Nan learned then and could not un-learn how women could keep this awfulness quiet inside themselves.
This collection of stories blew me away with terrible aches from the first tale, Corpse Walks Into A Bar. It grabbed my stony heart (I don’t know about the rest of you, but mine seemed to me to be hardening with too much feeling these past few years of worldwide brutalities and personal pains) and managed to squeeze more blood out of the old organ. In the story, a man must bury an animated corpse, one he has no connection with, but you must honor the requests of the dead, right? Maybe it will buy him some good karma? It is about people trying to remember those who are gone, like trying to cup light into your hands, girls escaping mean stories, women fighting back or looking for gravity to anchor them, settling into their troubles or swimming away from them, longing to move forward, some forgotten and left behind, struggling to do what’s right by the living, the dying, the dead. It is a voice for girls in trouble, girls that ‘things happen to’, a phrase as loaded as a gun. Here are lives defined by shocking moments, left out to dry, facing unbearable disappointments alone, when those who promised to come through never show up. Wow! I love it when I find a gem of a book and often think, some of the best writers sneak up on you! Don’t you just love when that happens?
These stories are short but powerful, loaded with emotional struggles. Haunting cries of stillborn babies and stillborn dreams takes over with the hunger of a mother’s grief. The balm sounds more like the devil’s trickery than anything godly to me in Waiting For Ivy. How did the writer conjure this strange tale? It’s creepy despite the presence of angels. Parents have dead children returned, could the couple have their sweet baby back? Should they, dare they? Hope can be cruel, it can feel like a murder can’t it? Or like slowly poisoning yourself, when you are clinging to optimism, looking for an escape hatch from misery with a mad smile on your face. Loss. Where do we put our collection of losses? It’s so terrible and beautiful being human.
These are ordinary people affected by events that would bring many of us to our knees. The Child That Went, 32 years have passed since Emily’s youngest child, son Peter, was abducted. She returns to the scene of the crime present day, right across from the café where she is speaking to the man who runs it, as she does every June. It is what followed, the inability to be the present, loving mother (to her two daughters) she was before her darling boy was taken and the not knowing what happened to Peter that weighs heavy on the reader. I don’t think it’s just me, my kids are grown adults in their twenties now, but I still have nightmares that they are small again and taken away, or harmed only to wake up in relief. These are anxiety dreams remaining from years of hypervigilance of being a mother. There are people who never get to wake up from nightmares such as these. Grief isn’t like some balloon you just pop, it hides in the little things.
There is so much yearning, in many forms, within these pages. People are worn out, cut down, and so hot to avenge wrongs, even if it means going against their good nature, against god and spilling blood, that they cannot see straight. It isn’t hard to imagine wearing their lives for a while, ponder where the winds of turmoil would land you. The subjects are heavy, so heavy. On Tuesday I Will Kill Him-A grandmother is plotting murder, you can feel the monster of senseless pain howling for release within her old bones. Can you ever even the balance when light is snuffed out in this world? Eye for an eye? I also adore the ending of The Boy In The Boat, what an original idea. Lesley Bannatyne is a hell of a writer! Hoping for a full novel from her, but I would delight in more short stories too. Please don’t keep us waiting too long! Yes, read it!!!!
Publication Date: March 15, 2022
Kallisto Gaia Press
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