![]() ![]() A husband who was never necessary before appears out of nowhere, but it “is possible he has been here the whole time.” Then the house begins to flood, and the narrator is transformed into a tree in response to her family’s needs-her own survival being secondary to theirs: “My husband and daughters touch my bark. What does she have against daughters? As is often the case in Wild Milk, the protagonist’s private weaknesses have just been waiting to confront her. “I don’t like change and I don’t like daughters,” this mother confesses. She has even trained her nine sons to remove lice, but a spell activated by the lice transforms the self-sufficient sons into needy daughters. In “Spells,” the narrator is a mother widely called upon for her skill at removing lice from children’s hair, though she is never given any public recognition for her genius. If Mark’s narrator cannot articulate that agony viscerally or connect psychic pain to an embodied state, perhaps it is because her body is already in use, always at somebody else’s disposal.Īlthough the narrator’s name changes from story to story, she often seems to be the same character with slightly different attributes, as in a dream. It is also the tone that often dominates my conversations when I am struggling through a depression: My body feels like a well of tears about to brim over, and so much of my energy is focused on stopping the flood that my affect is likely to be read as either sharp or flat-a steel lid containing the inner turmoil. A third of the way through the collection, when the narrator of the story “Spells” says, “Peace is what pain looks like in public,” she might as well be describing the tone of the book. The stories are narrated with a matter-of-factness that could be misconstrued as detachment or lack of feeling, except that this narrator-who is usually a woman entangled in a web of relationships, exchanges of love and need-evidently feels too much. Reading the wry, surreal tales in Sabrina Orah Mark’s short-story collection Wild Milk often feels like navigating an anxiety nightmare dreamt by a wittier half-sister of the Brothers Grimm. ![]()
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