Stories of the Unkindness of Strangers
By ROBIN ROMM
Caitlin Horrocks
THIS IS NOT YOUR CITY
Stories
By
Caitlin Horrocks
Illustrated. 169 pp. Sarabande Books. Paper, $15.95.
In
“At the Zoo,” one of the stories in Caitlin Horrocks’s impressively sharp first
book, a little boy recalls his grandfather’s interpretation of mouse thoughts:
“I’m small! I’m frightened! Oh no! An owl!” The boy thinks, “I’m sorry you’re
small and frightened; we are the same.” But quickly, his mind shifts. “Not the
same. I am much bigger than you. I could hurt you.” Still in day care, he’s
already exhibiting this most Horrocksian trait, “excitement at the capacity for
harm.”
Though
diverse in style and point of view — one story takes place on a ship hijacked
by Somali pirates, another features a woman on her 127th incarnation —
Horrocks’s stories share one consuming fixation. We live in a world studded
with cruelty. Humans inflict it; the world inflicts it. How do we live with
this bewildering truth?
Horrocks
is more interested in perpetrators than she is in victims. In one story, girls
just out of fifth grade form an unbreakable summer bond, entrenched in a world
of their own invention. But when illness strikes one, the other cannot “afford
to know” her anymore and so joins her classmates as they toss the girl’s wig
around. Long after the friend dies, the scene lives on in the other girl’s
mind, a devastating and terrifying first lesson in injustice.
In
“Zero Conditional,” a third-grade portable classroom serves as the sinister new
workplace for an adrift, off-kilter woman named Eril. The previous teacher,
“quite the biologist,” has left several projects in the room, including bowls
of gray “owl vomit filled with the fur and bones of whatever the owl had
eaten.” Shrew skeletons, pieced back together, now lie “caked in Elmer’s glue,
slivers of rib bones shellacked onto skulls.” A live rat, too, sits among the
ruins. The class pet, he bears an ever-growing tumor.
Unqualified
to teach, Eril begins with the only thing she can think of, a lesson on the
zero conditional. “If students misbehave, they are punished,” she writes on the
board. The sentence foreshadows her darkening impulses. In a deliciously
harrowing scene, Eril forces the most literal and observant student — who
bothers her precisely because of those qualities — to run his finger over the
rat’s tumor even as he quivers with resistance.
Illness,
cruelty, rats: I fear I’m making Horrocks sound grim. But she deploys love and
humor as convincingly as dread. In “World Champion Cow of the Insane,” a recent
college graduate is hired part time to teach basic Internet use at a Michigan
community center. There she watches as a spunky elderly student pecks out an
obscenity-laced note to his son: “Y-o-u a-r-e a . . . i-g-n-o-r-a-m-u-s.”
“Just
so you know,” she tells him, “I don’t think a subject line that long will show
up in his in-box.” Gamely, the student changes it to “Ignoramus = YOU.”
Horrocks’s
motley crew of characters have this in common: They don’t find easy anodynes.
Lyssa, the wife of a slaughterhouse worker and part-time dognapper in “Steal
Small,” one of the collection’s highlights, tries not to dwell on hardship. But
when her husband gets his hands on a beautiful Dalmatian, Lyssa finds herself
at a crossroad. Though she doesn’t ordinarily protest his questionable ways (he
plans to sell the dogs to pharmaceutical research labs), the Dalmatian plagues
her. Her relationship with the idea of rescue is thorny, though, and she fails
to free the dog. Instead, like many of the characters in Horrocks’s appealingly
rugged-hearted collection, she forges a messier path to solace. h
Robin Romm is the author of a story collection,
“The Mother Garden,” and a memoir, “The Mercy Papers.”
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