Final Thought:
Buy this Book.
The Lines That Would Not Be Considered “Killer” But Are “Killer” Because They Are Not Necessarily “Killer”:
- “The man stretches his legs out. He mutes the television and chuckles. She thinks he muted the television to make sure she would hear him chuckle” (from “Foreign Film”)
- “He lived with a woman who sold balloons at the zoo” (from “Swell”)
Some Killer Lines:
- “My aunt said she’d take me with her to Australia if I agreed to dress like a man” (from “Enigma”)
- “Our parachutes will bloom like jellyfish and we will hush and slow, falling softly to Earth” (from “There Is No Albuquerque”)
Favorite Stories (in no particular order and almost impossible to choose and completely subjective):
- “Wren”
- “There Is No Albuquerque”
- “Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild”
- “Foreign Film”
Some of the venues these stories originally appeared in:
- FRiGG
- Yemassee Journal
- Hobart
- Spork
General Observations:
- Stories by Kathy Fish contract and expand and then rarely leave you.
- Fifteen years of writing some of the best flash fiction on this earth. Yes! Yes! Yes!
- It was hard to put this book down. But when I put it down, it was easy to pick it up again.
- There is an Albuquerque.
Full Disclosure:
I once took a workshop with Fish in the middle of a desert (actually above a desert on a mountain) and she is as good and human as her prose (but you don’t need to know this; you just need to read her words).
Purchase this book from: https://matterpress.com/wild/
Jonathan Cardew’s stories, interviews, and articles appear or are forthcoming in Atticus Review, Flash, JMWW, People Holding, Smokelong Quarterly, and Segue, among others. He teaches at MATC in Milwaukee. He was a finalist in this year’s Queen’s Ferry Press Best Small Fictions. More at his website: https://jonathancardew.wordpress.com/.