There is a freshness to the stories in Whitney Collins’ debut collection Big Bad that buoys a reader through the challenges of protagonists trapped in worlds mainly conducted by unhappy adults. A disillusioned mother tells her daughter in “The Entertainer,” in which the girl is sent off to keep two wealthy girls company at the beach, “This is what it comes to, Rachel. Pudding people. For a while there, your father and I had a chance to make something of ourselves.” In other stories, a girl’s street-preaching father, Daddy-O, reflects her own fine line between optimism and thoughts of suicide; a girl inherits her mother’s obsession with a dermoid cyst that one doctor says is her vanished twin; and an adolescent boy navigates his own sexuality under the gaze of his stepfather and a counselor with a wandering hand. Sometimes the lost are the fathers themselves.
It is not hard not to think of various iconic Southern writers when reading these stories, starting with what feels like a nod to the iconic Frankie from Carson McCullers’ “The Member of the Wedding” when we meet a lone girl who shares her name in the collection’s opening story “The Nest.” This Frankie is deposited at the nursing home with her blind grandmother after her twin brother’s premature birth. We float in Frankie’s consciousness as she numbers her sins, and then into the story comes Uncle Eric, a disowned drag queen who throws a Thanksgiving dinner for which everything is made tiny and served on antique doll’s china, much to the delight of Frankie and the fury of her parents. Eric notices Frankie’s acute sense of observation and introduces her to a world of beauty, comfort, and honesty just as tragedy strikes her family. She is only six years old.
That this Frankie has a kind uncle reflects how these stories show compassion for the readers themselves. While these stories portray worlds that include dying children and dying marriages and heart-breaking scams, they are never maudlin, and they are full of well-earned one-liners, sometimes from the start, laying out life’s absurdities in premises both fantastical and realistic, with first lines of stories ranging from “Lenora’s first heart arrived in a box of Rice Krispies” to the opening impossible situation of “The Horse Lamp”: “Jarrod had been called to the girl’s house to fix her satellite dish, but when he got to the peeling blue rental and walked around its weedy perimeter, he saw that the girl didn’t have a satellite dish. She had cable.”
The fantastical premises of some of these stories have an ease to them, thanks to Collins’ humor, like the woman giving birth to different versions of herself throughout a lifetime in the title story, or a woman learning that what she had thought was love was something different than a ripping open part of each other’s chest sort of girlhood fantasy. The conceit, a stone fruit passed between the lovers, is balanced by the hilarity: the story opens at a couple’s retreat where the protagonist is charged with whipping her partner with a silk thread ribbon and scolding him: searching for a subject, she chooses the obvious:
“Bad, Dean bad,” Marta said, monotone. “Shame on you for …” Marta paused and searched for something benign to accuse him of, something other than drinking or the chapter of their relationship Dean referred to as “The Bad Idea,” and Marta referred to as “MacKenzie.” Marta gave the ribbon an apathetic flick. “Shame on you for leaving the toilet seat up.”
Dean feigned remorse and hung his head like a shamed dog. Ventura, their assigned Love Coach, raked his fingers through his short beard, dissatisfied.
“Try to be more emotionally specific, Marta,” Ventura said. “For example, when Dean leaves the toilet seat up, how does it make you feel inside?”
Marta twisted the ribbon as if stirring a pot.
Moments later, she gives up and drops the “whip.” Meanwhile, the workshop leader tells the couples to breathe.
Building symbols out of distinctive, and often absurd, images is some of what Collins does best. The pink silk ribbon used to whip the husband curls on the floor like a “pink worm”; a miniscule roasted quail stuck in a pocket to treasure; a father and daughter astride the spotted fawn warped in neon tubes above the Happy Thicket Motor Lodge. The images hold up conceits that flash with the truths permeating the absurdities. In “The Horse Lamp,” the small detail of the lamp on the floor by a mattress serves to carry forward one of the more surprising turns in the collection — when what we think is a young woman’s longing for a baby becomes that of the television repairman she cons into sleeping with her.
This is a collection that deals in the surety of the strange set in the everyday, in small worlds made close and particular, and in characters that can at times appear to be moved like pawns in slow motion. For the characters in Collins’ stories are caught in cycles of repetition: whether it is the woman giving birth to herself, a woman receiving and collecting heart after heart that she washes in the sink, the child taken to doctor after doctor for a harmless cyst her mother can’t seem to ignore, or a man imagining leaving his family again and again. These repetitions are the skipping record of reality and the numbing disappointment of life.
Yet these stories are far from bleak, not only due to Collins’ humor, but to her granting of characters’ unexpected, and at first glance unfathomable, attempts at agency in the shuffle of life. There lies the beauty of these stories, for how does one, realistically, escape the shadow of grief, the loss of a child, the dissolution of a family, the realization that those we love are not who we thought they were? By reaching past realism to a place of imaginative relief, whether invented by the characters or inhabited by them, Collins illuminates the capacities and limits of our natures.
In “the Pupil,” the only first-person story in the collection, the protagonist climbs up to the roof of their house for perspective:
Where the crappy back porch juts out from our cracker box, there’s a small shingled ridge I can straddle like a bronco, slide my sneakers into the gutters like stirrups, and pretend to gallop my sorry self out of this place. Up on the roof, I get a wide view of the world I don’t understand anymore – where the dust-colored plains rush toward a sky that backs away, hands up, the same way Mama does, surrendering against the kitchen wall, when Drake has too much to drink and even more to say.
Collins gives her characters the gift of imagination as a means and sometimes an end. The thirteen stories of Big Bad shape a notable and surprising 2021 collection. With stories winning a Pushcart Prize and the American Short(er) Fiction Prize, and new stories forthcoming in such venues as Agni and American Short Fiction, Collins, a Kentucky writer, is a storyteller we will be hearing much more from.
[Published by Sarabande Books on March 16, 2021, 224 pages, $16.95 paperback]