Author: Keith Pilapil Lesmeister

Review of “Heat Dome” by Kaitlyn Teer, published in Electric Lit

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A gripping and haunting story about parenting, climate change, and community.

I was at first amused by the heat of this story. Right now, I can look out any window of my house, garage, barn, office building, grocery store, and see nothing but snow. True, it is warming up, but the sun here pales in comparison to the unrelenting heat pumped out of this story. What started off as amusement instantly turned to torture (not the story itself — which is great — just the heat. Oh my, the heat!).

The story is told in a collective “we” or first person plural, which is mightily attractive to a person who admires everything he can’t do himself. I appreciate this POV on so many levels not least for the inclusive burden of suffering each of these women is having to deal with — for some reason it makes it all the more brutal when the sun is slowly burning away any ounce of sanity held by any of these women. Even so, they’re trying: “slicing fruit,” “[wiping] the backs of our necks with dishtowels,” “[buying] popsicles.” All while trying to calm themselves and their families.

“Meteorologists call it a once-in-a-millennia heat wave.” This reminds me of when my hometown of Cedar Rapids had something like three “hundred-year floods” in a matter of twenty years. Did I mention I just watched the film “Don’t Look Up”? If people don’t listen to the science, then maybe a screaming scientist like Jack Dawson or Katniss Everdeen? Maybe Hollywood’s the answer, though I have my doubts.

The heat and its effects in “Heat Dome” are simply unrelenting. This story is a crash course in applying pressure to a character or characters until they break and something happens. The only reprieve arrives in beautiful descriptions of the landscape: “…the old two-lane highway down the coast…. curves along sandstone cliffs that slope to the shore.” Later, “we descend a trail through red cedar, fir, and madrona.” If nature isn’t your thing, the narrator offers a more communal answer to the suffering: “We are sweaty, but together.”

At least we’re sipping wine and dining together, they acknowledge at the end of “Don’t Look Up.” Never mind the comet. It might not even be real.

Or maybe I shouldn’t be so flippant about this communal suffering (at least we’re in it together!). The first person plural, after all, is a collection of mothers or mothers-to-be who find solace in these together-moments. The heat and misery of dealing with themselves and their families literally drives them to the ocean for a reprieve. They can’t handle it anymore. They have to leave. They lament that this is “their new normal.” And since there’s not much else to do, besides float in the ocean (and wait for the comet to hit Earth!), they decide to do so with a sense of togetherness. Of “[holding] hands to keep from drifting apart.” Because if we’re all going to hell, we may as well enter the flames together.

Check out the story here.

Kaitlyn Teer’s lyric essays have received prizes from Fourth Genre and Prairie Schooner. Her essay “Drawing A Breath” was a notable for the 2017 Best American Essays anthology and was anthologized in Beautiful Flesh: A Body of Essays (CSU Center for Literary Publishing, 2017). Other work has appeared in Entropy, Redivider, Sweet, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. She is a regular contributor to the Ploughshares blog and is at work on a flash collection about parenting and the climate crisis.

Review of “Pagans” by Rick Bass, published in his 2006 collection The Lives of Rocks

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I realize the tardiness of this post fifteen years late, and later still my finding of Rick Bass’s stories, but does it really matter? I still re-read Lorrie Moore’s and Amy Hempel’s early work with the jaw-dropping awe it inspires and I imagine I’ll do the same now with Bass. This realization, this discovery, is what led me to write about the opening story of Bass’s collection. I’m not even halfway through the book (I’m reading the collection for the first time), but I wanted to make mention of “Pagans” because of its unique point-of-view and rumination on memory and choices, and the sheer unbelievability of who we are and where we are thirty years after an indelible high school experience.

The story, rich in details, features the lives of Richard, Kirby, and Annie. Richard and Kirby are best friends and Annie, a grade younger, finds herself in the middle of their adventures. Their adventures take them to what is essentially an environmental disaster area — a polluted river where they explore “junked cars, twisted steel scrap, rusting slag-heaped refrigerators,” dead animals, and more.

The environmental degradation of this area outside Houston is secondary to the relational dynamics between the three, but this isn’t a typical love story. We find out in the first paragraph that this is a “less common variation on that ancient story” because Annie ultimately doesn’t choose either boy with whom to spend her life. Instead, “she [chose] a third, and lived happily ever after.” The beginning of the story is built on a too-common ending of the fairy tale we’re all used to reading (…and they lived happily ever after.). And thank God for Bass’s deviation which isn’t at all a deviation in real life.

And so what do we do with these relationships of our past? How do we learn from and reflect on them with the meaning they deserve without anchoring ourselves to the sinking ship of nostalgia? This essentially is what Bass is exploring. “Even now, Richard thinks [he and Annie] missed each other by a hair’s breadth, that some sort of fate was deflected… He thinks it might have been one of the closest misses in the history of the world.” All told as a matter-of-fact and without any hint of regret.

Put the relationships aside for a moment and imagine all the micro, last-minute choices we’ve made that have now impacted our lives in profound ways. How grateful for that decision to turn left. Or to take an improv class. Or to go on that date. Or to plant an apple tree. Or to visit mother. Or to take a vacation. Or to cook Thai curry for the first time. The list goes on forever, but I think we can all look back at these moments — small or otherwise — that have shaped who we are today. How fortunate, or not, we might feel in light of those decisions. This is not profound stuff, necessarily, it’s simply life. But I think this is why I liked “Pagans” so well. Bass immerses us so fully in the lives of these three characters that their cares and concerns and ruminations on choice and memory become as meaningful to us as they are to Richard who, by the end of the story, “marvels… at all the paths they did not take.”

Review of “Mouse House” by Amelia Brown, published in Four Way Review

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We meet all relevant characters in the first section: our first-person narrator along with her boyfriend, Eddie, and Eddie’s mother (Susan). We’re also introduced to a mouse along with the home in which this story takes place. It’s Susan’s home located in sprawling bucolic Maine where everything is quaint and perfect and people keep tea times (and probably tee times). We’re also “two hours north of [the couple’s] cluttered apartment in Boston” where they probably don’t attend open houses just to see “decorated parlors” and “underground entertainment systems” which is Susan’s idea of an ideal afternoon.

The story deftly juxtaposes the narrator’s modest upbringing (with the “broken-down Mazda…in the backyard”) and Eddie’s mother’s tea time expectations (not that the two are mutually exclusive). And this alone would be a compelling story full of conflict and compelling situations between the three characters, but the event that propels this piece forward is a game of cat and mouse. Remember that pesky mouse we meet upon arrival from cramped Boston to sprawling Maine? Susan says, “…something has to be done about this mouse.” Susan is not keen on keeping company with rodents, but instead of using a traditional mousetrap, the narrator convinces them to use a live-catch trap. The next morning Susan fetches a “box trap” so the narrator won’t “feel guilty.”

With this goal of catching the mouse, a series of extraordinary—though bizarre—events take place. I won’t mention any of them to you. They’re just too good to name on this page, and so you’ll have to read them for yourself. A small clue: the events in question show in clear detail how out of touch with reality the potential future mother-in-law has become.

This is a fascinating story. I couldn’t stop reading.

Amelia Brown’s essays and reviews have been published at the Masters Review, CRAFT Literary, Full Stop, and the Ploughshares blog. She lives and writes in Boston.

Review of “Water in the Blood” by Megan Pillow, published in Triquarterly

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Mother’s Day was over a week ago, but perhaps we ought to do ourselves a favor and read “Water in the Blood” by Megan Pillow, a story, essentially, about everything going to shit—when your world, dreams, husband, and own body fail you, what’s bound to happen? This is Laura’s story. To say Laura is under a lot of stress would be a sick understatement, and this story is a cautionary tale of what happens to a mother (or parent) under constant barrage from all people and situations in her life.

In grad school, one of my teachers used to talk about stories as nothing more than mounting pressure on a protagonist. Put the protagonist in a vice and keep turning until the character or the vice breaks. I was reminded of this astute writerly advice while reading Pillow’s story. Her main character, Laura, is stuck at home, but it’s a new home in a new neighborhood where she knows virtually no one, while her husband is literally halfway across the globe in “fucking Antarctica” romping around and writing “beautiful” articles about his adventures. But Laura, we understand, is a better writer: “You would’ve done better,” the husband writes back after Laura reads one of his newly posted articles. Perhaps she’s the one who should’ve penned the article. Perhaps she’s the one who should be out galivanting around the arctic ice and writing about her adventures while waiting for shout-outs from adoring fans: “Take me on your next adventure?” writes queenbey9122 to Laura’s husband.

Meanwhile, Laura’s taking care of three kids and trying not to bleed out. Her last pregnancy and delivery left her with complications spurred on perhaps in part by a condescending male doctor who, of course, knew what was best for her. All the while, as all of this plays out, “There’s something in the woods behind the house” and a Florida storm is brewing.

The brilliance of this story is the melding together of all of these mounting pressures. It isn’t simply one of these conflicts that’ll break our narrator; instead, what Pillow’s showing us is what happens to someone who is under constant micro and macro attacks at all times and from those who should be there to help and support (the doctor, the husband), but there’s no one to help. Only her and her three needy children, one of whom was born only months ago.

We return now to the original question – what’s bound to happen to someone in this situation? When “…she is a great white-hot mass of rage, and she can feel the small dark thing opening its maw, and then she clamps it shut again.” What happens when she can’t “clamp it shut”? When the protagonist’s anguish and frustration are simply too much? Megan Pillow shows us the answer, but you’ll have to read the story to find out. Here’s a hint: Grab your personal flotation device and maybe an extra oar.

Check out this fantastic, heart-wrenching story here.

Megan Pillow is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction and holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Kentucky. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in, among other places, Electric Literature, SmokeLong Quarterly, Hobart, The Believer, Brevity, and Gay Magazine. Megan has also had stories featured on the Wigleaf Top 50, an essay honored as notable in the 2019 edition of The Best American Essays, and a story honored as distinguished in the 2020 edition of The Best American Short Stories. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky with her two children.

Review of “Good Teeth” by Leslie Walker Trahan, published in New Delta Revew

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“Good Teeth” was the 2020 winner of the Ryan R. Gibbs Award for Flash Fiction. After reading the piece, you’ll understand why. My brief review here:

This story is tied together by braided storylines with a compelling sense of time and excellent use of white space. The braids include: A creepy dentist/landlord. The narrator’s obsession with a stranger – a man – who may or may not exist. And the narrator’s deceased father. The two men — the stranger and the father — look alike and share a love of the violin. We see wonderful images and details that lend credibility to this: callouses on fingers, the “sleek neck of the violin case.” Meanwhile, the dentist gives a “months free rent” to the narrator if she goes out on a date with him. He also gives her free exams—sticks his fingers in her mouth and talks while the narrator “…[doesn’t] say a word.”

Throughout this very peculiar piece, the observations coupled with the braided storylines are enough to signal the alarm, but then we find out more of the narrator’s frame of mind through conversations between the narrator and her sister who asks: “Have you been taking your meds?” We hear that question a couple times, once near the beginning, and once at the end, and by the second time, we too wonder how much help this narrator might need. We readers aren’t exactly sure. But we do know one thing: we won’t call the dentist to come help.

Read and listen to the perfectly crafted and detailed story here.

Leslie Walker Trahan’s stories have been featured in The Forge and SmokeLong Quarterly, among other publications. She lives in Austin, Texas. You can find her on Twitter @lesliewtrahan.