This week’s short reads
Creative nonfiction by Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, Emily Austin and Anne P. Beatty, and fantastic short stories by Dana Wall, Frances Gapper, and Elvira Navarro
Snapshot of a Self by Alex Marzano-Lesnevich
I have a loved one that’s been transitioning in fits and starts for a long time, and this story really struck a chord with me. The last line is a doozy.
After you stepped over a threshold on the other side of the world, triggering the ding of the barber’s unseen bell. After you watched her rope your long hair into a braid and you didn’t cry; loop her fingers through scissors and you didn’t cry; sever that braid and you didn’t cry, and you weren’t yet taking testosterone so that wasn’t the reason you didn’t cry.
I’m not ashamed to say the story sure made me cry. It’s included in this anthology that I’m absolutely ordering. Also, I didn’t realize that Marzano-Lesnevich wrote the outanding The Fact of a Body. Turns out I was already a huge fan.
What the Dead Leave Behind by Emily Austin
I just finished reading Austin’s novel Interesting Facts About Space, and on her website she links to this essay about home and personal identity. It’s lovely:
There is a truth to life that is difficult to access if you are not grieving or depressed. If you find you have looked behind the curtain and seen that truth, try to walk even further behind the stage.
Women's Hospital by Anne P. Beatty
I love the metaphor in Beatty’s story, and . I wasn’t the one doing the work when my kid was born, but so much of the description in Beatty’s story brought me right back to that day.
In birth the only plan is life, and—you realize this in the moment, or at least I did—the life in charge is not yours. The building must come down. The baby must be born. Never mind the ripping.
The Last Lipstick Factory by Dana Wall
A melancholy love story about a world losing colour:
First, the sky forgot how to hold blue. It started at the horizons, a slow leaching of color like wet paper left in sun. Then the fade crept upward, until even noon became an exercise in shades of ash. Birds flew through increasingly monochrome heavens, their own feathers dulling in sympathy.
Saturday Girl by Frances Gapper
A light and surprising ghost story about a kid who works weekends in the bakery:
I had a Saturday job at the haunted bakery, where they can’t keep a Saturday girl for love nor money. But it wasn’t haunted when I worked there.Thirteen and a young thirteen, I spoiled their window display by putting cakes in the wrong places. Or tripped non-accidentally while carrying trays so I could gorge on the smashed creamy delights, eclairs being my favourite.
This story goes to some unexpected places. Gapper pulls some fun tricks here.
Images of Women by Elvira Navarro
A woman’s father tries to adjust after his wife’s death. Outwardly he’s living it up, but not so much behind closed doors. This is an excerpt from Navarro’s new book The Voices of Adriana that I’m defintely going to pick up.
In addition to ‘sweetheart’, there was the ‘This time I think I’ve found the one for me’. ‘What’s-her-name is a darling, I think she’s the one for me,’ he’d told Adriana on ten, twenty, thirty occasions, with the phone or computer at hand, ready to start a new conversation with the next headless woman. ‘Just in case,’ he always replied when she objected to the contradiction involved in saying he’d found the one for him and then immediately linking up with someone else.
