“What I Deserve” Delivers Disorienting Flash Fantasy https://ift.tt/RE542YJ
Selected by Isle McElroy as the winner of Split/Lip’s 2022 Fiction Chapbook Contest, Maybe This Is What I Deserve is a collection of surrealist flash fiction from Tucker Leighty-Phillips. The debut features twenty-eight imaginative stories that explore the pureness of adolescence, the strangeness of adulthood, and the humorous minutia of the not-so-everyday.
To preface his stories, Leighty-Phillips cites two quotes from very different sources. The first is from celebrated Hong Kong film director Wong Kar-Wai: “One’s memories aren’t what actually happened—they’re very subjective. You can always make it much better.” The other comes from the current manager of football club A.S. Roma, Jose Mourinho: “I prefer not to speak. If I speak, I am in big trouble.” In my reading of them, I was struck by how these sentiments seemed like opposites. One felt serious and insightful, the other humorous and clever. As I continued to read the collection, I realized that these quotes relate more to hindsight and foresight — not quite opposites, but similar tools with which to reflect on and reimagine reality, which is something that Leighty-Philips does flawlessly in MTIWID.
Many of his stories in this collection begin with an image of childhood and grow into something more. At first, you get five minutes in a fast food play area in “Down the Tunnel, Up the Slide,” you watch a classmate get called from your classroom and wondering what they did in “Mr. Boggins,” you wish that you were anyone but yourself before a big performance at your school as Midge does in “Midge Woke Up to Discover She’d Become A Lightning Bug.” These are things I feel like I could’ve done as a child, vividly rendered by Leighty-Phillips in just a few sentences.
Once steeped in the image, Leighty-Phillips subtly nudges the perspective to something broader. The ball pit in the play area becomes a reflection about things lost and found. Watching Mr. Boggins being called out of the classroom quickly turns to guilt about spreading nasty rumors about everyone at school. Pretending to be a lightning bug becomes a faint wish to live outside of society’s body standards. These revelations are shown through infinitesimal observations without an agenda. If anything, the details are almost a suggestion, a hint of an adult perspective seeping into the narrative left up to interpretation, which is something I love about this collection. Even in stories where we do get a clear adult perspective, there isn’t a concrete lesson to be learned — only more reflection and unbounded playfulness. One of my favorite ways Leighty-Phillips shares this strange, adult perspective is by parodying himself in the hilarious “The Rumplestiltskin Understudies (The Play)” and the existential “Tucker Leighty-Phillips 2: The Sequel.”
Along with that, I was also mesmerized by his use of fantasy elements. One such example appears in “Catfish Wishing Well,” which stood out to me in the way that it interprets the idea of a wish granted. In it, the narrator is waiting in a chaotic, crowded line with their children to get a pearl from The Catfish that will grant them a wish. The narrator imagines a life where they’ve wished for a full pantry and eternally clean bathrooms, but they end up inadvertently using their wish to grant their kids’ wishes in the chaos of almost losing them. One kid wishes to be a radio show and the other to be a bullfrog hurricane, and there’s something magical about the way they are rendered in the end of the story:
Then there’s a pop, and from God’s intercom we hear it, like wind in the air, a soul singing: 106.2 WCCQ, and the crowd disperses, and my kids are gone, and so is the wish, and it’s just us, me and the dillweeds, and we’re grazing to the tune, lauding the broadcast signal, swinging sunny as the drizzle begins, a slimy toad smacking the meat of my back.
The ending feels nonsensical and disorienting, but also peaceful and fulfilling. The children got their wishes, and the narrator didn’t lose them as they feared, but they aren’t as they were. It had me questioning many things: Is this really a happy ending or a sad ending? What about the narrator’s wish to have an easier life? Wouldn’t this make their life even less peaceful? Will they find their wish another way?
Again, there are no answers to the questions posed in the stories of MTIWID. There are monsters who want to continue terrorizing the citizens of their chosen town, a treasure trove of Gatorades at a sleepover, and a forced music lesson in a refrigerator box. It sounds like nonsense, but these stories will leave you in an endless loop — wistful for your childhood and delighted at the possible and impossible in the future.
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