Ghost Box Evolution in Cadillac,
MichiganRosie Forrest. Rose Metal Press, $12 chapbook (56p) ISBN 978-1-941628-01-0
Rosie Forrest’s stories are fairy
tales. Minus the fairy godmothers, minus
the happily ever after, minus the magic.The stories in Ghost Box Evolution in Cadillac, Michigan—winner of the Ninth
Annual Rose Metal Press Short Short Chapbook Contest—align themselves more with
the danger in those original, adult fairy tales. We find young protagonists in
less than ideal situations. We find absent
parents and emotionally absent parents.
We feel a sense of danger as the characters venture on their journeys in
the physical world or in their own minds.
We too “were raised to worry about the outside” like the children in “He
Showed Us A Road.” We hope the narrator
of “Bless This Home” will heed her mother’s warnings and stay away from the
bearded man’s cabin, although we know she won’t, although we want to see what
happens if she doesn’t.
While most of the shorts create a
sense of dread for the reader, they also create a sense of wonder, rooted in
Forrest’s precise language and vivid worlds.
So maybe I was wrong about the magic.
Forrest masters the short with openings that spark us: “On Wednesdays
they played dead because Jesse had a basement that was good for morbid games.” She
makes the worlds real and full and populates them with real and full characters.
In “We’ll Go No More A-Roving,” two girls inspect an abandoned church where
“the four parking spaces behind the building are five white lines and nothing
else.” As the children in “He Showed Us
A Road” escape, they pass, “a scrap of tire, an old plaid shirt, what remained
of Mr. Lipscomb’s property after the fire, the dip in the asphalt where an arm
of gravel collected…” In “Where We Off
To, Lulu Bee?” we feel every pinhole of a daughter’s embarrassment as her
mother rides a toy horse they’re both too old for.
The hardest and often best part
about flash fiction, about all literature, is the ending, and Forrest doesn’t
disappoint. Instead of a moral at the
end of these stories, she twists our expectations, leaving us with a something we often can’t quite
place. A something that moves in our
stomachs just the right way. (August 2015)
Purchase Ghost Box Evolution in Cadillac, Michigan HERE.
Reviewer bio: Christy Crutchfield is the
author of the novel How to Catch a Coyote. Her
work has appeared in Tin House, Mississippi
Review, Salt Hill Journal, Juked, and others. Visit her
at christycrutchfield.com
