“The Friends of Mike Santini”
“The Quiet House”
“With Arms Outstretched”
“Breaking Rules”
“The Gravedigger”
“Alone”
“The Idiot Whistled Dead”
“The Miraculous Life of Jackie Mendoza”
“Across the Hills”
“All For Nothing”
“Double Zero for Emptiness”
“Strobe”
“Balafer de Vie”
“The Mansions of the Moon (A Cautionary Tale)”
“Gamlingay Churchyard”
Subtitled: a journal of parthenogenetic fiction and late labelling, Nemonymous is the first in a series of short anthologies of anonymous fiction edited by D. F. Lewis. The idea is for the reader to judge the stories on their own naked merits, not the authors’ reputation [or lack thereof]. In fact, this reviewer hardly noticed the absence of author bylines. She found the most striking thing about Nemonymous to be the tone of the fiction, for editor Lewis has assembled quite a collection of the weird, the surreal, the darkly strange. The sixteen stories here are for the most part quite short, though not quite of the length nowadays referred to as flash, and some make a strong attempt at defying description. Several of the pieces incorporate the notion of anonymity, though this does not really become a theme of this anthology, as the individualism of the stories predominates.
“A Smile in the Sky”
When he [the character is nameless] was a little boy, his father lifted him on his shoulders to look up at the night sky, to see the stars. But what he saw was a smile: “two curved lines, one a deeper arc than the other, stretching through ten degrees of the sky. The two curves* joined at the ends and were further connected by straight vertical lines.” At first, this appears to be a charming image—what could be more warm and friendly than a smile? But the smile has teeth. The Smile, acquiring capitalization, never changes, but his perception of it becomes more sinister as he ages and approaches death.
This is a surprisingly chilling simple concept, but it would have been more effective if the author had not abandoned the subtle, understated tone of the earlier sections.
*correcting the tyoped text
“The Friends of Mike Santini”
Remember the Rat Pack in Vegas, back around 1959? Except here it’s the Wolf Pack, and the wolves are not just a metaphor. The narrator learns the hard way that you don’t mess with the alpha male of the pack. This story also may remind the reader of the character of Johnny Fontane in The Godfather, a story of similar ruthlessness.
“The Quiet House”
It’s a standard in the fairy tales: two sisters, one dark and one fair, a red rose and a white one. Here, with Mother gone, an aura of decay hangs over the house, the flowers are overgrowing the interior: "The buds in the bannisters are opening. Soon the flora will reclaim its timber cousin and the house may yet resemble the magical wood of imagined childhood." The narrator suspects she may be insane, and the reader may well agree. This is a strange, disjointed story, full of references to other tales which this reader has not quite been able to decipher. Perhaps the reader is dense. Or perhaps the story is obscure.
“With Arms Outstretched”
Mort Fleischer’s wife Maple has become no more than a convenience, a piece of furniture for him to hang his coat on. Still, she is a convenience, and he doesn’t really want to leave her, as long as he can have a comfortable home and indulge in sex with much thinner women. And Maple, despite his infidelities, doesn’t want him to leave. Eventually, the couple works out a modus vivendi that satisfies both. This story serves as a metaphor for a dysfunctional marriage, however the characters are unconvincing, and the oddly stiff, narrative voice tends to distance the reader—not that anyone would care to get too close to either of them. But this is not meant to be realistic fiction, and as metaphors, their absurdity is effective.
“Breaking Rules”
A desperate woman will do anything to keep her husband, so Laura agrees to the contest. Whoever breaks the most plates in ten minutes is the winner, and Jim is the prize. Whether he is worth it—that becomes the question. The conclusion is fitting—one of the few in this collection that does not end on a downbeat.
“The Gravedigger”
Someone has to dig the graves. Someone has to bury the dead. No one has to mourn them, though, and this is a town where no one mourns, no one cares.
This is a disturbing piece, a glimpse at a species of humanity without a soul. The nameless narrator’s voice is deliberately flat as she speaks of the situation she has found herself in, the job she does. Yet she evocatively describes a dead foal:
It had been lying on its side for several hours, its legs fixed by rigor mortis into a frozen gallop. But it had not even walked: the long cowls of rubbery white jelly that grow from the hooves of a new-born foal were unbroken. The eye that turned to the sky was whitened, the tongue protruded between the teeth, vividly suffused with crystallising blood.
“Alone”
Garret Munroe has always wanted to be alone, and he has almost achieved his aim on the planet Paradise, where only eight humans have settled. Then he discovers the other seven have been killed. Unfortunately, “Someone had slit their throats and laid them out in a neat line. Someone else was here.”
This piece is more of a joke than a story, though it is a rather grim sort of joke. It is hard either to feel sorry for Garret, or to believe he has deserved his fate.
“The Idiot Whistled Dead”
The idiot inhabits a kind of hell in the institution where they have put him, so he goes to the graveyard to whistle for the dead, for the dead to save him. Why he thinks they might do this is not explained, yet they do, only not in the way he had expected.
Into the Goblin Castle surged the dead, the liberating dead. Feet like marshmallows all wet and loose skinned, with toenails like shavings of brown-toasted almond. They bobbed their way through the halls and rooms, coffin shells bobbing like billy-oh.
“The Miraculous Life of Jackie Mendoza”
In a white cruel house surrounded by green lawns lives an alien, trapped in a body, in a world where he does not belong. Or perhaps he is a child trapped in inexplicable madness. Or perhaps the victim of abuse disguised as care. It is impossible to be sure. The tutor who comes to him for a while would like to help, but does not know how. He only hopes Jacky will sometimes be happy in his prison.
This is a frustrating work, for it does not seem to make an effort to be explicable, least of all in realistic terms. In realistic terms, the narrator would report Mrs. Mendoza to the Child Protection Services, and the ending would be different, if not happier. The reader can not expect this to happen here, the reader must let go of hope for an explanation. The story is in the encounter. But if Jackie/y’s* life is a miracle, it is a cruel one.
* The copyeditor does not seem to notice the difference.
“Across the Hills”
An apocalypse:
After the rains, he made his way to the ruined forest.
Clambering to the top of a solid mound of chopped branches, bushes and mangled tree trunks, he had a good view of the distant hills; the forest there now almost flattened, as if a bomb had blasted overhead. The hum of heavy machinery reaching his ears, his gaze caught a glimmer of clawed metal – a huge steel cutter slicing through the darkening air, before sinking once more into a sea of timber.
Amid the devastation, who could stop to care for the most fragile, vulnerable survivors: the naked, helpless baby birds? “There are so many . . .”
This is a powerful but fragmented image, as if it were clipped from a larger story of which we see only this brief glimpse.
“All For Nothing”
After Márcia’s husband dwindles and disappears, she replaces him with a small dog. Then the dog goes missing, and she offers a reward for its recovery. A pair of unemployed postmen attempt to collect the reward, though they have not found the dog. But they reason:
The concept of nothingness is greater and more difficult than the concepts of a dog and being lost. And this unfathomable thing is nothing important, for otherwise it would have been picked up before now. This will befuddle Senhora Márcia more than anything else we might take her, and she may never know that she has been swindled out of the reward. But we shall be long gone.
“Double Zero for Emptiness”
Writers writing about writers, about writing. This nameless protagonist is a writer who fears finding nothing more to write about, nothing in his past, that he has been mining for material, emptying it. This piece could have been shortened to its advantage, as the writer’s ruminations seem to go on at too much repetitive length.
“Strobe”
After discovering that he has photosensitive epilepsy, Lang becomes addicted to the attacks, to the strobe that brings them on, the visions they give him, until he never wants to come back. This study of the power of addiction and its consequences is not too original – this reader found it quite reminiscent of Trainspotting, particularly in the description of Lang’s disgusting room.
“Balafer de Vie”
A familiar story of obsession, told in a voice from long ago, another anonymous narrator seeking one final glimpse of what he had once loved, though only from afar. And finding that it may be best not to look too closely at the illusion of beauty to see what lies beneath.
“The Mansions of the Moon (A Cautionary Tale)”
Another fable of distant lands, another story of obsession. One night, Murak Ubu looks up at the hills, and there,
I saw the mansions of the afterlife—ghostly gilded palaces and filigreed balconies, and pale tall towers and winding staircases, all of such intense beauty, and built at—twisted into – such odd and gravity-defying angles that my heart quickens even now to think upon it.
“Gamlingay Churchyard”
Another nameless protagonist, one last obsession. He happens upon a tombstone, and reading the inscription, he begins to speculate upon the life and death of the woman buried there, and later, upon the nature of his speculations. Enigmatic, faintly haunting.