A few years ago, I went to the Pinball Museum in Asheville, North Carolina. The price of admission got me unlimited play on over 100 machines with themes across the years of my youth. The 3D aspect of pinball, the flashing lights, the sound of the silver balls smacking the flippers, and the ability to rock the machines just up to the tilt line made for a sublime experience.
Reading Kristina Ten’s debut collection, Tell Me Yours I’ll Tell You Mine, produced a similar sensory tour de force. Ten has a prodigious imagination and brings it to bear in each story, lights and bells going off in the most unexpected of places. The first three stories are straight genius. We begin in “The Dizzy Room” a story about a Russian immigrant adolescent girl struggling to learn English and fit in with her peers. Salvation comes unexpectedly through the family’s Dell computer and the titular game. The game somehow gives her the skills to negotiate her new environment and soon she’s invited to parties and borrowing friends’ “one shoulder tops with ambiguous phrases like WANT IT and FREE scribbled across the chest.” Later, as adult, she reflects, “I never understood why I had been chosen; what it was about me the game had liked.” But the story continues, ending somewhere between hope, hint, and heartbreak.
The second story “The Curing” is one I suspect may be long anthologized, a pinball machine from yesteryear that still shows up in arcades today as it were. Pulling the lever brings us “We stole a bottle of Elmer’s Glue in the pass time between lunch and free period, the orange cap a beacon on the art room’s back shelves.” Now we reside in the collective we of the middle school environment, understanding its social dynamics and pains, while in the supernatural presence of “spirit people”, a result of Elmer’s glue. I’ll say no more about the journey save that Ten gives us an ending sentence for the ages.
“Approved Methods of Love Divination in the First Rate City of Dushagorod” is a fantastical tale of a young woman’s quest to find a suitable mate and hence be part of the postwar “Repop” movement. The humor here dazzles, bringing to mind the comic genius of Gary Shteyngart. As our protagonist, Sofia Kuzmin, fails successive methods of divination, she finally arrives at the last one. “The Ropes is a brutish act. Dozens of depraved participants stand in a circle in the divinators’ cramped, poorly lit quarters, their unwashed bodies pressed against one another, chanting in low inhuman tones.” No spoilers, I’ll leave it there.
These three stories show the full range of Ten’s talents but the rest of the collection is also stellar. As with the pinball museum, there are a few stories which played less well with me, generally the shorter ones. I find Ten at her best in the longer form when her imagination ricochets like a silver ball. I wouldn’t soon forget a woman named Zacha struggling to remember who she is or a dragon named, or, more to the point, misnamed, Dove.
Ten is a force and this collection just begs for an extra ball or free game. Grab it and wait for more from this extraordinary writer.
Order your own copy: https://www.stillhousepress.org/stillhouse-store/tell-me-yours-ill-tell-you-mine
François Bereaud is a husband, dad, full time math professor, mentor in the San Diego Congolese refugee community, and mediocre hockey player. He writes, edits, and sometimes publishes. San Diego Stories is his first collection (Cowboy Jamboree Press). Read him at francoisbereaud.com.