Premium Harmony

The structure and narrative style of “Premium Harmony” juxtapose ordinary action and catastrophic interruption to create a quietly unsettling atmosphere. The story opens in media res with a couple already driving, their small talk and bickering unspooling with a familiarity that implies that they have had many similar conversations; likewise, their errands feel like the whole content of their days. The very routineness of the situation thus becomes ominous, hinting at buried dysfunction. For instance, the introduction places Ray and Mary on a consumer circuit rather than a meaningful quest: They orient their immediate lives around the local Wal-Mart, an illustration of how the town’s economy has withered to the point that the Wal-Mart has been integrated into the local infrastructure via “its own stoplight” (54). The liminal pause at the Quik-Pik is framed as a trivial detour to snag the right colored ball since purple is Tallie’s “favorite color,” which underlines how the couple navigates love and obligation through retail choices rather than conversation. This framing strikes a discordant note, but not one that prepares the reader for the randomness of what follows: Catastrophe does not arrive at a climactic destination but in the aisle between a wire cylinder of kickballs and a novelty T-shirt rack, establishing the theme of The Absurdity of Death Intruding on the Mundane. 

The limited third-person narration anchors everything to Ray’s consciousness so that the marriage’s history is filtered through his similes and self-justifications. The focalization characterizes Ray as cranky, practical, and self-justifying. For instance, he is irritated yet indulges the errand logic that organizes their day, rationalizing his choice on the grounds that it is “too hot to argue” (56). The same closeness provides tiny admissions that hint at unstructured lives shaped by fatigue and consumer habit, as when Ray thinks marriage is “like a football game and he’s quarterbacking the underdog team. He has to pick his spots. Make short passes” (54). Like the details of the story’s setting, Ray’s roundness as a character—he is psychologically complex but also ordinary—grounds the tragedy, making it feel both accidental and inevitable.

Consumerism plays a key role in this realism, mediating both setting and character. The landscape is a branded spectacle; a sign above the display insists on seasonal fun with thoughtless cheer, proclaiming “HOT FUN IN THE SUMMERTIME” almost as an order rather than an offer (57). This consumerism has permeated the characters’ consciousness, shaping Ray’s internal voice and his conflict with his wife. The title brand’s promise is a joke on the marriage—Ray’s smoking produces anything but harmony—yet the couple continues to map identity and care through retail options, as if the right choice could bridge emotional gaps. Ray, for instance, asks Mary to buy him cigarettes but offers a concession by requesting the “cheap ones” (56). Similarly, the couple can only imagine pleasing their niece by purchasing the correct color of a 99-cent ball. Even then, Ray resents the microeconomics of that choice: He waits “in the sun, waiting for her to buy a purple plastic kickball for ninety-nine cents when he knows they could get one for seventy-nine cents at Wal-Mart” (57). Brands thus promise quality and connection, yet the story shows them delivering embarrassment and friction. Ray, for instance, weaponizes junk food against Mary, while she polices his nicotine habits. Even commemoration is commodified: The T-shirt rack chirps, “MY PARENTS WERE TREATED LIKE ROYALTY IN CASTLE ROCK AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY TEE-SHIRT” (58), a product that strips away any nostalgia or memory from an event and reduces it to a consumer expression. The result is a portrait of people who have been trained to reach for a brand when they want consolation or self-definition but inevitably find the promise hollow—a key element of the story’s exploration of Poverty and Small-Town Discontent.

This sense of hollowness continues once Mary collapses; the story accelerates even as the prose remains spare. The collapse itself is recounted secondhand and in simple phrases, such as the young woman explaining how “she just fell down” (58), reducing a turning point in Ray’s life to a simple verb. This framing of Ray as a bystander persists as events unfold. He kneels as time passes because “if he gets up he’ll look like a spectator” (59), which is a fragile claim to relevance rather than an action that changes anything. His attempts to reassert control are small and telling. He reaches for narrative by telling strangers that Mary “made a quilt that took third prize at the Castle County fair” (61), an anecdote that humanizes her following her medicalization at the hands of the EMTs. He reaches for offense by snapping about an autopsy and then for gall by entertaining a fleeting sexual fantasy about the women present. The rituals cannot give him agency, but they allow him to move forward from moment to moment.

The powerlessness does not end with Ray, however. The arrival of the EMTs promises routinized expertise but fails to intervene meaningfully. Ray sees the specialized machine and hopes that this means the EMTs know how to respond, and their diagnostic ritual does proceed with steadiness; one EMT “listens to [Mary’s] nonexistent heartbeat, and the other takes her nonexistent blood pressure” (59). However, these medical routines, though performatively reassuring and familiar, are quite literally devoid of life. The implication is that the EMTs are practiced not at saving people’s lives but at bearing witness to their deaths. The recognizably bureaucratic stages that follow—the gurney that “with a single flip of the wrist” unfolds (60), the sheet pulled up over her face, the clipboard with “about twenty-five questions” (60), and the reference to the mortuary handled as a practical next step—underscore this point. The practiced patter and equipment suggest that Mary is not unique. Indeed, the description of the medical equipment—“an oxygen tank on a dolly […] with an American-flag decal on it” (59)—extends the critique by tying Mary’s fate to that of the US itself, suggesting the country’s inability to deliver on basic, life-sustaining promises. In this environment, people like the EMTs are, at most, going through the motions of attempting to salvage something; others, like Ray, are reduced simply to watching the decline. 

The ending compounds Ray’s grief while clarifying his compromised self-knowledge. The second tragedy is visual and grotesque, with the dog’s body offering an image that fuses tenderness and indictment. The “little bits of coconut caught in his whiskers” remind Ray of his role in the dog’s death (62), while he confesses that the sight “shouldn’t be funny, but it is” (62). Ray’s instinctive eulogy, assuring the dog that he is now with Mary, tips him into tears, but the narration immediately records the new freedom that he reframes as a macabre consolation: Now, “he can smoke all he wants, and anywhere in the house” (62). This response, like Ray’s reaction to the dog, nods to the theme of Dark Humor as a Response to Grief, suggesting that humor offers one mechanism of control in a world where tragedy seems random and inescapable. 

However, the meaning of the smoking shifts as Ray “smokes all the way to the hospital with the windows shut and the air-conditioning on high” (63). The sequence captures how self-punishment slides into habit; the cigarettes become at once an emblem of the marriage’s rancor and a ritual of penance. He is not celebrating independence so much as testing how much hurt his body can absorb, a tacit concession that Mary’s fear about his smoking was accurate. The drive to the hospital is therefore a concise final image: a man in a vehicle that smells of death and cigarette smoke, moving toward forms and fluorescent lights with a purple kickball beside him, discovering that the only thing he can control is how quickly he destroys himself.