Gray Plot Summary: Short Story

Gray

Plot summary: Short story "The Gray" by Aaron Gwyn

The short story "The Gray" by Aaron Gwyn begins with bar fight between several men. Three of them are upper-class students and the other three are lower-class men. The class markers are conveyed explicitly and implicitly: the students wear Polo shirts, but the main character Murray, the reader soon finds out, does not even have a computer and works tarring roofs. The next day, the three of the men wake in such a disoriented state they can hardly remember what happened. Murray gets out of bed, leaves his apartment, and goes to see the other men, only after frantically listening to the television news, evidently to see if there is news of the fight the murder he fears he committed.

Murray only vaguely recalls the violence he perpetrated, and the fact he might have killed one of the young men is in doubt, although he feels violently ill. When he meets with the two other men he learns that Shorty's nose is straightened by pencils, evidently because Shorty was too poor or too afraid to go to the hospital with his injuries. The other men are shaken, but not as guilt-ridden as Murray. Murray is clearly the most frightened member of the group, regarding the possibility that one of the boys might be dead. Murray is also scared that he cannot remember most of what transpired. When Murray asks Shorty what transpired, Shorty says does not remember Murray "putting a knee in that guy's back" and the college boy "laying there like a corpse" but he does remember the boy's hand at his own throat.

Murray's sense of guilt continues to plague him. Even when he goes back to work, tarring roofs, it is as if his body remembers the terrible event, while he tries to shut out the vague memory. Murray comes over to Shorty's, drunk, and is reminded again and again that the boy tried to kill Short. Shorty repeats over and over again that Murray did not kill the boy, but the boy tried to strangle Shorty. Shorty and Big Ed say that the boy is not dead, and even if he were, killing the boy would be an act of protection not murder.

Up to this point in the story, the reader is slightly suspicious that Murray could have killed someone with his bare hands, regardless of how drunk he may have been. However, the third person limited narrator introduces a flashback, revealing why Murray is so loyal to Shorty -- Shorty befriended Murray when Murray was a fat, slow boy on their baseball team. Gradually, Murray lost weight, became more athletic, and the fun Kung Fu moves the boys used to practice while watching Bruce Lee films on TV became deadly serious as Murray became increasingly accomplished in a variety of martial arts.

This suggests that Murray's hands may indeed be "registered deadly weapons." The better Murray got at fighting, the more fights he got in with his friends. The fight the three of them may have not been the college boy's fault, but part of the tendency of Murray and his friends to fight back with their fists and ask questions later. For the next several weeks, Murray avoids his martial arts gym, and both he and Shorty monitor the television for news of the boy.