Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-9825416-2-3
Perfect bound, 193 pages, $15
Traci O'Connor does not write about pretty things, but she does write them prettily. Or are the things themselves pretty in a way that takes the writing of them to reveal? Are mangled dogs pretty? Are pink prosthetic hands? Are beautiful monsters—to whom Recipes for Endangered Species, her first collection of short fiction, is dedicated—beautiful? Despite their monstrousness, or because of it?
"I thought of Edgar Allen Poe," she writes in "Starla and June." In many of these stories, a Poean dark blush creeps into the language, a language of obsession and Romantic death. "Starla and June" begins with an unbelievable pun: "It was a fairy tale, more or less, and then Starla gave me a hand. It was heavy, a strange shade of fleshtone pink." Hand-language dominates head-language, even as the narrator pleads indifference to her lover's one-and-a-half missing fingers. A gift from the second-hand store, lemon cookies on a hand-painted plate. Other stories hide ghosts, dead lovers turning violet in bathtubs, everything rotting, curdling. But it is all oh so beautiful—even the sacrilege fails to offend. "In fact, Jesus is no bigger than a pencil. ... There is a knot in the wood that looks like his penis. This, Jesus thinks, is a miracle."
In "Love Like That," a hospital attendant—his job, he says, is to package the things of dead infants for ex-parents to take away—faces the anxiety of his own pregnancy. "I don't want to hurt the baby," he pleads, but which baby does he mean, when so many are hurting, dying? "Always always hearts beating. beating. All day long, from all directions. Monitors in every corner. My fingers on tiny necks counting time. I feel I'm waiting for the sky to fall."
"Do you find the idea of eating babies repellant?" O'Connor asks in another story. "What if you were stranded in the Andes? What if the baby was made of marzipan?"
The recipes promised by the title are not instructions for the preparation of newborns or Van Gogh ears, though such apparitions are far from scarce. The recipes are cocktails—their names, slipped between the stories like little invitations, tell their own story: How to Make a Ghost. How to Make a Southern Suicide. How to Make a Sweet Jesus. Are these the endangered species? Or are we? We are each of us, O'Connor's stories suggest, the last of our kind. Are cocktails pretty?
When you make an Angel with grenadine and orange juice, does it mask the rum's poison? Does the rum hide beneath, like a snake waiting to strike, or does it blend, glowing, with the other liquids' sweetness, a Van Gogh sunset?
The collection brims with shock scenarios: rape, suicide, murder of innocents upon innocents. But it isn't written to shock—not even to shock with beauty ("Van Gogh Dreams" pulses with this refrain: "Blazing. Brilliant. Beauty slivering his veins. Splintering in his blood. Ribboning his flesh. Eating him. Consuming him. What does he do?").
The cocktails are preparation (buffer or lubricant) for the story to follow. "How to Make a Cannibal" precedes "Mrs. Rotham Has a Bun in the Oven and Plans to Eat It with Butter and Jam," the opening of which is barely stomachable without a drink in hand: "Last week (Friday. Midnight. The thirteenth [why not?]), after nearly six hours of poking and sawing, Marjorie Rotham ate a young female possum." She finds it "very much like eating oysters." Her husband, we later learn, "is unaware of all this. Or better said: in a coma."
What sort of recipe is this? For what, for whom? The convergence would be tritely novelistic were it not handled with such delicacy: "Her water breaks, flooding into her shoes. She grabs at her belly as if to catch it and there's a beep beep beep and she can't think why because there's nothing in the oven." Then: "The body arcs from the sheets. The baby clutches as if pulled by the hair. These two things like marble bookends."
This is not shocking. This far into the book, the reader has come to expect such deftness. Why not, when pie-making renders such descriptions:
Rose stirs until the heat boils away the clouds and the syrup turns to liquid crystal, the dark cherries to glass beads. She spoons it into the crust, watches it settle into the hollows left by her fingers. It rises, fills the crust, kisses the bottom of the golden, crimped edge. She presses a cherry with the tip of her nail, and pushes it beneath the syrup already starting to glaze over.
Is this a recipe? Her stories are full of lists; the book lists with lists.
A forty gallon drum
Sulfuric acid
Twenty-eight pounds
of human fat
Bone fragments
Two dental fillings
A beaded purse
A gallstone
Are these ingredients? Are the contents, in "Little Animals," of a red purse at the side of the freeway? The instructions for "How to Make a Zombie" consist of only one step, endlessly elaborated: "Make a person dead." That much is sufficient; the universe will handle the rest. It doesn't take much.
e. With too much gin and tonic
f. and a stranger who takes you home.
The author made these; they are her dying infants, her knife-stabbed animals. Gifts. "Centered on the mat, a tiny paw licked clean." "The lobe of his ear in the prostitute's palm...the blood spilling over." "The wasp at the center of the fig." Jesus Christ, covering his own ears in embarrassment. "And it takes a lot to embarrass Jesus."
They are gifts, these little monsters, neck-snapped animals and dying babies falling from the sky. Are they pretty?
Byron Alexander Campbell is an MFA Writing student at the California Institute of the Arts and an editor for the renowned literary magazine Black Clock. He is working on an ergodic novel/textual artifact. He's been published here and there—find out about his other ongoing projects at theyearisyesterday.wordpress.com.
