Her Body and Other Parties

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was an uneven collection of short stories. “The Husband Stitch” expands and riffs on the story of the woman with the black/green ribbon around her neck. It’s well done and the audience involvement is a genius touch, but it’s chilly tale is ultimately just a retelling. “Especially Heinious” is especially overlong, convoluted and unreadable. “Real Women Have Bodies” is the most original, with a tight storyline that comments on the sacrifices we willingly make as women to fit into society’s mold of fashion and conformity. It is probably the best of the bunch. Several more stories are simply forgettable. “The Resident” is haunting but confusing. And “Difficult at Parties” is simply unreadable. It’s always hard to find a solid collection of short stories but I would simply seek out “Real Women Have Bodies” in an anthology and call it good.

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Babies are heavier than you’d think.

 Her mouth is an endless cavern, into which light and thought and sound descend, never to return.

 Around me was not the absence of sound, but the sound of absence:

My body was so cold it felt like it was disappearing at the edges, like my shoreline wasevaporating. It was the opposite of pleasure, which had pumped blood through me and warmed my body like the mammal I was. But here, I was just skin, then just muscle, and then merely bone. I felt like my spine was pulling up into my skull, each vertebra click-click-clicking like a car slowly ascending a roller coaster’s first hill. And then I was just a hovering brain, and then a consciousness, floating and fragile as a bubble. And then I was nothing.

The receding bubbles leave strange white striations on my skin, like the tide-scarred sand at the beach’s edge.