short story

Flash Friday Review: “There, I Said It” by Tori Malcangio, published in The Lascaux Review

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“There, I Said It” is flash fiction piece that explores a person’s incomprehensible pain and sorrow at the literal hands of those who should protect and comfort.

The story, narrated by Kiva, moves by section (or stanza – it is poetically rendered) from Kiva’s mind/memories to the physical movements and actions of her college roommate, Romy. A shower curtain hangs between their beds. An “innocence shield,” according to Romy.

Still, Kiva sees and hears things: the bodies, the whispers, the “cakey” voices, the “happymist.” Romy, “serial lover,” her cup overfloweth. And what happens in the wake of excess? Inevitable disappointment, maybe boredom, maybe new realizations: “too much give, and not enough get.”

But what of Kiva, the so-called virgin?

What happens when she’s stuck in a box full of noises and body parts (Romy and a new person every night) that remind her of the horror of home?

She internalizes it and we readers are there alongside her, experiencing the pain and agony of betrayal, though betrayal is perhaps the nicest word one could use in describing her pain.

The story is masterfully crafted—turning in on itself, revealing perfectly timed insights made more poignant through reoccurring images and details: the haiku, the color pink, the music.

“There, I Said It,” is a brilliant though painful story of terror— enduring another person’s transgressions—and its aftermath.

Tori Malcangio received a journalism degree from Arizona State University and an MFA from Bennington College. Stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, Mississippi Review, Tampa Review, ZYZZYVA, Passages North, and elsewhere. She won the William Van Dyke Short Story Prize, the American Literary Review Fiction Prize, the Waasmode Short Fiction Prize, and the Cincinnati Review Robert and Adele Schiff Award.

Heart of the Matter: A Review of “Corzo” by Brenna Gomez, originally published in Prairie Schooner, republished online in The Dark Magazine

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B. Nathanial Steelman

Dare I say, my Laurel Edition of Anna Karenina provokes as much by the epic narrative as by the former owner’s liberal, however often derisive, edits. Before one even opens this classic, “LEO TOLSTOY’S GREATEST HEROINE” on the cover has been revamped (or revitalized? vandalized?) into “LEO TOLSTOY’S GREATEST HEROINE flop.” And on the first page of the front matter, “LEO TOLSTOY” has (d)evolved into “Leo the Lion.” Sure, these two possibly droll, certainly cheap alterations are of the ilk you’d suspect to find, insofar as they are legitimately juvenile, lurking in the stacks of a high school library. That said, there is a platter of amendments housed inside my copy and many of them steam with bona fide, if nihilistic, cultural criticism. Here is the crème de la crème: etched into the very sentence among those in the pantheon of story-starters, the reader observes that “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” has, indeed, become “Happy families are all alike sick; every unhappy family is unhappy dead in its own way.”

Touché? For better or worse, family is, as a fountainhead, a framework, that experience and structure we humans can neither shake nor escape, if only on the procedural—that is, subconscious—level. It’s too deft and deep. Even if a family has absented from a person’s life, a boy’ll still stretch into those voids to feel, as he yearns, for attachments. Family makes us who we are. Take Brenna Gomez’s debut short story, brilliant and tragic. Published originally in print by Prairie Schooner in Spring 2017 and republished online by The Dark Magazine in May 2019, “Corzo” is about nothing other than a family struggling to find equilibrium. Specifically, you could say it is about heart. 

I may never forget the opening scene. I had thought it was a dream, at first, or a sort of horror that Fuckhead gets himself into in Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son. A young daughter, yet one matured by the dint of parental dysfunction, arrives home after school and sees in her father “a ragged chest wound the size of a plum”; he asks her to help him cut out his heart. After mija refuses, her father, Eduvigo Herrera III, implores her, “‘Please do this for me. I never ask you for anything.’” Accordingly, mija—Sara—identifies the falsity of this claim, inasmuch as she, being the daughter and the big sister, frequently is asked to do too much by and for her parents who religiously partake in “epic screaming matches” and methods of self-destruction; incumbent upon her is, too, the pressure to get “straight As, to never be in trouble.” But—because she is, precisely, the daughter—she relents and seizes her father’s heart: “It was soft around the edges and firm in the center. Every so often it shuddered like it didn’t know it wasn’t being used anymore. It was a deep purple so dark it looked black.” And if the premise thus far hasn’t compelled me to see what happens next, this specificity of imagery convinces me of the narrator’s rectitude, and the author’s, to boot, which I oblige to trust and honor by reading.

Flannery O’Connor ascribes such images to so called “anagogical vision”: “the kind of vision that is able to see different levels of reality in one image or one situation.” In her lecture “The Nature and Aim of Fiction” from the collection Mystery and Manners, the storied writer banishes the notion that fiction is predicated upon the abstract, and rather champions the notion that the art form is “about everything human and we are made out of dust.” The form is about, in other words, a human’s experience through her senses; and the form achieves any meaning by the overall medley of these senses as they experience circumstances over time. And so, when Eduvigo requests, additionally, that mija cut his heart up like dinner meat, to squeeze the pieces through the mouth of the empty Corzo tequila bottle—and when the mother, Izzy, arrives home and declares that Eduvigo shouldn’t have made the daughter do it, and when the knowledge is made known that Eduvigo’s grandfather had taught him the ancient cultural practice of excising a heart to punish loved ones—and so on and so forth goes the medley—the image of the heart inside the Corzo bottle embodies, literally and metaphorically, the heart of Gomez’s story: an Hispanic family centered around patriarchy and its pathology. Don [Somebody], the former owner of my copy of Anna Karenina, wouldn’t, I imagine, be astonished.

Subsequently, the Herreras are haunted by a man who loiters both alive and dead. Izzy begins to habitually recite the Hail Mary; suddenly, to Sara, she looks old; and she painstakingly attempts to tip off those bygone screaming matches with her husband, however great with rage they had been. Freddie, the little brother—whose name is poignantly close to Ed, as if to insinuate an Herrera III will, of course, pass on to an Herrera IV—prattles on at school about zombies. While Sara, the point of view and the narrator, imagines pressing a hot iron to her father’s face—“Would he even feel it?”—and she cannot concentrate at school; and the trauma could explain why she misreads a boy’s foul intentions for fair. Meanwhile, Eduvigo, heartless, bleeds through his work shirts; he no longer laughs, yells—in a word, feels. Subtle but sure, the irony regarding masculinity plays convincingly. In America, we have inculcated an archetype of masculinity, that a man is austere, stoic, among other things. In “Corzo,” a man has to die—in a manner of speaking—to become this way; and his wife wants the former—we suppose volatile—man back, because she does not know who, nor what, this other man in her kitchen is, nor doing, the fountainhead of familismo having now been compromised. 

On a yellowed notecard, scrawled in faded blue cursive, Don holds forth two inquiries re: the following cultural constructs: What is a successful marriage? and Why love? Honest questions, to be sure, no matter intonation. There are certain regions of the mind made gray, we know, by altogether bewildering, embattling percepts in our everyday lives. Nurses who smoke like chimneys, for example, or spouses who berate, but who “love,” each other—as in “Corzo”—epitomize the conundrum of not practicing the preaching. Why upkeep institutions, such as marriage—even love—if their abuse dwarfs reward is a premise always worth writing about, insofar as wellbeing hangs in the balance. Gomez owns it. She’s shaped a short fiction through the sensibilities of a young narrator whose upbringing by all means substantiates O’Connor’s zinger that “anybody who has survived childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”

“Corzo” is, ultimately, a reflection. Set in the past, over approximately a couple of weeks, mija—which means daughter in Spanish—still at this late date needs to know just what happened. To her father, sure. But more to her little brother, Freddie, it seems. Toward the end of the story, after she and Freddie arrive home during another screaming match, Freddie takes the bottled heart to his father and says the he still wants his dad. Freddie hurls the artifact over the apartment’s railing, the glass—a motif—shatters, as glass iconically does when it collides with just enough stubbornness. His father does not react. The most striking line of all the story: “‘Dad,’” Freddie says, “‘didn’t even get mad and nothing happened to him. He’s like invincible.’” And the most striking response of all the story, from Sara: “‘Damn it, Freddie!” she screams, “‘Just eat your dinner.’” Because trauma, so easily and cunningly, is transmitted generation to generation at some, and yet every, point.  

Flash Friday Review: “A Bee Story” by Nicole VanderLinden, published in SmokeLong Quarterly

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I’ve always been enamored by flash fiction. Something about the conjured intimacy in such a brief amount of time. Like a tantalizing secret traded between strangers in an elevator. There’s an allure to its brevity. An awe at what can transpire in so few words.

In “A Bee Story,” published in SmokeLong Quarterly, Nicole VanderLinden mines the deepest parts of our human nature and does so deftly by presenting us a mundane, though interesting, event through which to tell a more compelling story about the narrator’s life. The event used for the surface-level story is beekeeping, and we start off with a discussion of the hive and the cyclical nature of things: “This queen bee is old news… Enter the new queen, the queen ascendant…”

And while beekeeping is fascinating in its own right (mundanely fascinating), it’s ultimately a device used to explore the nature of our relationships—both to others and ourselves. It’s a meditation on the choices we make and the people with whom we share our lives. “The beekeeper and I ended up married for a while.” There was also a physical therapist and later on a dispatcher. All of these partners exhibited damaging behavior, and I think this is the core of the story: an exploration of the dual nature of our lives and ourselves. The yin yang. “Half the sky was sunny and half was threatening rain.” Isn’t that the case with all of us? Every day, each decision? Constantly battling against the devil on our shoulder, while keeping an ear open to the angel on the other? If such an angel exists. “…I laughed so hard I thought he might hit me, which was the opposite of his vibe, the whole bearded beekeeper thing.” Appearances so often disarming though so often inaccurate.

The examination of these previous relationships and decisions are made more poignant by the sobering insights offered by a narrator who has learned a thing or two about herself: “It isn’t easy, being social—more than bees know that. Harder still to have ambition that’s not weighted by who you’ve been, that doesn’t keep you close to ground.”

And how to move forward with such baggage weighing us down?

The narrator offers an answer: we “fly off toward [our] own irrelevance.”

At least we’ve found someone who’s honest about what we’re doing here.

A Response to Disaster: A Review of “Aminatu” by Olufunke Grace Bankole, published in Michigan Quarterly Review

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Written by B. Nathanial Steelman

The world as we first see it, as we first are led to believe in it, is anguished, starved: instinctual. In media res “drunken dogs” are enduring, as the humans in their milieu they hollow to tissue and bone. They growl; yet “in that grayish-blue darkness” their “eyes droop heavy with shame,” as if Man’s Best Friend well knows the consequences of his (re)wilding in these circumstances post-storm inside the dome. Things will not be the same. In “Aminatu,” Olufunke Grace Bankole’s poignant, gusty debut short story published by Michigan Quarterly Review, first in print in Fall 2006 and again online in August 2020, a reader is learned in the wake of the US’s costliest natural disaster for whom life is most fragile.

Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 nearly rendered the city of New Orleans like mythological Atlantis. Gales thrashed the metro and made a house of cards of apartments, churches; but it was the ensuing deluge to which the civilization nearly succumbed. It was a disaster in the truest sense of the term: disaster, disastro: apart star, ill fate: inevitability. The city had been evacuated, but tens of thousands could not leave, because exodus is not free. In her modest essay, “Going Solo,” Bankole speaks to, although does not reference by name, “Aminatu”: “Having just moved from New Orleans, and witnessed with the rest of the world, the horror of Katrina and its aftermath, I clicked open a blank page,” Bankole says, “and tried to imagine how the hours between night and dawn, inside the Louisiana Superdome, might have been for someone who hadn’t the sort of choices that allowed me to leave the city in the first place.”

Think about any disaster—or, at the very least, crisis—such as Hurricane Laura in 2020 or the derecho (or any of the outbreaks or any of the shootings or any of the deaths of heroes or any of the obliterations delivered by/embodied in the deluded occupant of this White House in 2020). See roofs peeled open like sardine cans, alarmed neighbors in tents on their lawns among snakes of downed power lines: The undone structures subjugate our focus and the tense is present. We can’t look away. Because the grotesque is so perverse, thrust upon its audience is the impetus of meaning-making. In “Aminatu,” the dogs loiter around the carnage and carcasses strewn across the gridiron of the Superdome-come-grotto. “One has in his teeth and clutched between his skinny legs a blue-yellow damask head tie.” Thus follows meaning-making so much as memory: “A scarf,” the narrator says, “the kind that would adorn the head of a West African woman; and just a short while ago, it did. Her name is Aminatu.”

There appears to be cultural responses to disaster. For instance, after the derecho bulldozed much of Iowa, where I live, folks swarmed with chainsaws and garbage cans the detritus of their houses and lawns. With all the oil and grease of machinery, whole blocks smelled of an amusement park. Spangled across social media were pictures of community aglow with purpose. It was quintessential Iowa Nice. That said, Coming Together displays, and is allowed by, certain culture, certain socioeconomic status. In “Aminatu,” the culture Bankole admirably depicts is that which houses, again, as she says, “someone who hadn’t the sort of choices that allowed me to leave,” the culture, in other words, inhabited by those to whom inevitability arrives faster, as these inhabitants cannot afford protection from and/or to flee various clutches by dint of low socioeconomic status and racial discrimination. Per “Aminatu,” this culture’s disaster response (vide trauma response) is remembrance. Because what else can be done if one has nothing?

Not so much points as characteristics in the middle of the story: Aminatu was the vendor in the small, dimly lit stall in the Big Easy’s French Quarter; she was the woman from Africa in America. Among the fluid colony of market stalls, she was the one with the “permanent space,” seeing that her brother-in-law had bought the stall. She lived in her brother-in-law’s basement, with her daughter, Ghaniyah, and paid no penny of rent, utilities, nor tuition for her daughter’s schooling, because “little was expected of [Aminatu].” And yet she “read the kind of books she had heard black students read at local universities.” She wanted out. A late-twenty-something, single-mother-of-one, she hadn’t been back home to Africa in a decade and now “could not answer for herself where she belonged.” Notwithstanding, when you visited the shop, Aminatu made you feel so “lucky.”

A paragraph of the story: “Aminatu had a way. That way not easily described, but well understood when you met her.”

Not so much backstory as this analepsis is eulogy. And it is eloquent, compelling, and thorough as a eulogy can be, it seems, which is remarkable in light of the fact that the narrator had not been friends with the vendor, never had been, so far as we know, in activities with Aminatu, etcetera. It seems important here to see that the reader does not experience Aminatu move and talk and think. We learn about her. So it goes with eulogies—even with the one I had given of my grandmother, who I had known all my life, with whom I had spent my mornings, afternoons, and summers—that the character never graduates out of static into dynamic; eulogies are synopses. In essence, they convey the informative point that not enough about the person was known or could be. It seems important here, too, to see that the narrator does not attempt to wrest from the fetid, crenellated maw of the dog—as some would—the damask head tie. The narrator lets it be, surrenders it to inevitability. There is so much to “Aminatu”: the irony, existentialism, brilliant language and structure, among other provocative features. I encourage you to give it a read. It can induce reflection on disaster response; for instance, I clean up—tangible debris as well as intangible—I attempt to restore order. (In all likelihood, I confess, I would have tried to reclaim the head tie.) But I am inclined to say this sort of response disallows disaster’s most useful function. Suspension of disbelief is idling; it is avoidance of any critical thinking at the convenient store on the way home from work, and it is forsaking any examination of our mothers at the dinner table. Suspension of disbelief buoys illusion and disaster can snap this. “Aminatu” is tagged in orange, italicized, small font Black Lives Matter. Per suspension, per our culture’s cushion, we do not see that Black lives do, indeed, matter. Disaster can allow us to come back down to earth to see who we have coerced into the trenches. As importantly, it can recalibrate our morals that have altogether been scrambled if not abandoned.

Review of “Little Beast” by C Pam Zhang, published in Bomb

/ Keith Pilapil Lesmeister / 1 Comment

Little Beast by C Pam Zhang is propelled by a tsunami of momentum gathered and flung forth by the narrative voice of its protagonist—a paranoid, delusional, displaced, misplaced, and misguided middle/high school student who is bewildered, troubled, and so writhing with uncertainty that she can only act on base ambitions, on some level. We learn the ultimate reason for why—why all or any of what happens in the story—but not until the end, though we are clued in throughout. I’m being intentionally vague about this because the conclusion at which I arrived—meaning, what I think the story is about—only came from a gathering of several details and clues interspersed throughout that aren’t fully realized until the end, at which point we learn who this narrator is and what afflicts her wholly. Or at least we think we know. There’s so much left to question, in the best possible way.

But we can’t talk about this story without first addressing the figurative language: “My posture was liquid and my spine nonexistent despite containing the requisite thirty-three vertebrae.” Or, “Once again a girl appeared, summoned by my blood as a shark is summoned across murky waters.” These examples, like so many other lines in the story, are so rich and multilayered that one wonders at times if what we’re reading is real or surreal. And later still, with the series of events that occur, we’re still as confused at the end as we were at the beginning, but we aren’t as confused as the narrator herself: “When the door began to open, I slopped into the breach, pleading, my mouth wide with explanations, never mind how I looked or what I spattered.” But maybe we’re not as confused as we think we are. There might be a lesson here about the mentally ill; about what happens if people aren’t given proper treatments and therapy needed to address the mental illness. Or maybe that interpretation of the story is wrong. Maybe it’s a more surface-level here’s-what-happens-in-extreme-cases-of…. Of what? Of adolescence? I’m not sure. I’m not sure if we’re supposed to be sure.

The story, on the surface, is about a young woman who winds up in Alta, an all girls school “built on progressive principles” where “senators’ daughters, screenwriters’ daughters, celebrity daughters’” etc, attend. This is also where the protagonist’s father works as a custodian and where she attends on “scholarship.” While there, she meets a host of young women in a special, “silent” group, and these women are awarded nicknames given to them by the protagonist. Names such as “mouse,” “elf,” and “armored.”

While the narrator is battling the ongoing onslaught of typical (and not-so-typical) school and adolescent issues, there’s also the father who is a wonderful character in his own right, full of heart and ambition, and perhaps what he’s guilty of is that he cares too much. But we understand why. A blue collar, working-class father who allows his daughter, who he calls “girlie,” to stand on his shoulders to reach heights he’ll never reach. It’s a common story of a parent wanting better for their children—that the child(ren) achieve the “success” that the parents weren’t able to achieve for him/herself, for whatever reasons held them back. And what’s conspicuously missing throughout is the mother who, we learn three-quarters of the way through the story, died in childbirth. What, if any, affect does that have here? Well, we’re not exactly sure.

The demise of the narrator occurs rapidly (possible cutting, anorexia, paranoia, delusions, more), but the unraveling of the parent-child relationship, while on the surface can be explained by “typical” teenage angst, in the end seems an utter misunderstanding. Again, this is only if we are to read this on face value. If read as a surrealistic cautionary tale, then we know we are no better than the selfish ambitions that propel us forward at any cost, even if those gains mean leaving behind those who have helped us the most (such as a caring father). Because in the end, really, does it matter at all?

And perhaps there’s another way to read this, which is maybe how I best understand the story. Maybe it’s not intended to be read at face value, and perhaps not as a surrealistic cautionary tale, but maybe as a modern-day fable told from the perspective of a mentally unstable young person, whose actions she’s not fully aware of because of her instability, and this causes her to act in permanently detrimental ways. A fable, traditionally, possesses some kind of lesson and often features animals prominently. They don’t always end well, but there’s a lesson to learn somewhere in the story. Maybe that’s the case here. Maybe. Oh, the vagueness! Oh, the elusive dodging of what actually happens! I know, I know. But I would feel as if I were denying you an Experience knowing I gave everything away on a platter to you, when in fact you could read this deliciously mischievous, sad, confusing, and manically paced and rendered piece on your own.

Check out the story here.