Everything you need to understand or teach Tabloid Dreams by Robert Olen Butler.
The dozen short stories in Tabloid Dreams all involve human needs for and in relationships. The Titanic tales that bracket the other ten develop two characters who have been isolated from another's passion and touch, the man for fear of intimacy, and the woman by her passion for the cause of equal rights for her gender in a patriarchal society.
Loretta of the glass eye can see herself and her husband moving step by step through the classic stages of a dying marriage—his passion is lost to her and focused on another woman. Loretta can see the pattern, but cannot stop it.
The sixteen-year-old boy bearing the Elvis birthmark resents his mother's pattern of taking up with one man after another, and only begins to understand the power and depth of passion for intimacy after his first encounter with a girl.
The elderly woman who immolates...
Robert Olen Butler, (Jr.)