A willful woman and her fiance are stranded at a train station with several other people from their town. When Willa takes off, her fiance follows her, against the advice of his fellow townspeople.
I was really excited to swap books with my friend Jillian. She gave me her copy of Just After Sunset, Stephen King’s most recent short story collection, and I gave her my copy of Under the Dome. Stephen King has always had a real knack for the short story, with the ability to build memorable characters and suck you in within just a few pages. In the introduction to Just After Sunset, he says that he wanted to refresh his short story writing skills because he was afraid of losing the ability to write them. “Willa” makes it clear that for King, it’s just like riding a bicycle; he’ll never truly forget how!
At first, we just follow Willa’s fiance as he walks through the desert beside the train tracks looking for her. Stephen King quickly lays out a problem: Is Willa worth the trouble, or does she only care about herself? Her fiance stubbornly refuses to listen to his fellow townspeople and insists that she does care about him, and that she only got bored with waiting for the next train.
When he finally does catch up with her and she explains why she left, the story gets turned upside down.
The ending was bittersweet. King did one of those leaving-it-open-to-make-you-crazy things, in such a way that leaves you on the verge of tears.
The unfinished ending parallels the main theme of the story, though, so it leaves you teary eyed and thinking, Imagine if I were them… Imagine if that’s what it’s really like…
I loved “Willa” and dove right into the rest of the collection after. Then again, it doesn’t take much convincing to get me to read anything Stephen King writes…
Have you read Just After Sunset? I’m about five stories in now, so I don’t have a favorite, but which is your favorite? What did you think of “Willa”?