Maybe a screengrab from Encounters At The End of The World will help cool you a bit if you can’t get to one of your local cooling centers.
Did it work? No. Okay. We’ve also got a contributor roundup for you.
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Hard To Say by Ethel Rohan
2011, PANK
Reviewed by Kenny Mooney
I began reading Ethel Rohan’s Hard to Say (PANK 2011), a slim volume of very short fiction, with very little exposure to her previous work. I’m not sure what I was expecting from those fifteen little stories, but it’s fair to say that I was unprepared for just how deeply I would be affected by them. Spread over fifty-three pages, they document a tale of life in an Irish Catholic family, and although each story is an individual, they have been deliberately ordered so as to run in chronological order, taking you from the narrator’s birth to her new life in the US and her struggles dealing with the emotional turmoil of a dying mother.
The book opens with “Crust,” a story that appears to set the tone for the rest of the book, and hints, with its talk of bloodletting as a form of medical treatment, at the emotional bloodletting that is to follow:
“Open, bleeding, my body rumbling and raged, and drums started up inside me, faster, louder, till I was throbbing. Speak, the ancient beat commanded. Speak! I gurgled and strained, my drowned tongue the rope in a tug-o-war. Through bubbles of blood, my voice finally sounded, garbled and halting at first, but then stronger, surer, till at last the words tumbled forth like warriors. Till I was shouting. Till I was heard.”
It reads like these stories are words that needed to be written, that needed to be heard. Perhaps silent for too long. This blood-soaked prologue segues into “Fresh From God,” in which we realise not all is well in the family. The birth of a new child should be joyous and celebrated, yet the mother here is weary and her thoughts are of cigarettes and brandy. Continue reading
Down the Rabbit Hole
A Review of Sarah Rose Etter’s Tongue Party
Tongue Party by Sarah Rose Etter
2011, Caketrain Press
Reviewed by Melissa Reddish
When I first received Sarah Rose Etter’s Tongue Party in the mail, I knew nothing about it other than it had won the 2010 Caketrain chapbook competition. In hindsight, I’m extremely glad I knew nothing about this collection, because watching each beautiful, terrifying, utterly bizarre story unfold is part of what makes reading this cohesive collection so enjoyable.
Reading each story is a delightful trip down the rabbit hole. Many of the female protagonists live in worlds ruled by the dizzying logic of nightmares, struggling against situations beyond their control. In the title story, the protagonist must attend the tongue party, because, well, she must. While later we learn more about the relationship between the narrator and her father (one of several characters who abuses a position of authority and trust), the narrator never stands up and says, “No, I will not attend the tongue party.” The tongue party is as central to her reality as going to the DMV is in ours, and through it, we are able to experience the rawness of her fear and her desire for love. In fact, at no point does any character question the reality they find themselves in; like dreams, we don’t realize something is amiss while the dream is happening. And because Etter builds each world with such detailed, logical precision, we as readers don’t question what is happening either. Continue reading
Kill Yourself (viii)
by J.A. Tyler
My father withered when I told him, or he did not move at all. Or I did not tell him. Because in the trees where I sit when the wind isn’t, there is the belief in coming down. And I am no longer a baby cradled.
What it means when I write a letter to Leonard is that I love him and there are words I want to use that I do not otherwise. So I pencil them out and send the sentences, this packed suitcase, to his house on his farm where the sun rises. And I don’t write my return address or sign them with the name that I have. They go with my fingerprints but no one can chase those through this town.
Yesterday my letter only said Leonard, I love you. The day before my letter said I will hold you until we are no longer pumpkins on vines. The day before the day before I didn’t send a letter because I was in Leonard’s bedroom, ruffled as feathers in his sheets, listening to the mice scurry in his walls.
