review

Review of “The Smell of Muskoka Pomade” by Jacob Anthony Moniz, published in Southeast Review

/ Keith Pilapil Lesmeister / 1 Comment

Here’s a flash fiction piece set in the tucked away corners of a bar. While there are multiple people stuffed into a booth, the points of interest in the story revolve around the narrator and his friend/former lover Adrián who, as the narrator observes, “does his best to hide his disappointment,” but the narrator “take[s] notice of the way his face drops.” Something, in other words, is going on with Adrián and the narrator—the two aren’t aligned with one another, something is off, and now they are speaking or not speaking around each other in ways that feel unfortunate in the way that most simple miscommunications feel unfortunate, especially in retrospect when one might realize the importance of a direct statement or question. Instead, the narrator shares with us readers: “I turn to Adrián for some sign that this isn’t where our night is headed…” but it is in fact where their night is headed as “…each take a pill and raise it in what I suppose is a bold, subversive take on a toast.”

What’s brilliant about this flash piece is that these few hundred words open us up to an entire relationship. We feel the torrent of emotion around these two, their past, their present, their potential future. We also feel what it’s like to satisfy a primal need to alleviate any emotional hurt we might be feeling at the moment—to reach for some physical antidote from whatever or whoever might be within our immediate proximity.

A melancholic piece made more so by the characters’ inability to communicate, and their turning to drugs and others to alleviate their emotional wounds.

Read the story here.

Jacob Anthony Moniz (he/him) is a writer and visual artist from California. He holds degrees from UC Santa Cruz, NYU, and the University of Notre Dame. His writing has appeared in Catamaran Literary Reader, Penumbra, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Ocotillo Review, The Whisky Blot, and Southeast Review, among other journals and publications.

Keith Pilapil Lesmeister is the author of the fiction chapbook Mississippi River Museum and the story collection We Could’ve Been Happy Here. His most recent work is published or forthcoming in Bennington Review, december magazine, and Terrain.

Review of “American Mother” by Sarah Balakrishnan, published in Narrative

/ Keith Pilapil Lesmeister / Leave a comment

A finely crafted story whose main character, Lady, endures an enormous amount of stress. An excellent example of how an author places a character in an impossible situation to see how the character might (re)act, thus creating (a very compelling) story.

As a reader, if I’m going to latch onto the story, I need instant orientation to the people and place. In the special case of “American Mother” we get both people and place, but also the situation. And by situation, I mean power dynamics which, in a short story, are often overlooked, but critically important. In “American Mother” we’re introduced to the primary characters immediately: Lady (the main character), her husband, Richard, and an acknowledgment of their two children, both daughters. In the second paragraph, Lady is “crouched over a toilet… scrubbing a bowl…that the husband peed in that very afternoon.” And, “The children are not there, thankfully” because the husband has announced he’s leaving, while Lady cleans. Lady is in the position of being held down by household chores (and is also physically lower than the husband), while the husband is in an upright position, footloose and about to leave with a suitcase in tow.

The story unfolds from Lady’s close third-person POV. She and Richard are immigrants from India. They’ve lived in a “safe, safe, safe” suburb of Houston for seven years, but she can’t reconcile her husband’s assurances (safe, safe, safe) because of the paranoia caused by “American television” coupled with her daughters’ ogling soccer coach (Lady is opposed to soccer because of the male coaches), and one additional incident that happened when she first moved to the States: a handsy individual at the park is all we need to say about this. So here’s Lady: estranged from her home and extended family who support her and share tea time in the afternoon; distanced from daughters who are getting older and more independent; and disconnected from her one and only friend who is being treated for a medical issue. And now her husband is leaving. If that weren’t enough, the “sky is spitting…” She can’t escape its influence. It changes over the course of the story: from drizzle to full-on rain (“the wet hair sodden on the sides of her face.”). And while the rain might not be a welcome element for Lady, it’s also the only sense of physical touch she’s offered in the present time of the story because between her and her kids, “…touching is not something they do anymore.” The absence of physical human touch makes the sense of rain—this kind of baptismal, immersive moment—all the more powerful.

But let’s return for a moment to the power dynamics. How a story might be bookended is also a fascinating writerly choice, especially in a short story, where every authorial decision impacts every part of the story. Remember how it starts: Lady crouched, scrubbing a toilet. Her husband upright, mobile, leaving her. An obvious power dynamic. I won’t tell you how the story ends. That’d be irresponsible. But I will tell you that I was fascinated by the physical locations of each of the characters at the end of the story and how they reflected Lady’s ongoing struggle now, and what those struggles might look like in the future.

A brilliant short story won’t tell you how things ended, but they’ll certainly bring you to a point of imagining those remaining moments on your own, allowing the story and its characters to linger in your mind long after the final sentence.

Check out this finely crafted and compelling story here.

Sarah Balakrishnan, winner of the 2022 Narrative Prize, also won First Place in the 2021 Narrative 30 Below Contest. She holds a PhD in African history from Harvard University and is an assistant professor of history at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. More at: sarahbalakrishnan.com

Keith Pilapil Lesmeister is the author of the fiction chapbook Mississippi River Museum and the story collection We Could’ve Been Happy Here. More at keithlesmeister.com