It is important to establish, before this begins, that I never thought of myself as an animal person. And since I do not come from a pet family, I never thought the family we were raising needed any more life running through it. Especially not a scurrying kind of life, with its claws tap-tap-tapping on the hardwood floors.
There’s a certain reading process that I expect to engage in with my favourite short fiction — my acceptance of the initial set up followed by a swerve that upends my expectations — and Alexander MacLeod writes just these kinds of well-crafted and thoughtful short stories that, rather than feeling like truncated novels, are perfect little pearls of insight that couldn’t be told any other way. The eight stories in Animal Person each center on absolutely believable characters who probe the boundaries between themselves and others — exploring the differences between public and private, between family and outsider, even between animal and person — and as the characters are forced to learn something about themselves, the reader glimpses truths about the world. And they couldn’t have been told any other way. A wonderful collection that perfectly satisfied me. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.) The stories:
Lagomorph
I don’t know, but sometimes when he closes in on me like that and I’m gazing down into those circles inside of circles inside of circles, I lose my way, and I feel like I am falling through an alien solar system of lost orbits rotating around a collapsing, burning sun.
Elegiac and philosophical in tone, this (O. Henry Award-winning) story that seems to be about a pet rabbit is, on a deeper level, an exploration of a failed marriage.
The Dead Want
She wouldn’t have felt a thing. They kept coming back to that. Once in every call, someone would say the words and the person on the other end would have to agree. She wouldn’t have felt a thing. She wouldn’t have felt a thing. It was the chorus, the refrain of the first six hours.
When it comes to what we owe our families, sometimes the needs of the dead take precedence over the needs of the living.
What Exactly Do You Think You’re Looking At?
A good bag is a miracle, intimate and distant at the same time; completely mine and completely not mine. When everything is in order, a good bag stolen from the LAX at precisely this time of year shows me a way out, a way through.
How shallow would your life have to be to search for meaning in the contents of stolen luggage? The answer to that question is surprisingly relatable.
Everything Underneath
Me and my sister. My sister and I. My sister and me. It has never been good between us. Never. We are eleven months apart and we have the same parents — the same mom, right there, on a blanket at the beach, reading her book, and the same dad, wherever he is now. But we have always had this gap, too. Eleven months is too close, and at the same time, it is too far away.
Two young girls are snorkelling in the ocean at the end of summer and everything underneath the waves — the swirling grit, the unseen lunar forces — are analogous to what swirls and pushes beneath their relationship.
The Entertainer
He felt sure that even the MC was not impressed. She seemed to be rolling her eyes at the vocalists especially, but he could not disagree. When they sang, the kids closed their eyes and circled their hands in the air, aiming for notes they could not possibly hit. Around him, people visibly winced, and when it was over, they applauded the quiet and not what had come before.
I was sobbing at the end of this: Three characters under pressure make a very powerful human connection through a shared love of music.
The Ninth Concession
I saw a light shining out of the house from the second floor. Allan was there, perfectly framed behind the glass of his bedroom window. He was staring up and over, not down, and his hardened hair was still perfectly parted and everything behind him was illuminated. You know how it is when the light gets like that. Sometimes the person looking out can’t see anything, only the dark, but for the person looking in, every detail is magnified and clear.
A relatable and thoughtful coming-of-age story about class and race and discovering what truly determines a person’s worth.
Once Removed
Amy remembered the closet by the door, and all the hollow shirts and pants stuffed into the Tip Top Tailor bag, a few decades of bad ties. She thought about the afterlife of objects. All the things that were still here and the people who were not.
An interesting examination of what makes a family and the stories we tell about them; what is forgotten over time and what is saved.
The Closing Date
When the news story came out, pictures of the motel were everywhere. Police cars and flashing lights, caution tape and pylons, men in hazmat suits entering and leaving the mobile forensic unit. It was what you’d expect.
In this story of a young family crossing paths with danger, we learn that perhaps the only people less knowable than strangers are ourselves.
