“The Blackbird and Other Stories”
Sally Thomas, Wiseblood Books (2024)
280 pages, $16.50
A short story collection is often among the most difficult works of fiction to review. Unlike in a novel, where the decisions of a cast of characters over time reveal a story’s underlying motifs and purpose, a short story collection requires careful consideration of each piece to understand how they fit into a unified whole.
In her excellent new collection, “The Blackbird and Other Stories,” Sally Thomas presents nine brief works of fiction thatwhich at first appear disparate, but which upon further consideration are seen to mutually reinforce and illuminate each other. This reflection is well worth the effort, as with slow digestion the reader comes to see how, like pearls on a string, common themes link the stories of Thomas’ collection together.
Grief is the first theme that runs through each of these tales. The stories of this collection feature grief for the dead, for broken relationships, for lost children or lost childhoods – and sometimes for things not yet lost, but which are slipping away. Thomas’ moving depictions of loss, frequently as uneasy as they are sorrowful, gain their power from being rooted deeply in the tangible: Dance shoes, takeout containers, sunscreen and sand dunes are the instruments by which her characters experience, and are subjected to, heartache.
Accompanying grief in many of the stories, likewise, is a quiet thread of anger at injustices that cause unnecessary loss. Abusive or careless spouses rend their families apart; casual cruelty and indifference rubs salt in already painful wounds; negligent parents reject their responsibilities, to the detriment of their children. Not all losses, the collection stubbornly insists, are inevitable – though those left behind must suffer them all the same.
Four of the stories (“Doing Without,” “A Noise like a Freight Train,” “The Beach House” and “The Happy Place”) follow a series of losses at the heart of a small family. The first three are told from the perspective of Caroline Mallory, a North Carolina homemaker, processing the deaths of first her son, John, to suicide and then her husband, Cash, to illness. Her daughter, Amelia, remains semi-estranged from her mother across a generational and philosophical rift. The final story, however, is from Amelia’s perspective following Caroline’s own death, now the mother of a teenage daughter herself. The family’s history is told through the lens of its fading away, each moment of the quartet a reflection on, and frame for, moments that have already passed and cannot be recovered except in memory.
And yet grief is not the only common marker of the stories in this collection. Moments of sudden, unexpected grace pierce through the smoke and the gloom like fresh air, letting the characters catch their breath. These moments are rarely explicitly religious. Rather, religiously tinged scenes are followed, after a brief pause, by ostensibly ordinary moments of unexpected comfort or wild, rebellious joy: A rainstorm lulls a child to sleep, a spouse provides a comforting touch, a young girl dances in the face of impending death.
In the first of the stories featuring the Mallory family, the grieving Caroline notices a cardinal chirping outside in the winter snow and wonders if, “he (minded) that the spell he wove, of love, longing, and desire, would not so much be broken, there in the small of the year, as simply run down, peter out, give up its sweet red ghost(.)” The quartet ends, however, with her daughter Amelia hearing two mockingbirds chirping to each other at the old family beach house: “Back and forth (they) sang, call and response, desire answering desire.”
If God is in these moments, as he surely must be, then it is as a still, small voice, letting natural happiness be the tabernacle of supernatural peace – even if only for a moment.
Madelyn Reichert is publications administrative coordinator at The Catholic Spirit, the official publication of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota.