A year ago, Gamut Magazine closed its doors; but in the process, it made all of its works free to read. (Gamut continues in long-form over at Ruadan Books.) I’ve been reading through Gamut’s archives, and here’s five entries in no particular order that I adored.
First and foremost — Body & Blood, by Nick Kolakowski — a piece of short fiction.
But I’m not much better. I have a chart on my phone. Column A lists the organs I’ve given up, the bags and vials I’ve filled with blood and sperm and marrow and hair. Column B breaks down the cash I’ve earned for it.
With a wry, dark humour that rings even closer to home than when it was first published a year ago, Nick Kolakowski’s “Body & Blood” is a heist story with a fantastically complex character at its center. Centered on a legalized organ market, Kolakowski gives terrible people enough detail to make them compelling while making absolutely no excuses for them; which makes our main character’s success that much sweeter.
The Thing About Cancer, by Clinton Crockett Peters, is some excruciatingly gorgeous creative non-fiction;
I’m curious about the tentacles of The Thing and other body horrors, how they slither into our imaginations, how they squeeze us into panic yet earn fans’ ardor. Why do I watch a movie yearly that recalls my father’s demise just as those polar astronauts do when winter closes in?
Creative non-fiction is one of those things I marvel at; I’m a non-fiction writer and a fiction writer, but the two skills never seem to quite mesh for me. On top of my usual wonder, however, this piece brilliantly blends cultural examination of The Thing, personal reflection on parental loss, and the mix of fascination and disgust so many of us feel towards cancer. In some ways, it reminds me of Garland’s Annihilation (2018) which dwells on cancer in similar ways — but it goes different places with it, delving into mummification and the afterlife. As a horror fan, a writer, and an archaeologist, I’m thrilled.
Persistent by A.G.A. Wilmot, another piece of stellar short fiction,
When you arrive at class, you catch everyone’s stares, are immediately inundated with a cacophony of what-happeneds and are-you-okays, as if you’d been hit by a bus or attacked by an escaped lion and somehow survived. Not the truth—not that you messed up your hand attempting to dig through ceramic and concrete searching for something you still aren’t sure existed in the first place.
I’ve read more and more of A.G.A. Wilmot’s work over the years, and I’m perpetually struck with how deftly they use perspective and shifting context; the sliding understanding of the light in this story and the increasing understanding of the main character’s mother’s role is so well done. This is also a story I would very happily give the label ‘schizorealism’, a term I’ve been using as a cousin to ‘magical realism’. While of course I can’t speak on authorial intent or lived experience, I use schizorealism to speak to stories where what is real or not real is less important to the speculative or ‘literary’ nature of the story than whether or not the main character is experiencing it. That is, the experiences of the main character in Persistent could be fantastical and could be the products of mental illness, but it’s not relevant. (I also use Wilmot’s debut novel The Death Scene Artist as an example of this, so this is a consistent thing!)
A Girl Walks Out Of A Bar by Jessica L. Walsh, a crisp and sharp bit of poetry,
When I asked my professor for a letter,
he said What you should do is open a bar.
Jackson or Flint, maybe. Someplace rough.
If a poem could be shaped like two middle fingers without literally being shaped that way, it would look like this. It’s harsh, but necessarily so, and deservedly so — and sparse in a way that leaves a lot unsaid between the lines. Walsh’s use of short verses shifting to longer ones then back to the short, sharp last line is also perfectly suited — it hits a little like a whip. (Or, one might say, a shot to the head.)
In This Dress, Stitched In Anger, I Thee Wed by Lindsey Godfrey Eccles, a gorgeous piece of short fiction,
And look, the dress is finished. Blood-black satin threaded fine with silk in every color there’s a jewel for, and it fits her slender as a flute. Sequins pop and glisten, red as rage; beaded cyclones stalk the hem. It’s a dress to kill, and even if she’s had to borrow anger from her sisters, she’ll wear it like it’s hers. Whatever it takes to get her man, her Orfo, and keep him by her side. Forever.
Put some madness in that dress and it will make you beautiful, her sisters said. That dress will make you strong.
This poetic feast is a reprint, which is only important because where it’s a reprint from is like a tasty, tasty little clue as to where everything is going — although if I’d been a little cleverer when I first started reading, the name Orfo would have clued me in faster. The way Eccles uses language is so lyrical that it’s a joy to read, and the story itself is an embodiment of a moment just before disaster — the second before the story we know.
And finally, one last short story, A Portal Fantasy For Grown-Ups by Catherine George,
Your first thought is: this is why we got the house for less than asking. Your next is of the days, long ago, when you would have given anything to have your closet open onto another world, like something out of a childhood story. But now, instead of childlike wonder, there’s middle-aged apathy, and instead of snowflakes in lantern-light there’s…this. The darkness at the bottom of a bottomless well.
You slam the door shut. The happy endings in those stories were always bullshit, anyhow.
This is a brutal, brutal story — not at first, no. It takes a little bit to sink in, and I don’t think it’ll hit the same for everyone. But for everyone who’s been pushed into the role of caregiver, who’s had to be the one doing all the emotional labor for a family, it’ll hit hard. Nor does it have a happy ending, and part of me wishes it did, while another part of me recognizes that it wouldn’t ring as true otherwise. Portal fantasy for grown-ups, indeed.
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Elliott Dunstan 