Story Collection Blends the Venn Diagram Between “Weird” and “Feminist” https://ift.tt/UrmQ8B1
My heart bleeds for the girls and women in Jennifer Fliss’ second collection of speculative short fiction, As If She Had a Say. They are overlooked, disrespected, used, violated, raped, kidnapped, abused, abandoned or betrayed. Their parents are dead, and their babies have died. They self-harm, or have sex when they don’t want to or with men they don’t want to have sex with. They live in a medium — a suspended animation — of perpetual grief. Patriarchal menace surrounds them. Even their own homes aren’t safe spaces. The husbands — unreadable, unknowable, a species apart — snore in the next room, perhaps, but the wives are wakeful, tormented by frightful imaginings and a darkness that presses against the panes of the windows.
In January 2022 I reviewed Fliss’ first collection of stories, The Predatory Animal Ball, for this magazine. In addition to her two books, Fliss is the author of numerous short fictions and essays that have been published in literary magazines, including The Rumpus, Hippocampus and Narratively, and she is the recipient of several Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net nominations. I found this new collection as surprising and inventive as her first. Who could resist reading “Projection,” for example, when it begins, “Jackie’s vagina projects films”? I mean… What?
Considered as a whole, her stories are a beguiling concoction of literary styles told through a lens of magical realism. While her settings and characters are realistic, she uses fantastical elements to comment on that reality. And while Latinx writers often use magical realism to critique colonialism, Fliss employs it to critique patriarchy. Her work is also absurdist, Kafka-esque, because her central characters, mostly women, experience life as incongruous and futile.
It’s full of what could be termed “body horror.” Fliss uses grotesque violations of the human body to convey her characters’ physical vulnerability. In her story “The Potluck,” reminiscent of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and even Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy, Mrs. Court hangs her husband out to dry… literally. She makes him into a jerky — “dried-out, brownish-red strands on a gold-flecked Tiffany china platter” — and we watch along with the rest of the neighborhood as three judges taste him with glee, “masticating the last of Mr. Court.”
In “Maude’s Cards and Humanity,” after a rapist spontaneously combusts in a café, the café owner Maude decides to leave the “bits of muscle and spatters of blood” on the wall because they look like art, and the owner later sells that portion of wall to a collector.
And, in “Splintered,” a young woman named Katie suffers from the pricks of several splinters, only these splinters seem to have agency: The first one “embeds itself quickly, inserting itself readily, as if her skin were dough.” Her husband Josh tries to pry it free with a safety pin: “He hasn’t sterilized it, but surely it doesn’t matter, he tells Katie.” After she becomes pregnant, a friend tells Katie that she’s “as big as a house,” and Katie later gives birth to a small wooden house via a grueling c-section.
Fabulism, perhaps, characterizes these exceedingly weird stories best, in that they meld all the styles above — magical realism, surrealism, horror and even science fiction — to blur the lines of genre.
What I enjoyed most, however, beyond the genre-bending, was the feminism. If Fliss’ collection was a Venn diagram, it would reside in the overlapping area between the ”weird” and the “feminist.” I relish the author’s focus on the personal and interpersonal experiences of women, particularly wives and mothers, relegated to the claustrophobic private sphere.
In one of my favorite stories in the collection, the darkly whimsical “Domestic Appliance,” a tiny woman who is “seven tablespoons of person” (not a full person, mind you), lives in a refrigerator and crushes on the man of the house, Amos. Amos is aware of her existence and woos her, but he doesn’t release her from the refrigerator until she nearly drowns in a puddle of spilled beer. After reviving her, he wonders, “Were there always women in the corners and crevices in the world that directed life? Was their purpose to go unnoticed?” before placing her in a plastic storage container.
And in the very first story, “As She Melted,” Marla — you guessed it — melts, in the vein of the Wicked Witch of the West, I imagine. Fliss describes her as a “mermaid woman who was not a mermaid.” As Marla melts, she worries about the mess she hadn’t yet cleaned up, the cat she hadn’t yet fed, the dinner she hadn’t yet finished, even the “nascent lagoon” of her former whole self making her husband, Brent, slip on the linoleum when he returns home from work. “What should we do?” she asks. “I don’t know,” Brent says. “I mean. I’m really hungry right now.”
Women think in terms of “we;” men in terms of “I.” And while worrying about his lack of flood insurance and his wet socks, and gazing at his own reflection in her liquefying eyes, he asks, “I wonder if it’s all you women?”
Fliss’ answer: Yes, Brent. It’s all us women.
FICTION As If She Had a Say
By Jennifer Fliss
Curbstone Press
Published July 15, 2023
0 Commentaires