May We Shed These Human Bodies, by Amber Sparks (A Review by Dawn West)

150 pgs/ $12.00

Welcome to the cabaret. Amber Sparks’ May We Shed These Human Bodies is a menagerie of twisted fairy tales, ghost stories, and wild fables. Her stories are often fantastical but her prose is almost scientifically precise. No muss, no fuss. Sparks is our fairy tale cartographer, mapping a world of modern magic and human error.

We begin with Death and the People, a darkly comic fable. Death comes for one of them, and the people stand up to him and say no. “If he goes, they said, then we all go.” Death, who is one suave son of a bitch, looking “tall and elegant and kind of preppy in a crisp white button-down and chinos,” gives in.”You all have to come with me, then.” This story is both humorous and poignant. The people are irrational, insatiable; a chorus of gaping maws, like we really are.

I love how Sparks takes the most surreal characters and renders them tangible- making us empathize with Death, for example. The feral children, the cannibalistic seniors, the trees who become people, the wives who become animals, a big City hungering for mobility, a legion of ghosts- they are all hoarding desires, even the dictator drinking alone,”watching Shane and weeping into a glass of whiskey.”

Sparks blends horror and levity in many of her fables, like a carousel song in a film about ghosts. Cocoon provides a crowd of old people who become cannibals, devouring a children’s choir.

The children are savory and tender, better even than the Grand Slam breakfast at Denny’s. The old people pick bits of children from between their remaining teeth and smile big, camera-ready smiles. They are as full and friendly as babies.

In Vesuvius, “the senator’s wife set fire to the furniture.” This story is barely a page long and I love it; I love the senator’s wife and her rage. I love that she doesn’t have a name, and that the “flames were shouting obscenities,” and that they buried the senator’s “weak, slick words.” This is one of my absolute favorite revenge stories.

Sparks clearly has no problem wading in dark territories. In As They Always Are, the mother dies and the stepmother comes, bringing “a heart grown narrow and choked with hate.”This story was another favorite; stuffed with terror and beautiful prose, with an ending that made me have to close the book and take a breath.

The characters in May We Shed These Human Bodies are often ravenous, illuminated by their wants and needs, yearning and grieving and taking and transforming. In The Woman Across the Water Wore the Shape of Love, which is a stellar title, a man falls in love with a woman who may or may not be a ghost.

Every morning she emerged from her cottage and walked the length of the pier. Or rather she glided, her bare feet just touching the wooden slats, her dressing gown fluttering behind her like grey wings, her slim limbs light and full of all the natural grace of morning.

In the titular story, trees de-bark themselves and become humans, only to end up pining for their lives as trees again, wishing to shed their human bodies “for the punitive grace of greening branches and deep, steady roots once more.”

You Will Be the Living Equation is my favorite story in the collection; a stunning example of the second person narrative and a unique coming of age story mediating on grief, love, jealousy, identity. Every scene moved me. Every moment was necessary.

This is your first death, and it will slightly separate you from your mind. It will turn you both into cordial neighbors. At first your mind will try to give counsel, will say things like, Come on old girl, stiff upper lip and all that, and Now then, mustn’t carry on so. Your mind has always been embarrassed of excess.

Your body will ignore your mind. It will learn new tricks all on its own, tricks like ‘curling up into a ball at the foot of the bed’ and ‘betraying you utterly in front of absolute strangers.’ It will become desperate to telegraph your grief. When you think people may have forgotten about Danny, it will force you to remind them by bursting into tears during AP Psych and also sometimes fainting in the middle of Homeroom- though the true cause may be your new habit of skipping breakfast. This is not to say that your sadness will only be acted. Truly you will feel small and lost and separated, just a bit, as if someone has strung a bed sheet between you and other people.

There is an ongoing tension between our narrator’s body and mind, much like Sparks’ style, whimsical yet rooted in the tactile. I’m in love with the above passage in particular because of our narrator’s mind being embarrassed by its ‘excess’ yet continuing to develop ‘new tricks,’ luxuriating in its own trouble, yet the trouble is real; “you will feel small and lost and separated.” Feeling embarrassed by your own sadness further exacerbates the sadness, swelling the chasm between body and mind, producing more lavish self-destructive display- at least in my and ‘your’ experiences. I fiercely related to this.

You Will Be the Living Equation made me feel as if I was underwater; soaked to the bone. The ending was everything I wanted it to be- an indelible moment, a wave breaking. I’ve read this story five times now, and I will again.

I traveled slowly through this debut. It is wonderfully rich and each story seemed to haunt me; I took several pauses, rereading many of them before moving on to the next one. Here is humanity in all its splendor, terrible and beautiful, weak and anthracite-hardy. May We Shed These Human Bodies is the answer ringing from the mirror on the wall, and we are the evil stepmother, asking.

Dawn West reads, writes, and eats falafel in Ohio.