reviewed by Isaac Fox
Leigh Chadwick’s micro-fiction “The Story of a Marriage” is shorter than this review. In only 217 words, Chadwick distills a long-term relationship into a rich allegory with a surprising emotional punch.
The story’s events take place entirely on a couch, with the narrator at one end and their husband at the other. The two write each other love letters and exchange them via carrier pigeon. The pigeon gets lost in the space between them, so the first letter takes a week to arrive.
Although the couple’s messages are fairly standard, tropey love-letter sentiments, they’re phrased so awkwardly that they seem alien. “It is the best day when our lips spend the afternoon touching,” the narrator writes to their husband. These characters’ oddities contrast sharply with the many fictional romances that act as crowd-pleasers or even role-playing opportunities. Most readers probably won’t find this relationship cute or sexy, but the people in it do (at least for a while), and doesn’t it belong to them?
Chadwick tells this strange story in deceptively simple language. It’s one paragraph long, mostly consisting of simple sentences, and the tone is extremely matter of fact. Even (maybe especially) when events stray furthest from day-to-day reality, the language plods right along, half-bored, but too indifferent for the boredom to be anything urgent. While delivering one letter, the pigeon flies into a wall. The narrator “ask[s] the pigeon if it’s okay, but the pigeon doesn’t say anything because the pigeon is dead, and you can’t say anything when you’re dead.”
By sculpting such a humdrum voice into such surreal sentences, Chadwick presents a marriage as something both mundane and magical, something that feels entirely bland and entirely impossible.
Cease, Cows (https://ceasecows.com/) publishes strange and surreal flash fiction and poetry, usually every other week. Leigh Chadwick’s This is How We Learn to Pray, which is a hybrid poetry collection/coloring book, is available here: https://elj-editions.com/this-is-how-we-learn-to-pray/.
Isaac Fox is a student at Lebanon Valley College, where he majors in English and creative writing. He spends his free time reading and writing things that aren’t assigned, shooting pictures, and playing the clarinet. His fiction and photography have appeared in Rune Bear and Heart of Flesh magazines, as well as Green Blotter’s 2021 issue. You can find him on Twitter at @IsaacFo80415188.