A year ago, in the early days of COVID lockdowns, I felt a strange simultaneity of panic and extreme slowing. In Denver, my building and our neighboring highrises participated in a collective evening howl for the first-responders—a surreality, something external and collective but still confined.
Reading Rebecca Fishow’s collection from the precarious COVID winter reminded me of something like that. There’s a domestic, interior howl in Fishow’s stories, and a collectiveness in their texture, change, and movement.
The Trouble With Language (TRNSFR Books, 2020) is composed of flash pieces and longer near-novellas, plus a piece that dips in and out of drama, stripped down to dialogue evocative of the strangeness of Sarah Ruhl’s worlds. Fishow’s characters must convince themselves of the tangibility of their realities—that the apartment is not strange, that the room is not ablaze—and in this way Fishow estranges contentment as well as containment. Body parts are missing or autonomous (a severed hand, a severed head). Bodies binge and purge, hurt themselves and each other. But Fishow takes care to return if not to a safety then at least to a deep tenderness.
The story that stuck in my gut is “Visiting Sarah, 2005,” a sisters-story, alcohol-fueled, a story that inhabits a tender adjacency to the military scaffolds of the US. Sarah is a Marine with road rage, and it’s a harsh portrait: the relationships between men and women fraught, and the relationships between women and food, and between memory and truth.
But it’s also intimate, an account of a visit in which a sister addresses a sister directly:
Back in your barracks, I pull myself up to the top bunk, watch you undress. You fling your body around the room. You are angry and then laughing, manic. You are naked and clutching your stomach like a loaf. You jiggle your own flesh with both hands, say, “The Marines are gonna make me lose weight.”
I think, time moves through us, not the other way around. It goes on living through us until we’re all used up. You let go of your stomach and kiss yourself in the mirror. Then you shit in the toilet with the door open.
And, of course, there is a trouble with language, or a variety of troubles—and not just with language, but also with silence and communion. “Jailbreak” is a haunting example of how gestural language, like spoken language, is readily vulnerable to misinterpretation:
The husband and wife do not discuss why they are in prison. Sometimes, when the wife feels like discussing it, she takes off her shirt, stuffs it in her mouth, and bites down hard. The husband misinterprets her nudity and gag as sexual advances. He walks to the wife, hugs her. He runs his hand down her back and kisses her.
But the book’s opening piece, “None of This Is Your Fault,” ends with an urge toward care—whatever shape that might take. Care with language, care with bodies:
None of this is your fault. Nonetheless, I implore you, please be more careful.
There is something fantastical and formally inventive in these stories with which lovers of Sabrina Orah Mark might identify, and in these relationships something witty and private, reminiscent of Lydia Davis.
There’s also a plaintive directness in Fishow’s closings which reminds me of Raymond Carver. From the closing of “The Trouble with Language,” the title story:
Just a sleeping man and a sleeping cat. The apartment grew still and strange and empty.