Clockwork Phoenix 1
John Grant has a penchant for gut-hitting stories wrapped in an intriguing speculative quirk. Here's an SF Site review for a pair of his stories.
This tale involves the single man John Sudmore who accidentally calls his own home telephone number and talks to himself, married to his best friend, Justine Parland, who in his reality had died in a car accident. The story pages back toward, but never falls into, his past. We visit the past through the voice of the present. In this case, the voice may be too distant:
"eyes, which are cold and gray.... the way I see the world.... I can believe in the little gods, little creator gods who are us."The detachment prevents the reader from fully experiencing the past as the narrator does. That doesn't mean the speculation--intimated above as more probable than alternate universes or God--narrator don't have a strong impact: You get the feeling that the narrator feels more than he's letting on.
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