Something is always wrong with our bodies, at least a little. Sometimes you have an ear growing out of your back. Sometimes your upper skull is removed and fastened over your face.
Rebecca Fishow, author of How to Love a Black Hole, is closely attuned to these strange mutations. The collection of fabulist flash fiction operates on a level of simmering surrealism and frequently taking among its themes relationships (usually of the romantic or family kind) and various ways the human (usually female) body can be contorted by both societal forces and the body’s own whims. Throughout, the stories display their own strange internal logics and de-familiarizations.
The collection opens with two stories involving a medicalized body: a woman develops a rare condition and falls in love with the doctor treating her, a girl has to deal with the fallout from a medical procedure she received when she was young. The specifics of these conditions, however, move towards the surreal (the woman has ears growing all over body, the girl has had her skull removed and placed over her face). Neither speaker reveals, or maybe doesn’t know themselves, the causes of the conditions they are subject to. In fact, few things are explained throughout the collection, to its strength. Instead, there is a sense that the events of the stories adhere to their internal logic, one that happens to be foreign and withheld from us.
How to Love a Black Hole is illustrative of the dream logic that the flash fiction form is capable of inducing when done well. The stories are short, rarely coming in at more than two pages. Much is said in few words. The stories rely on implication, asking us to fill in negative space and act as collaborators in constructing the meaning of the stories.
Much of the collection operates on a surreal register, in worlds where gravity gives out or people shrink to a size so small they can swim in coffee cups, but this is not true of every story. In “Go Back,” a speaker implores their sister (or maybe a childhood friend) to remember a time before they, the one the speaker implores, joined the marines, to remember life before they experienced the violence of war, before they made rightward political turn. It is a quietly emotionally devastating story. In only a few pages it shows the unfolding and unravelling of a full human life. This story is planted firmly in the world of our reality, but even here there is still a slight sense of defamiliarization. This effect is here achieved through the techniques Fishow uses, in particular the second person and the backwards-unfolding chronology.
In addition to point-of-view, Fishow plays often with tense, which helps create the affect of these stories. Many of these stories are written in the present tense, giving them a sense of immediacy that ironically makes them feel more dreamlike, less familiar. This sense is also achieved through an emphasis on pronouns without referents. Characters are rarely named. They are usually just demarcated with a pronoun—she, her, I, you. Every now and then a character will be denoted by the role they play in a relationship—husband, aunt, fourth-wife, doctor. At their best, these techniques help create an off-kilter reality for the story. However, at times this vagueness leaves the stories feeling unformed and textureless while the immediacy leads to stories without much lasting impact. The less successful stories in the collection have a tendency to simply float by on faint vibes.
The instances of more extreme formal experimentation are not always successful. In particular, “High School Mixtape” stands out as the weakest story in the collection. Its formal invention feels like it is taken from a book of writing prompts (write half the story as side A, half as side B, and change the POV) and, in falling flat aesthetically, the story does a disservice to its heavy theme, school shootings. In terms of formal experimentation, “Haunts” is more successful.
At their best, these stories have developed logic to themselves. One of the strongest stories is “The Daughters.” The story, which deploys a first person plural point-of-view to great effect, grabs you from the get. The story is about a group of young women playacting as young girls, daughters to a group of “mommies.” Who exactly these mommies are is unclear and the reason for the playacting are, of course, never explicitly stated. By the end of the story, the “daughters” collect their paycheck, go home, and enjoy the luxury consumer goods they bought with their paychecks. There is a sense of implied menace, not quite sexual but the kind of job that seems to follow the rhythm of sex work. It gets a lot in—complications of mother-daughter relationships, manipulation of social media and memory—in only a couple of pages. It’s a story that delivers on the potentials of flash fiction. It builds a whole world out of only a few words, and what is unspoken is fraught with implication. There is a whole world in what is written and, more unsettlingly, a whole world in what isn’t.
How to Love a Black Hole, by Rebecca Fishow. Portland, Oregon: Conium Press, March 2025. 88 pages. $20.00, hardcover.
Jacob Stovall is a writer currently working in Chicago. He is the Books Editor at Apocalypse Confidential.
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