reviewed by Isaac Fox
Amy Cipolla Barnes’ flash story “Page Six” is a world of paper: ears full of newspaper, food made of newspaper, paper clothes, a paper belly, a paper baby. Paper overwhelms the story, one line at a time, until everything is thin and white and has words on it.
Barnes’ piece is narrated by a mother living in this paper world. She scrounges in dumpsters and accepts church handouts to keep her son fed and clothed, and she also seems to provide for her husband.
Her already bleak life is made even more stifling by the fact that her home—surreal as it is—feels a lot like middle America in the middle of the 20th century. She eats “apples and pork loins and cabbage,” people heat their homes with oil, and a gallon of milk costs 50 cents. These images call back to a time and place far less open and free—in terms of civil rights, social rules, and dispersal of information—than the one most people who read surrealist fiction online probably live in.
The narrator refuses to sugarcoat that bleakness or lie to herself about it. The entire story is a monologue-like single paragraph, entirely in her voice. Her desperation is palpable in each long, comma-free string of ands and buts cascading to a distant period. Hearing her son walk in his hole-riddled shoes, she thinks, “Each step sounds like a prayer to me, squawking in shoe Latin that the wind is mean and the world is cold and the cold is his world and my world and our neighbors’ world.”
Although she acknowledges her family’s struggles to herself, she tries to hide them from her son. She constantly stuffs his ears with newspapers, which read themselves aloud to him. Hearing about the cold world keeps him from hearing the cold world itself. It’s an imperfect distraction, though, and he still hears that “the price of heating oil has gone up again.”
In a small moment of joy and beauty near the story’s end, this mother and her son “cut out paper snowflakes together and drop them on [them]selves and the neighbors and the world like confetti….” In Barnes’ blend of surrealism and harsh reality, there is no escape from the literal or metaphorical cold—no escape from the snow, and no escape from the newspapers. But those sources of pain can also be sources of joy, or at least distraction.
Cease, Cows (https://ceasecows.com/) publishes strange and surreal flash fiction and poetry, usually every other week. Amy Cipolla Barnes 2022 short story collection, Ambrotypes, is available here.
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.