None of This Is Real
None of This Is Real
by Miranda Mellis
Sidebrow, April, 2012
115 pages / $18 Buy from Sidebrow or SPD
O, the subject of the title story of Miranda Mellis’s collection of short and long fiction, None of This Is Real, seeks solace (he has headaches—better to say “pain management,” then? we’ll see) in something called “Path to a Position™,” purveyed by its shadowy practitioner, Tiara Scuro: “She outlined for O the steps by which he would, with her, find his position. . . The old school believed the antidote for despair was courage, she said, but the real anti to the dote is a comforting distortion; this is what I call somatic realism.” “Somatic” realism? Is there another kind? Or do we deal in phenomenology?
“For years I had been removing the ground from under my clients,” she tells him,
But then I realized that what people really want is exactly what I was trying to subtract: a position, a Patch of Stability, a bit of personal ground in a time when actual ground is inaccessible for a variety of economic and environmental reasons, and in a time when positions, in the sense of steady employment, are scarce.
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April 23rd, 2012 / 12:00 pm
April 23rd, 2012 / 12:00 pm