3-Minute Reads: 'Crazy' by Ron Hansen

Nov 09, 2012

3-Minute Reads is a series featuring very short writing you can enjoy instantly. This week, "Crazy" by Ron Hansen, featured in the new collection She Loves Me Not. Hansen is the author of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Nebraska.

Critics have said that Shakespeare's Macbeth is a man who fell in love with his wife's madness. I have seen a crazy woman's hands kintting the air in her sleep, as if she were darning what was torn in her mind. There are so many wanderers, all pleasantness lost, claiming microchips have been installed in their heads, having hot arguments with enemies who are no longer present. "Who are you yelling at?" I yelled, and his insanity stared through me as if I wasn't there. I heard a Marine ask the girl, "Then why did you invite me here?" and she said, "Because I wanted you to beat me." Kierkegaard called Abraham a knight of faith because he was willing to give up everything, even his son, in obedience to the instructions he'd heard. Confident he would get it all back. And there was a fascinating student who wanted me to read her fiction. But she handed me a scrapbook of stories written in Crayola and in glossy words razored from magazines and glued onto the page. She thought writing was a ransom note. The child was not returned.