{"id":750,"date":"2022-10-07T21:35:22","date_gmt":"2022-10-07T21:35:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/wordpress\/greenblotter\/?p=750"},"modified":"2022-10-07T21:35:22","modified_gmt":"2022-10-07T21:35:22","slug":"the-world-is-cold-and-the-cold-is-his-world-review-of-amy-cipolla-barnes-page-six-cease-cows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/greenblotter\/2022\/10\/07\/the-world-is-cold-and-the-cold-is-his-world-review-of-amy-cipolla-barnes-page-six-cease-cows\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cthe world is cold and the cold is his world\u201d: Review of Amy Cipolla Barnes’ \u201cPage Six\u201d (Cease Cows)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

reviewed by Isaac Fox<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n

Amy Cipolla Barnes\u2019 flash story \u201cPage Six\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Barnes\u2019 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Her already bleak life is made even more stifling by the fact that her home\u2014surreal as it is\u2014feels a lot like middle America in the middle of the 20th century. She eats \u201capples and pork loins and cabbage,\u201d 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\u2014in terms of civil rights, social rules, and dispersal of information\u2014than the one most people who read surrealist fiction online probably live in.<\/span><\/p>\n

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, \u201cEach 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\u2019 world.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Although she acknowledges her family\u2019s 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\u2019s an imperfect distraction, though, and he still hears that \u201cthe price of heating oil has gone up again.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In a small moment of joy and beauty near the story\u2019s end, this mother and her son \u201ccut out paper snowflakes together and drop them on [them]selves and the neighbors and the world like confetti\u2026.\u201d In Barnes\u2019 blend of surrealism and harsh reality, there is no escape from the literal or metaphorical cold\u2014no 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Cease, Cows<\/em>\u00a0(https:\/\/ceasecows.com\/<\/a>) publishes strange and surreal flash fiction and poetry, usually every other week. Amy Cipolla Barnes 2022 short story collection,\u00a0Ambrotypes<\/em>, is available here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019t assigned, shooting pictures, and playing the clarinet. His fiction and photography have appeared in\u00a0Rune Bear<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Heart of Flesh\u00a0<\/em>magazines, as well as\u00a0Green Blotter<\/em>\u2019s 2021 issue. You can find him on Twitter at\u00a0@IsaacFo80415188<\/a>.<\/span><\/p><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

reviewed by Isaac Fox Amy Cipolla Barnes\u2019 flash story \u201cPage Six\u201d is a world of paper: ears full of newspaper, food made of newspaper, paper clothes, a paper belly, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[20,3,4],"class_list":["post-750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-flash-fiction","tag-isaac-fox","tag-literary-magazine-review","clearfix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/greenblotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/750","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/greenblotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/greenblotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/greenblotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/greenblotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=750"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/greenblotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/750\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/greenblotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/greenblotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/greenblotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}