Barrelhouse Reviews: The Ill-Fitting Skin by Shannon Robinson
Reviewed by Kate Keleher
Press 53 / May 2024 / 242 pp
Never bite back. That’s what all the parenting websites tell you. None of this tit-for-tat nonsense, however tempted you may be. Giving a mixed message is not the danger. The danger is that you will be making yourself all too clear.
A bird makes a home in a woman’s womb. An eighteenth-century woman gives birth to rabbits. Discarded clothes come to life and remind us that sometimes, the harder you try to let go of something, the more it clings to you. Here are speculative leaps in the tradition of Carmen Maria Machado and Rachel Ingalls, rendered in a voice that recalls Viv Albertine. Always, these elements of speculative fiction reveal incisive truths about characters’ inner and outer worlds. The Ill-Fitting Skin asks: are werewolves and zombies really any stranger than sex, or childbirth?
From the opening lines of the collection, Shannon Robinson’s deliciously wry voice crackles with energy and dark humor. Each line has the ring of things said in confidence. These twelve tales bend expectations and avoid easy answers as they leap from humor to horror to emotional honesty and back again. I felt possessive of the collection as I read it, as if the narrator of each story were speaking to me personally. It’s a voice I would gladly follow anywhere.
A few paragraphs into the first story, Genna wakes up to crashing sounds coming from her son Wystan’s room. She enters the room to find “a dark figure on all fours… shredding books”—yes, books, of all objects—“tearing pages from the spines with teeth and paws.” It appears to be a “medium-sized dog.” Genna runs around the house looking for Wystan, only to return to find him “curled up, naked, profoundly asleep in the corner on a heap of tangled sheets, a mangled page in his damp fist.” Her son has become a werewolf. “Lycanthropy” is the pediatrician’s diagnosis. “It’s kind of a fashionable diagnosis these days.”
Throughout the story, Wystan “flicker[s] into a wolf and then back into a boy—like a faulty broadcast or an old-fashioned flipbook, slowed down.” Genna wonders if perhaps “those flickers” had been happening for some time already; if they had “at first appeared so quickly as to be subliminal or even superimposed: wolf/boy/wolf/boy.” She reflects: “Lately, reality had been rippling underfoot.” There are many moments throughout the collection in which reality ripples and things “flicker” between states—mother/imposter, victim/bully, alive/undead, self/stranger.
In “Dirt,” a failed academic, Sharon, picks up temporary work cleaning houses, and takes on a new client named Hartley. He is awkward and unattractive, which gives Sharon the impression that she has the upper hand in their dynamic. This attitude plays some role in what happens next: she goes along (for a price) with his increasingly lecherous requests until she finds herself cleaning in heels and a French maid’s uniform while he jerks off under the kitchen table. After one especially uncomfortable encounter, Hartley shows her to the door with an expression she sees as his “apology/smug face.” It reminds her of “one of those pictures that appear to be either a duck or a rabbit, this one, that one, not a double perspective but a mutually exclusive choice.” The reassuring notion that it’s possible to hold two things at once doesn’t appear here. Hartley is either apologetic or smug, not both. It’s up to us to decide. “Dirt” ends with Sharon recognizing that the French maid’s uniform was “someone else’s idea of sexy… an ill-fitting skin.” (And is the French maid’s uniform all that different from “the tweed skirt [her PhD] advisor so admired”?)
The Ill-Fitting Skin could populate a small circus with the contortionists and escape artists in its pages—mothers, daughters, siblings, students, and lovers who twist themselves into impossible shapes to try and fit or wriggle out of costumes that are too tight. In “Zombies,” a woman grows tired of being an “unofficial girlfriend” (i.e. other woman) to a guy who happens to be a diehard zombie movie fan. She gets dressed up for a zombie parade where she plans to finally confront him. By the end of the story we see that she might actually be a zombie—in a limbo state, neither dead nor alive, starving for human contact.
Readers whose ears perk up at the mention of werewolves and zombies will find a kindred spirit in Robinson. And readers who tend to stick with literary realism may be surprised to find themselves falling for these genre-bending tales. Robinson invites us to see the strangeness that is always all around us. Figurative language itself is a kind of “flickering” between two things that inhabit the same space. A cat with “melon-green eyes” has ears that “fold backward like insect wings.” A girl winks “as if her eye were biting down on something.” A treatment facility resembles “a concrete egg carton with windows.” A pomegranate’s seeds look “like ruby teeth.” Language ripples underfoot.
The stories themselves wrestle with or slough off narrative conventions. One is told as a Choose Your Own Adventure story. Another alternates between the character’s waking thoughts and nightmares. Yet another sheds its comfortable third-person narration in the final pages in order to address the reader directly, in first person.
Robinson’s voice shines in “Miscarriages” and “Charybdis”—two stories in which she arranges short sections of material out of order and leaves it up to the reader to make meaning, as if the characters were saying, I don’t know what to make of this, you deal with it. “Charybdis” is perhaps the most electric story in the collection. An unfortunate encounter with an entitled man and his micropenis is at the heart of the story, but it’s about much more than that. “Charybdis” gets its title from a scene when, in a late-night conversation with college roommates, the narrator comes up with a nickname for her vagina:
Charybdis: a sucking, wet void, a destroyer of men. In some myths, Charybdis is a voracious beast, hoovering back seawater three times a day and then belching it forth, creating deadly whirlpools; elsewhere, she’s imagined as the whirlpool itself. Her nebulousness seemed fitting, given what she represented—woman’s dark interior. It wasn’t flattering, but at least it was epic.
The story never shies away from condemning the rage and sexual entitlement of Mr. Micropenis, but it also examines the narrator’s own complicated role in the story and its telling. Robinson’s tone can be surprisingly jocular in moments of intensity. Mr. Micropenis “turn[s] into a bit of a stalker.” At one point, he sees the narrator in public and goes after her, “his demeanor just shy of a man hacking through the jungle with a machete.”
Robinson understands that humor and horror are siblings, and she holds them together in multiple stories. After a dilation and curettage operation, a woman analyzes a large stain of her own blood like a Rorschach blot in “Miscarriages.” An Alzheimer’s patient thinks her dead husband is simply out on “the longest grocery errand ever” in “Changeling.” Robinson also knows when to lift the dazzling shield of her humor to reveal what’s underneath. In “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” a story about sisters organizing an intervention for their alcoholic brother, she shifts tone deftly, from deadpan to vulnerable. “What does one serve at an intervention?” the sister asks. “Red or white?” Then she answers her own question: “I’d guess white, in case people start throwing things.” In the next paragraph, the narrator elaborates: “We used to be an object throwing household. Mom and Dad were, that is.” The narrator recalls the way the mother threw cash into the kitchen garbage, a sight she found “nauseating and frightening.” Her younger brother uses the money to buy an electric guitar, with which he makes his “own kind of screaming.”
Try as they may to adapt or escape, many of Robinson’s characters are stuck. “A Doom of Her Own,” told in a Choose Your Own Adventure format, offers the reader the illusion of agency, in the form of choices at the bottom of each page, but no matter what you choose, you end in the same place. In “Rabbits,” a woman thinks about rabbits, which makes her give birth to rabbits, which makes her think about rabbits, and give birth to more rabbits, in a maddening loop. For a daughter caring for her mother with dementia in “Changeling,” the phrase “in the moment” takes on a new meaning as she experiences “the same moment, again and again... a goldfish in its bowl.” A woman tries and fails to bury the memory of her brother’s abduction, and her guilt around it, in “Secondhand.”
Robinson’s frequent use of present tense underscores her characters’ difficulty with integrating the past into a tidy narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. “Time moves along like scenery flowing past a car,” Robinson writes, an echo of an earlier line in which the “scrolling sameness of the trees” out the car window resembles “cheap cartoons with recycled frames… every chase scene filled with déja vu.”
How to escape? The collection’s ending offers a clue. The final image in “Birdie” is of a woman in free fall, plummeting toward her death. The thing that saves her, the thing that gives her wings, is opening her eyes.
Kate Keleher’s short fiction won the Crazyshorts! Short-Short Fiction Contest and was anthologized in Best Small Fictions. She teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, where she earned her MFA in fiction in 2021.