1-1-Final Cover-001Humans are curious and strange. We attach to unnaturally bred teacup dogs, watch television that dramatizes the most heinous human acts, invent stories about strangers’ lives, dig our heels in stubbornly over things fathomable only to ourselves, tolerate a status quo that keeps us depressed and trapped, and keep up appearances that are unflattering at best. In The Whack Job Girls & Other Stories (Monkey Puzzle Press), Bonnie ZoBell’s collection of short short stories, the language for_review_in_GRLand choice details reveal a dangerous undercurrent of laziness and self-loathing in today’s America. Not that it feels like it is delivering some judgment from on high, because it doesn’t do that.  ZoBell’s characters are a function of point of view, the stories minimal lyricized sketches.

For the most part, the characters serve more to create mood than to be round characters, with perhaps one notable exception: The collection has a powerful opener in “Nonnie Wore No Clothes,” weaving mental illness and family dysfunction and religion and adolescent angst and creating stunning images and characters, two of them, that the reader really fears for and cares about. So much empathy can be generated by her choice of detail and precise language. The piece can be held up as an example of what attention to language can produce.  The first two lines: “Nonnie sat cross-legged in front of the living room wall wearing no clothes. On the drywall before her were two brown spots looking back,” and the writer’s superb use of the limited third person perspective of Nonnie, where “Anyone could see this was the Madonna,” establish everything for the reader with an economy of language.  The verb choices are equally controlled and exact in this piece: “Her son Antonio banged into the house.” The conflict is established quickly and forcefully: “You can’t keep doing this shit or they’re not going to let me live with you anymore.” The reader is afraid for Nonnie, who has cracked up, and afraid for her son, admiring his patience, his maturity, his self-restraint, and sad for this boy who has to behave like the adult in order to get the house ready for the county worker’s inspection. The piece never crosses into magical realism, the reader is never inclined to believe that a tearful Virgin Mary really has made an appearance in the drywall. The piece ends not quite hopefully, despite the fact that Nonnie shows signs of change.

The title piece, “The Whack-Job Girls,” is set in Nellie’s Hair Salon, where small town women have started (sort of) challenging the backward-ass misogyny in their lives and live vicariously through the one single woman, Kitty. This piece is funny; intentionally funny- it features lyrics to a supposed song by Loretta Lynn (it couldn’t be a real song by this artist, although her lyrics are almost as absurd). And has a romantic twist (I guess you can call it that) at the end.  This is completely absurdist and some of the lines are very funny:  When the women insist that the postmaster stop opening mail not addressed to him, he threatens to have them arrested. “What could the women do? If the FBI drove over, who’d fix the kids’ meals and get them to school? Who’d be the only one in the house who could find the hemorrhoid lotion?” The men are truly assholes in this story, and the women are pretty much dumb bimbos. It’s not a flattering portrait of anyone, and a sensitive small town type might believe the author is making fun of those who occupy said small towns.

Towards the end of the ten-story collection, the piece called “Serial” opens with a disturbing image from a television dramatization of a murder and pans out to the couple who watches the show from their separate couches. The first person narrator describes the content of the television show, including a preview that reveals that, “a couple involved in torture will be driven to far more heinous acts than either would pursue alone.” The reader gets the sense that this is a comfortable couple, comfortable alone together. The family image is both comforting and a bit off kilter- the astute selection of details serve to darken the piece that outwardly is non-threatening but again the reader is left feeling this sense that a darkness is innately inside all living things, but for a fine veneer, which keeps it at bay. This piece and the first one are the writer’s strongest commentary on the state of humankind and its tenuous position as functioning society.

This is a chapbook, containing just ten flash fiction pieces, each previously published in a variety of magazines, and it comes with a lot of advance praise from the likes of Steve Almond, Myfawny Collins and Kathy Fish.  As the title promises, each of the stories features women who are a little unusual; some of the pieces are in first person point of view, others in limited third, and there’s even one piece told in second person. “You are Not Langston Hughes,” is a first person story told in second person, a technique used very successfully by some writers (see Grandbois, The Arsenic Lobster) and less successfully by others. As it serves to distance the narrator from the action and attempts to draw the reader in as participant, it remains an odd point of view despite its recent popularity. This piece manages to be extremely self-aware and somehow about racial discomfort. The City (NYC, of course) is the antagonist in this piece—the city and the narrator’s fear and awkwardness as an outsider. It feels like it might be the most autobiographical of all the stories, just by virtue of its self-consciousness. ZoBell is adept at her craft, and this collection of her stories is engaging.

First published in Gently Read Literature