Assistant Editor Lily Davenport: Kirstin Allio’s flash story depicts loss as refracted through several kinds of distance: divorce and estrangement, our infomercial-saturated culture, outside observers’ reactions, and the relentless passage of time. These separations frame the story’s central distance, that of the death itself: the narrator’s ex-mother-in-law, who has died by suicide and left no note, only a body that neither we nor the narrator see (though we’re told it’s laid out at another location defined by absence, a shack “where men recreated without their women”). Ultimately, Allio’s piece asks what we owe each other in the face of loss, and how close we can really get in trying to settle that debt.
State Park
A week after the first day of first grade, we were on a plane back to New Hampshire. My ex-mother-in-law had drowned in a lake in a state park. Drowned herself. When I told people, I sounded as if I were chafing at death, and people failed to ask follow-up questions. I heard myself hanging on until I elicited an apology, a public apology for the fact of death. No one brought me flowers.
The body was held at the Beer, Wine, Worms shack on the back side of the lake where men recreated without their women. How do you know she—I asked my ex-husband. You don’t want to know, he said, but I didn’t believe him.
I was making a smoothie in the blender from the infomercial when he called. As advertised, it was very quiet. I need to see my son, he pleaded.
I burst out laughing. I laughed until there was no chance he’d pay for the plane tickets. I was back on the boardwalk at the beach just over the state border, strapless satin, strappy heels, my new mother-in-law supporting me as I took my victory lap after the vows. My armpits were on fire because I’d used air freshener at the last minute when there was no deodorant in my cosmetics bag. Strangers stood by and smiled.
Kirstin Allio won the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize from FC2 for her new story collection, Double-Check for Sleeping Children, coming out in 2024. Previous books are the novels Garner (Coffee House Press), Buddhism for Western Children (University of Iowa), and the story collection Clothed, Female Figure (Dzanc).
