Short stories are like art. They either speak to you or they don't. This one spoke to me.

The rise in popularity of ebooks is a boon to short story writers who can now put their work directly before the public. In the past, there was little commercial publication of short fiction by the traditional gatekeepers, i.e. the print publishing companies, because the readers for those books might number in the thousands rather than the millions that big business needs in order to be profitable. With ebooks, the market for short fiction ebooks is booming.

Journeys of Midlife Relationships: Volume 1 by Chuck Emerson is a small volume of short stories that should benefit from the growing ebook audience. In the book description, these seven stories are described by the author as "quick reads for commuters." I think I'll condense it further and call them "commuter short"s because I can see commuters on buses, trains, or car pools reading a short story on the way to the office.

The stories are just long enough to be read and then thought about before one arrives at work. Make no mistake. These stories will make you think because each one tackles a life situation in which most of us eventually find ourselves from the "imploding career" in Tracking, the first story, to "Winding Road," the last story that indeed encapsulates the theme of this volume: life is a winding road.

Whether the author is showing an adult child's last goodbye to a mother who has passed or he is showing a parent's interaction with, and worry for, a young child, he manages to infuse sly humor, emotion, and optimism in each story.

Though this is not a perfectly executed volume, most of these stories spoke to me, perhaps because I've already found myself in these situations. I like Mr. Emerson's eye for detail, and I like that he ended the volume with the optimism and the charm of "Winding Road" because it's a road we all travel.

Each story is like a snapshot taken with the closeup lens of a camera, capturing a snapshot of two people on a certain day when something happens that changes them and changes their lives.