Do Not Go Gentle

This short story completely surprised me.  The story starts out with a man and his wife in an intensive care unit for babies.  Their son is in a coma and has been for a while.  The man explains how his wife and he are struggling to cope with what is happening just like many of the other families that are at the facility.

One day he decides that he will go out and buy a few toys for his son.  He wonders down the street and comes upon a store called "Toys in Babeland".  It seems like it would be a nice children's toy store, but when he walks in he discovers it is anything but that.  It is actually a sex toy shop.  He is caught off guard, but decides to browse their selection anyway.  He sees videos and dolls and other items as he's walking around, but when he turns around a corner he sees something he has never seen before, chocolate thunder. Chocolate thunder turns out to be a 15" vibrator.  For some reason he is amazed by this and decides to buy it.  He brings it back to the hospital.  He starts to wave it over the babies in hopes that it might do something.  He welds it like a wand.  His wife eventually takes a liking to this toy, but not the way you might think.  She puts faith into it.  She plays her drum with it and actually thinks that it has powers.  The story ends on a happy note because their son eventually recovers.

A vibrator is not what I was expecting the father to bring back to the hospital.  If I was another parent there I would probably be upset with him and would likely force him to leave.  I think it would be very disrespectful to have that in a room with sick children and to use it like he was.  He does say however that many of the other parents laughed.  So I guess it is possible that given the stress they were under it was good to add some humor to break up the sadness.

I think the main point Sherman Alexie wants to make is that people can put faith into anything.  People give objects value and worth.  Nothing inherently has value, except for maybe food and water.  Everything else in life takes on different values to different people.  Just because I may not believe in the powers of a vibrator doesn't mean someone else can't.