by Francine Cunningham
INVISIBLE PUBLISHING
2022/$20.95/272 pp.
Exploring the potential of the short story genre for endless experimentation, Francine Cunningham’s compact debut collection of narrations—a book hovering between the poem and the novel—goes for the gold. Or should I say the lemon and lavender, as almost all the tales in God Isn’t Here Today have in common a thread of scent. There’s the daughter in “Asleep Till You’re Awake” who notices her dead mom is wearing a “gross lavender perfume,” the artist who makes paintings with the ashes of a “young child with a fondness for lemons” from “In Remembrance,” and “Complex 2675,” in which Gerry remembers a woman in an elevator who smelled “like flowers—maybe lavender, and something else. Lemon maybe.”
The stories also attend to characters and plot, the most meandering being “Mickey’s Bar,” where a host of Indigenous characters (Tommy, Quinn, Grace) and bodily organs (Lungs, Skin, Heart) swirl around a dying bar owner in acts of care and injury. Among my favourites of these more conventional stories is “Pornorama,” where a shop worker, Crimson, becomes disgusted by a random act of crudity from a stranger she thought she might have a promising future with, and “Spectre Sex,” where Damien the Incubus wearies of his erotic work with widows but still ensures he blows out the candles that had summoned him and, hilariously, decides to eat a “cheese-and-tuna casserole… as he walked home.”
These are interspersed with jagged flashes of poetic rant—grim interludes of environmental terror with shards of Kafkaesque didacticism: “Wake up, look at your phone, like things / until you like yourself, or hate yourself”; ice cream truck simulacra (“BA dum BA dum BA dum BA da da”); creepy dialogue snippets (“Who is Erik?,” a tale that opens with sad lines far too many women will relate to: “I moved to the city because I believed in fate, in following your gut. But then I saw a penis at the window of my ground-floor apartment, a hand gripped around it, furiously pumping…”); and ragged prose chunks that require awkward accommodation as they mimic the “Thirteen Steps” of the title and the tale’s condemned killer.
Indigenous struggles and sufferings score the collection but in ways anyone who hasn’t experienced the horrors of residential school, the resultant addictions and other cultural and spiritual eradications, can still relate to. Clichés occur in descriptions of “matted hair,” writhing “in pain,” and “ominous quiet,” but God Isn’t Here Today (longlisted for the inaugural Carol Shields Prize) emotively channels the abject quotidian, akin perhaps to Cormac McCarthy or The Twilight Zone, burning with its unforgettable fruit and herbal fires.
Catherine Owen is the author of Riven (ECW Press).
_______________________________________
