Some of these had no effect, but the rest of them just straight-up broke me

I slapped at his arms, his chest. He jumped away from me. We stared at each other, stunned, breathless. I felt I had holes in my head and face from the crush of his fingers. He dropped to his knees and cradled me tightly in his lap, hid his face in my shoulder. Inside the glass, my mother flailed, a tree in a storm, trying to get to us.


***


Like a knife turned on its side, shaving away tissue-thin portions of skin one after another until seeing red, the thirty tales in Ethel Rohan’s debut short story collection Cut Through the Bone are self-contained, sometimes lyrical, often brutal slices of flash fiction, each ending with such a sharp intake of air one might feel lightheaded after reading too many at once.

In the past, flash fiction, as a form unto itself, is not something that I had given a great deal of thought to. The limits—500-1,000 words in most cases—seemed, to me, almost too restrictive. I’ve been writing a lot of short stories over the past two years, and when I first got wind of flash fiction I admit the idea of deliberately confining a narrative into such a tightly formed burst of words seemed, at the time, ludicrous. I was having a difficult enough time keeping myself within the parameters of a few thousand words; competent flash fiction seemed, thanks to a mental block I’d given myself, impossible. My thoughts on the subject, however, were clearly misguided, and like all things, strong work from the right hand will always light the way.

Flash fiction isn’t about restrictions. It’s about paring down, carving away adjectives and nouns, trimming modifiers and superfluous language until what’s left is only the barest of essentials—a breathless hit from a pipe that will spin your world. That’s what Ethel Rohan’s collection, Cut Through the Bone, delivers.

In thirty stories spread over a sparse but fulfilling 112 pages, Rohan gives us minimalist narratives of mostly nameless avatars: families falling apart; sons and mothers unable to communicate with one another; daughters and fathers adjusting to abandonment by the third peg in their once-was trio; a woman who, to the distress of her husband, latches on to an army of lifelike dolls to give her love to when there is no flesh and blood child to reciprocate; acceptance and rejection of the body as a thing to be cherished for what remains, or something to be scarred forever in an attempt to remake one’s life and, at the same time, inspire the jealousy of others. From “Under the Scalpel”:



Carrie’s hand rushed to her mouth. John gaped. The others paled. I shot out of my chair. Mom stood in the doorway in her long white nightdress, ghostly and unsteady. Her wig was lopsided and her make-up had melted. A doll burning in a fire. She looked from the others’ repulsed expressions to me, her lips two wiggling worms. She made small, wounded noises.

I hurried to her, my arms out. “Mommy. It’s okay, Mommy.”

I led her back to the stairs. My lies echoed in the hall, came back at us. She felt so tiny inside my arm, fragile and childlike, ,and yet the burden of her slithered up my spine, tightened around my throat.



Rohan understands the sparseness of language required in each of her stories, and she doesn’t abuse that. While some are admittedly stronger than others—the entries “Lifelike”, “Gone”, and “Next to the Gutter” are the fiercest pieces in the collection—the thirty stories in Cut Through the Bone offer a wealth of emotion and control, guiding readers through a minefield of disturbingly fragmented lifelines.

As a short aside, this is the first product I’ve had the pleasure of reading from Seattle-based Dark Sky Books. The chapbook-style is perfect for flash fiction, and the book maintains a very clean sense of style and organization, not to mention some beautiful cover art by a Seattle artist named Siolo Thompson. I’m very curious to see more work from Dark Sky if this is the quality of their early offerings.

This book is phenomenal! Written as short stories, I kept feeling like I was sitting in a high-rise brick building, looking out my window, recognizing the people from my building and catching a little description about each of them. The characters feel real and we're only given a brief look into their life. Every story ended with me wanting an entire novel dedicated to each one. I can't wait to read the other pieces by this author!

I was pretty excited to come across this collection of thirty five short fiction pieces, because sometimes I think that's what my book would look like, and I was curious to see how Rohan met the challenge of not repeating herself. I think, in the end, I was expecting too much, because while it's true there's not a lot of repetition here in terms of characters or situations, all the stories cover roughly the same narrative terrain-- mostly realistic, traditional and domestic scenes here, often centered on female protagonists. There's nothing wrong with any of that, I just thought that more of the stories could've gone someplace else. It's true, I think, that short pieces often take liberties-- either with language or with narrative impossibilities, to become more like poems on the one hand, and more like fables or allegories on the other. I don't think that Rohan, based on the stories here at least, has a great interest in doing either, since with few exceptions, the writing is competent but never reaches beyond a solid middle style of workman-like prose, and the stories don't really break from the realist mode, don't reflect much on their status as stories, or do much beyond initiating, and ultimately, containing the narratives they present.

It's not a bad book, and I don't mean to suggest otherwise. But as a collection, it suffers from being a little samey, and especially given the range of work other writers are doing in the genre, this reads like a missed opportunity.

I can see the appeal of this book for some people but it wasn’t my cup of tea.

It was so unmemorable that I forgot I had read it three years ago. I reread it and didn’t really enjoy it.

First things first, a couple of these stories were published in the webjournal I edit, so I read Cut Through The Bone already a fan; weigh that relationship as you will.

These tend to be short, sharp shocks of story, and even those occurring over several days are compact and quick. Their characters are often trying to regain control against forces outside their influence, whether that's illness or economics or aging or the kind of ennui that sets like frostbite. My favorites are those in which characters reach for that control in unexpected, even counterintuitive ways. Like "Reduced," in which a married couple attend an art opening and the wife, stung by reminders of the more imaginative life she might have led, makes the knowingly mistaken decision to drink—more than that, the decision not to stop drinking—into a powerfully defiant, declarative act:

He rubbed his eyes with his fingers, weary, sad. "You promised."

I swallowed and looked into my wine glass, pictured my parents inside. They sat facing each other with their knees pulled to their chests and heads tipped back, their mouths open, filling. I drained my glass and waved to the waiter.

Or "Scraps," in which a woman meets with her ex-husband in order to finalize their separation, and drowns out unwanted feelings with a voice that's not hers:

"How's that teen intern you're banging?" she asks. The word is foreign in her mouth, but satisfying.

"She's twenty," he says.

"Tell her I said, 'Happy Birthday.'"

But my favorite is "The Trip," one of the collection's longer stories, about a woman taking her aged father on a cliché Irish-American "homecoming" journey. The daughter aims, by taking charge of the details, to maintain control of the trip and of her father and of his no longer deniable decline. And the father, straining against his own weights, foils her efforts at every turn until his beautiful, tragic gesture at the end of the story (and you'll have to read it for yourself to find out what that is). It's a moment that makes so clear what underlies this whole set of stories: the moments we don't expect to matter can be the ones in which we most vigorously and vitally battle to become and remain ourselves.

Those unexpected moments are made so powerful, in fact, that the more "obvious" ones often pale in comparison. There are experiences we know define us—the loss of a parent or child, or facing our own terminal illness—which renders the stories hinging on them less surprising even though they're written every bit as well. It's just that they show us the world we already know we're living in, whereas the others—those surprising moments—show us a world we didn't yet realize we'd always been inhabitants of. And a world that, once Rohan leads us into it, we can't help but marvel at for as long as she lets us stay.