between the denial of losing someone and the undeniable
reality of death.

Adrian provides further examination into the final stages of “anticipatory mourning” to demonstrate
the inevitable occurrence of death in the human experience. Eventually the parents begin to accept
reality which is shown by the gradual disappearance of illusions and magic. When entering the
hospital ward, Titania’s disgusted tone “the ward was almost the ugliest place she had ever seen”
highlights the growing emphasis on the reality and the gradual disappearance of the magical world
that served the purpose to help the parents avoid the truth about the illness. “The glamour… now in
tatters”, they begin to act more like human parents than fairies, “pushing the pole” when taking a
walk with their child while “adjusting his mask”, addressing to their child’s immediate concerns
rather than hiding behind the illusion where everything is perfect. The supportive attitude of the
parents as a result of embracing reality, is catered towards their ‘Boy’ who is constantly begging for
“just one little feast” but cannot consume food anymore. The oxymoron creates a sense of contrast
between the imaginary world and the stark reality of the child’s condition. Both parents prepare
together taking “a long time” to make a tiny feast but is not more tangible than an imagined dinner.
Nonetheless, the emphasis is rather on the time the parents spend together with their child, having
accepted the circumstances they are in. However, despite all the care the parents provided and
“everything mortally possible [done] to save him”, the boy still dies. Thus, Adrian demonstrates the
debilitating impacts that is accompanied with the inevitability of death.

Adrian expresses, from his experiences, the inherent nature of death as part of the human condition.
Through A Little Feast, the use of supernatural elements provides unique insight and conveys a new
perspective on important issues that allow Adrian to put forward his views of the traumatic journey
humans have to face against the overwhelming inevitability of death in the human experience.