This might be the finest short story I’ve read since Richard Ford‘s ‘Rock Springs‘, the lead story in the collection of the same name. I often go back and read the last paragraph of that story, and once I met Ford and I told him how much I liked that story especially those last sentences he proceeded to repeat back to me word for word the section I was referring to.
The second story in this collection from the ridiculously talented Deborah Willis will take your breath away. I was really confused at first until I realized just how fucking genius this little gem is. Ms. Willis writes from two dueling perspectives, a wifeless father, who owns a farm, and his daughter, Edith. One day after school his daughter brings home a friend, probably seventeen going on forty. Men are always in this spot, a young woman passes them on the street, and suddenly their urge to stop the girl, even if she is young, and ask them, “did you know you were looking at me like that?” is brutally hard to stop from happening. The young girl’s response would most likely be, “like what?” But most men don’t do that, they just keep walking.
Edith’s dad should have kept walking.
Ms. Willis toggles around in time to find out why Edith’s mother has just disappeared. Apparently, she can’t live out in the farmland anymore, and leaves her daughter and husband, for no real reason, or because it’s remote, or the weather sucks. Whatever it is, that’s not good enough if you ask me. Women are capable of this kind of desertion, a switch gets thrown and that’s it, they’re gone. Dad likes this girl Rae, Edith’s friend, and slowly but surely Rae notices this, as girls who are trapped in a woman’s body usually do, and she starts to act on it. Over time, and through both voices, we see and hear what Dad and Rae are up to, and Rae finally gets Dad to explain the absence of his wife.
The writing is clean and clear, free of bullshit, finely tuned with detail, and startling imagery, both showing and telling. I see a lot of Victoria Patterson in these pages, her collection, ‘Drift’, a masterpiece from late last year. -JR
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