Anecdotes by Kathryn Mockler
Anecdotes
By Kathryn Mockler
Book*hug Press, 2023; 280 pages; $23.00
Reviewed by Heidi Greco
Part of Book*hug’s Autumn 2023 publications was this one-of-a-kind assemblage of short fictions, a book with one of the most original covers I’ve ever seen. The image is of a maxi-pad taped onto a wall. This piece of found art is just one of the signs that lead the narrator in one of the anecdotes to observe: “She was normal and I was not.”
The story explaining the pad art is in a section called “We’re Not Here to Talk about Aliens” — a title that might lead you to conclude that this book is no ordinary collection, a conclusion that’s absolutely true. Much of the book reminds me of when Dorothy confides in Toto that she doesn’t think they’re in Kansas anymore. Instead, we’re here on a planet that most days feels doomed.
Each of the four sections functions as a stand-alone, a kind of chapbook within the book. This is most obvious in the part called “This Isn’t a Conversation” (even though it’s written as one, with back-and-forth comments, stark in white letters against a black background). And yes, the comments, with their focus on the climate disaster are fittingly dark, grim in a sickly black humour sort of way: “Did we do everything we could? Nope.”
Our shifting climate isn’t the only matter Mockler addresses. In the first section, “The boy is Dead” the young boy in question is molested by a series of babysitters, but he keeps these occasions to himself. “He felt ashamed. He felt it was his fault. The molesters knew that such a shy and with- drawn and disfigured kid would tell no one. He was the perfect target. And they were right.” The piece ends with an admission that sounds convincing: “I wrote this story about a boy in the hope that you would find it more interesting than if it had been written about a girl.”
Other issues in this section include anxiety (“on a scale of one to ten, this was one hundred.”) and its siblings, underconfidence and obsessive compulsiveness, a family constellation that ups the challenge of applying for employment into a complete hell: “I was too terrified of people to waitress and too terrified of cash registers to work as a cashier.”
Yet, as the old infomercials used to promise: “Wait, there’s more!” and truly, there is. My favourite section is the aforementioned “Aliens” which chronicles the narrator’s years growing up, starting when she’s five, about to enter kindergarten, while her parents are in the throes of breaking up. Innocence is the operative word, as she anticipates being able to share her Charlie’s Angels trading cards at show-and-tell. but then, when the questions from her fellow students lead her into not-enough-show and too-much-tell, we can only feel empathy. Who of us have not found ourselves red-faced in front of our peers?
As you might expect from a book with a menstrual pad on the cover, there is plenty of bleeding, often in combination with public mortification, as when on the last day of Grade 8 “. . . a tall loner girl. . . had a splotch of blood on her white track pants.” The narrator calls this “. . . about my worst nightmare, and likely the worst nightmare of every bleeder in that class.” In Grade 8 that would’ve been mine too.
The closing section, the most surreal in the book, sees The past and The Future as its main characters. Yet even in the midst of this Land of Abstraction, there are bizarre truisms from Reality, as when the two are waiting for a bus. “It will come soon, said The past, and lit a cigarette. If you light a cigarette the bus will come before you have the chance to smoke it.”
No need for a cigarette: open this book, and let the bus come.