“We were the first generation to leave our island country,” Brenda Peynado writes in her debut story collection, The Rock Eaters. “We were the ones who developed a distinct float to our walk the day we came of age.” Peynado doesn’t mean they had a light step. She means they rose up off the ground and flew away. The two opening lines of the collection’s title story capture the two beating hearts of the book. One is a deeply literary look at issues of class, migration, culture, and history. The other is a high-concept journey through science fiction, magical realism, fabulism, and urban fantasy. The stories range from a realist accounting of a school tennis rivalry to a tale of kite-flying alien refugees, with many bracing detours along the way.
In “Yaiza,” the tennis rivalry between the narrator and the team’s newcomer is only one of the rifts between the two. Yaiza is also the granddaughter of the narrator’s housekeeper, and poorer than the rest of the school. Nonetheless, she has a confidence no one can touch and a tennis swing no one can field. The narrator, dethroned as the team’s all-star, is caught between the rivalry, the class separation, and solidarity when Yaiza helps her out of a tough situation. Peynado manages the tensions beautifully, homing in on the complications rather than forcing their resolution: “Later, her kindness would be my consolation prize, and my gratitude burned. I would never thank her. I felt a hot fire in me to win, to beat her for her kindness. Who can explain why we feel it necessary to be cruel when we do?”
The themes are no less complicated, though, when she veers into other genres. “The Kite-Maker” takes place years after the dragonflies, alien refugees, arrived on Earth, but not long enough for the narrator to forget the way panicked humans beat and massacred them as they landed. By the time of the story, they’ve integrated into society, but with the same plights many refugees face: substandard housing, limited work options, and the constant harassment of bigots. Living under the weight of her own participation in first attacks, the narrator navigates running a business and raising children in a troubled society, and doesn’t always know what the right choices are, as when she sees her sons playing with a young dragonfly and reenacting the massacres: “I was not against the kids mixing, unlike the other parents who were prying their blinds open to watch from across the block. It’s just that I didn’t think the kids were ready. Not after I’d seen what we’d done as adults … When they crawled out of their broken ships and picked themselves up out of the crashes, we were sure they were invading, they wanted our children, they wanted more than we could give.”
The “we” is important to Peynado. Several stories are told in the collective voice, and even those that don’t exclusively use it often have a chorus or community or group at their center. Like the humans in “The Kite-Maker,” the parents in “Thoughts and Prayers” react to perceived threats — in this case a school shooting — with violence and aggression, amassing guns and patrolling the neighborhood.
Both of those stories highlight the dangers of group psychology, the way groups can attack. But Peynado is also concerned with how groups defend each other and the pitfalls that go along with that defense. An example is “The Whitest Girl,” a complex story that recall’s ZZ Packer’s “Brownies.” In it, the Latina girls at a Catholic school view the new girl Terry Pruitt, a girl whose “skin was so pale we could see the web of veins underneath, including one throbbing blue like that split her forehead in half,” with semi-hostile fascination. As more of Terry’s story emerges, however, they have to decide whether to extend their protective solidarity to her.
Communities can even be an entrancing trap, as in “The Stones of Sorrow Lake,” a fabulist story in which the residents of town grow stones like tumors after their first great grief. “You knew which rock was yours,” Peynado writes. “It called to you if you went too far away. You could see as you walked on the shore where people had carved their names on their rocks in acknowledgment, as if to say, here is the one that came out of me, that won’t let me go. The townspeople tied to that lake — so few of them were ever able to leave town for any long period of time.” Other enchanting fabulist stories follow a group of students at Catholic school where sleep is considered a sin, and a group of teenagers coming of age in a town plagued by frequent drownings.
The breadth of Peynado’s imagination is miraculous, and her ability to execute her premises perfectly in so many different genres is astounding. The past, the future, the real, and the mystical are all within her control. It’s become more common for story collections to interrogate questions of genre, but The Rock Eaters doesn’t interrogate that question — it discards it as irrelevant and shows us the power of a versatile author making meaning every way she can.
What’s even more impressive than her range, in the end, is her ability to craft heartwrenching tales. That’s true in one of her most futuristic and also timely stories, “The Touches,” which takes place in a world ravaged by pandemics so deadly everyone now lives in isolated, sterile cubes in the “Dirty” physical world interacting with others only in the digital simulation called Clean. “I’ve been touched exactly four times in real life,” the story begins. The narrator quickly describes the first and second times, being held momentarily by her mother and father on the day of her birth, but the reader, like the narrator, will have to experience an excruciatingly long, lonely time for the third and fourth touches.
It’s also true in what might be the collection’s most straightforward and realistic story, “We Work in Miraculous Cages,” the narrative of a young woman buried under credit card debt and student loans, working two low-wage jobs to stay afloat but slowly drowning anyway. While trying to land a job with her engineering degree, she rushes from her soul-killing day job at a hair salon to her stressful night-and-weekend job manning the desk at a veterinary emergency hospital. Peynado vibrantly encapsulates the rage of a starved generation:
“These people I shampooed, they were fake breasts and balloon lips, the stretched faces of age artificially preserved, all those people who could afford to spend money just to have their hair washed or get their eyebrows arched in the perfect way. I did not want to hear about their lives. When the person was young, I didn’t mind. They thought they had their whole life ahead of them, and while I massaged their hands, I wished this for them. With the older women, it was different. I thought about how they had spent not just their lives, but our lives, too, gobbled up or snorted up or injected into their faces all that good fortune of the eighties and the dot-com boom, them laying their heads back into the shampoo bowl and me wasting all my understanding about the world — fluid dynamics, the great monologues of literature, the construction of engines, the physics of flight — on rubbing their skin over their bones.”
There are 16 stories in The Rock Eaters, and readers will quickly learn that there’s no predicting what’s coming when they turn to the next one. They may find science fiction or fantasy. The may find realism or fabulism. They might find sorrow, rage, loneliness, solidarity, or community. They might find a tennis prodigy or radioactive superheroes. But they’ll learn just as quickly that whatever comes next will be something to savor.
[Published by Penguin Books on May 11, 2021, 288 pages, $16.00 paperback]