“So There!” comes off as a poetic species of chick lit, its female characters desperate to break deadly dull routines, longing for more (not even sure what), but generally expecting the doorway to redemption —- a passage figuratively filled with light in their imaginations -— to be a man.

So There!: New and Selected Stories by Nicole Louise Reid. Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 176 pages, $16.95.

By Vincent Czyz

Nicole Louise Reid’s collection of short fiction, So There!, conjures up an unspecified south (Mississippi? Alabama? Somewhere else?) with breezy strokes. “To the Surface for Air,” for example, begins,“When the buddleia called the bees in thick—July it was—and locusts shook out of their skins, my son brought her here for me to serve freshly squeezed lemonade on the old sleeping porch . . .” In this sentence, Reid lets images and vernacular (“called the bees in thick”) do most of the telling.

The stories tend to deal with adolescent girls (whose bra straps, it seems likely, are soaked in sweat—if not from the southern sun then from the heat of simmering hormones) and adults who drink too much, are too emotionally crippled to be good parents, or show ominous signs of having strayed into a nether region where sanity is on the far shore. The female reproductive system is often involved. And so is love — obsessive, manic, inexperienced, romantic, and familial. Emotions are usually in molten form or of the volatile variety—one inept move has concussive consequences.

Take “Pearl in a Pocket,” a dark tale in which Vyla, the oldest of some 14 daughters, is forced to help her mother either to dispose of stillborns in a nearby river or drown newborns whom the mother — of questionable mental health is in question -— deems too defective to live. When she’s not called on to perform this grim chore, Vyla hankers after a boy she meets on a less sinister bank of the same river. In “Two Swimmy Fishes,” Coretta has been brought to the brink of madness—and perhaps a bit beyond—by a malignant pregnancy and the loss of unborn twins who had to be surgically removed to prevent her from dying of sepsis. Unable to let go of her dead boys, she hallucinates bathing the twins, whom she pictures as having grown to the age they would have been had they lived.

“Like Paper Snow,” a flash fiction, opens with the younger of two siblings recalling the discovery of their mother’s body on the bathroom floor when the narrator was barely a toddler. The lead-off story, “If You Must Know,” isn’t dominated by the same bleak undertones as the aforementioned fictions, but in this tale—laced with humor though it is—dysfunction and psychologies warped by longing are nonetheless present. Is it something about the South?

If Flannery O’Connor’s harsh realities—characterized by the grotesque, the bizarre, the unrelentingly grim—are in evidence in Reid’s collection, they are redeemed by a lighter comic touch. Reid’s writing is lively rather than ponderous, mostly extroverted rather than deeply introspective, and it is as keen to take note of beauty as to document the world’s horrors or the ugly things sloshing through the swamps of the human unconscious.

Author Nicole Louise Reid

“To the Surface for Air,” for example, contains this lyrical description of parental love for a mother whose son who has just brought home an aloof and unfathomable wife: “I still know every freckle and swirl of hair I learned in the sticky August nights, the way his fist squeezed my thumb . . . I watched the moon in his eyes those nights, or when he slept within fingers’ reach I counted the number of stars sitting up with us.”

The language, vivid and energetic, takes on local rhythms or curls grammar to limber up its stiffness. Reid goes out of her way to avoid the commonplace, choosing memorably concrete images rather than abstractions. To draw on “To the Surface for Air” once again, we read, “. . . I usually take muffins or something early enough to catch them in one pair of pajamas between them.” Reid could have used an exact time, such as “8 o’clock” or just “early,” which is what the typical creative writing grad would have written, but instead, with this snapshot, she illustrates the awkwardness of the relationship between mother and son and his new wife.

So There! comes off as a poetic species of chick lit, its female characters desperate to break deadly dull routines, longing for more (not even sure what), but generally expecting the doorway to redemption —- a passage figuratively filled with light in their imaginations -— to be a man. Reid limns the adolescent’s hormonally imbalanced take on the world and has deep compassion for these women (or girls), who aren’t yet fully formed and are often subjected to traumatic circumstances—social, economic, biological—over which they have little or no control. Reid’s characters are destined to be damaged and, like bones improperly set, to heal badly, if at all.

Recorded interview and reading featuring Nicole Louise Reid.