In Kathy Fish’s slim volume of flash and micro-fiction stories, Wild Life, she splits the collection into two halves, the first entitled Wild (“The lioness is crouching.”) and the second entitled Life (“Grundy Triplets Perish Unnecessarily”). And there is a reason for this. While both sections deal with family (even though the subtitle to the collection is “a collection of undomesticated flash fictions”) the first part has a feeling of chaos, and a lack of control, while the second part hints at the day-to-day events and mundane entertainments that we often take for granted.
Wild.
Life.
Kathy Fish is at her best when she mixes a blend of bitter and sweet to create an air of nostalgia, sentiment and understanding. The first story in this collection is entitled “Watermelon.” Take this excerpt for example:
“You left anyway, hitchhiked all the way to Houston, and one night months later we looked up and saw you at the table, eating watermelon in the dark.”
She focuses on the relationship between two brothers, which eventually descends into mockery and violence, that’s just what brothers do—sisters, sometimes too. But underneath the words and the sharp tongues, there is usually a layer of love, and loss, and longing. When you say, “I never liked you, ugliestworstmosthorrible brother ever” what you really mean is “stay.”
Later, in “The Cartoonist,” she shows how in only a handful of sentences she can create a vivid tapestry—weaving family, setting, and emotions together. As a family sits around the dinner table, a mundane event if ever there was one, a crow flies down the chimney. Chaos ensues. But if you listen closely, you’ll hear the father say, “sit down you lunatic,” to his frantic wife, the last line slipping through your fingertips to punch you in the gut:
“Big brother in the shadows, slumped against the doorway, his baggy jeans and narrowed eyes. Draw him smaller than everything else.”
So much weight in those last two sentences, so much life packed into this one moment of undoing.
And that’s part of what makes this sixty-six-page book so rich. Observations unfold into prose poetry, long sentences stretching out into conversations that layer on meaning and depth. Pay attention, you don’t want to miss a word. Who else but a writer disguised as a poet (or maybe a poet disguised as a writer) could call a sick son who thrashes on the couch, “post-apocalypse,” to invent a new juxtaposition of words that makes you pause to consider what is happening in front of you, nodding your head, wishing you had written that phrase.
Every time I relaxed and faded into the scenes on the page, I was rewarded with a punishing turn of phrase that left me muttering to myself, caught unaware once again. This from “Cancer Arm”:
“It’s Thanksgiving and you are six years old. Your knee socks are pulled up over your kneecaps. Rusty, your Golden Retriever, is under the table and now and then you drop a piece of turkey on the floor for him. What you’d really like is a Tollhouse cookie or some muskmelon, cut into chunks. You think Rusty’s distended stomach is from eating too much, though in truth, he hardly eats at all. He won’t make it to Christmas and neither will your father. Everyone knows this but you.”
Have you been here? Ever come home from college asking, “Where’s Whiskers?” only to get sad eyes that won’t meet your question, the water bowl no longer sitting in the utility room. To be a child and to lose a pet, it’s such a devastating experience—to lose a parent, even worse. For a second take the pain that you know is coming to sit with that child, and place it squarely in the chest of the surviving parent, in this case, the mother. Now you see what has been shown.
Sometimes life is just cruel. I have a soft spot for kittens and puppies, I mean, really, who doesn’t? But I also have a morbid sense of curiosity. Don’t you look at the road kill when you pass the furry mess on the side of the road, wondering to yourself, “What was that? Raccoon? Possum? Cat? Oh, please don’t let that be a cat.” I can’t think of much that is more unsettling than the way that a relationship is whittled down to the bare bones in “Tenderoni” as a couple discusses a furry gray mess, a dead kitten, fighting over how best to deal with this mess, and in one moment the whole relationship dissolves, like the sticky fluff on the side of the gravel road, nothing certain in a world like this.
Kathy Fish has the uncanny ability to reduce life’s most intimate and revealing moments into a flash of insight and wisdom. Wild Life is a touching, bittersweet, unsettling collection of stories that sits in the pit of your stomach like a family member home for the holidays, stirring everything up.
[...] Writers Collective Wild Life by Kathy Fish Hiram Grange and the Chosen One by Kevin [...]
Thanks very much for this terrific, insightful review, Richard. I’m glad you liked the book!
[...] and the other in the MLP Stamp Stories Anthology. Kathy’s chapbook is also reviewed at Outsider Writers Collective. Susan Tepper has a story in Schuylkill Valley Journal. Matt Potter’s Pure Slush has a new [...]