Sidney Thompson short story: The Man Who Never Dies

"The Man Who Never Dies" is the kickoff short story in Sidney Thompson's collection, "Sideshow", and it's also the apparent source of the book's title.  Life is definitely a parade of carnival characters in Sidney Thompson's world, and in this warm but comic story the hero has to deal with one particularly tough character: a show-off father whose oppressive personality and over-enthusiasm for sports soured this narrator from a young age.  But he's now a relatively happy and centered FedEx worker, husband and father, and when he takes his family to a town carnival and visits the eponymous tent of freaks, a haphazard array of life metaphors fill his senses: an eternally old man (the "man who never dies") who remembers the narrator's father, an alligator woman whose uniqueness is rooted in skin disease, an enticing "world's smallest horse" that simply isn't there at all, disappointing the narrator's sweet daughter.  It's a very satisfying story, especially at the end when the quietly-suffering narrator finally takes his anger out on an unwitting ball game operator in a very human way.  Great start for an excellent collection of stories ...

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