The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals by Rae Bryant (A Review by Thomas Michael Duncan)

Patasola Press

$14

Remember the last time you woke up after a one-night stand and chewed your own arm off so you could sneak out without waking the semi-stranger sleeping next to you? No? What do you mean, that’s never happened to you?

In the surreal world of the stories found in Rae Bryant’s The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals, such an act is not only regarded as plausible, but somewhat logical, as well:

“She tied off the left sleeve of her coat, moved out of the apartment and into the hallway, missing the forearm already but resolved to leaving it… A single forearm was well-worth the escape.”

This story, “Intolerable Impositions,” is one of the best in the collection and really highlights Bryant’s powerful and often poetic prose. It’s a concise tale of a woman who is afraid that her life could become consumed by caring for a cyst on the neck of the man she slept with the night before—so afraid that she gnaws off her own arm. She’s determined and headstrong, like most of the women in Bryant’s stories, and her decision making process—which includes ideas such as leaving a fake phone number and spending the rest of her life with the man—is both comical and gloomy.

And I find that these combined feelings meet me in several of the collection’s stories. The bizarre story “Collecting Calliope,” for example, describes a sort of brothel in which men come to fornicate with life-like dolls. One of the dolls, Calliope, can be taken apart like a jigsaw puzzle for the customer’s pleasure. I laughed at these lines about a bachelor party enjoying the doll before I realized how disturbing they really are:

“Just last week, we had a bachelor party who delighted in her disjointed features. It took us three days to put poor Calliope back together, but the men paid a divine rate for their pleasures.”

The collection is divided into three parts. Nestled between parts one and three—aptly named “Stories” and “More Stories”—is the section titled “Klimt Redux: A Study in Desecration.” Here Bryant uses eleven sketches from the Austrian artist Gustav Klimt as a canvas for her words. I am not going to try to seriously critique the visual art—I would be out of my element—but I will say that I enjoyed “Klimt Redux” and found it refreshing; it made me wonder why more writers don’t include some sort of visual element in their work.  

There are strong post-feminist themes among the “Desecrations” (as there are throughout the rest of Bryant’s work). In some of the pieces, Bryant even appears to be mocking Klimt’s sketches, which generally depict nude women, sometimes in erotic positions.

One of the standout stories is “Cow Tipping.” It’s about a group of guys playing their weekly poker game in one of the friends’ “Man Cave.” It’s there that the men rebel against their apparently oppressive wives—with playing cards with naked women on them, Jack Daniel’s, and by sharing the details of an affair. The conflict of the story appears when one of the men suggests inviting a new guy to their next poker game. The potential newcomer is black, and that puts at least one of the men on edge. The tension of the story is palpable. Secrecy fills the space between the characters, and it is clear that their time in the “Man Cave” is a closely guarded ritual:

“The men sit in silence knowing that no one truly intends to invite Jarod. Not Fred or Sam or Jim or Alan. It’s an exercise, a social narrative they’ve fallen into since the three of them got their asses kicked by the all black city defensive line for one’s lust for a black cheerleader. And besides, asking a stranger into their game was like asking a girl into their secret club house.”

The results of their “social narrative” reveal just how fragile these men are, as well as fragility of their lifestyle. Parts of this story made me feel uncomfortable, as if I were stuck in the middle of an awkward argument.

I certainly can’t say that each story is exciting or riveting, but each one will have a strong impact on readers. This is the kind of book in which each word carries weight and each one seems to have been chosen carefully. You could read the whole book in a single sitting, but I wouldn’t suggest it. These stories surely benefit from a little bit of time to simmer in the reader’s mind.

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~Thomas Michael Duncan lives, writes, and works in central New York. Visit him at tmdwrites.tumblr.com.~