Circling by Lisa Kahn Schnell, reviewed by Ellen Parker Avert your eyes, boys. Go watch something nice on ESPN. Gross chick-lit alert! Now, I’ve heard the objections to the chick-lit label, and I suppose some people have made some good points, but I’m here to tell you that I like it. Being a chick, I like fiction written by and about chicks. Why? Because I get it—especially the crampy lower parts, the bleeding vaginas, the weepy nipples, the dry heaves. Men, really, have no business here. They know nothing. Have they ever had another person living inside them? Have they ever had another person dying inside them? Have they ever had another person, alive or dead, coming out of their bodies? Without exception, it’s wet and sloppy. Even when all goes well, there’s blood, there’s tears. What we, as living females, are usually concerned with, when we have another person residing inside us, is the status of that other person in there. Is it alive? Is it growing? Why, suddenly, is it so still? In Circling, Lisa Kahn Schnell gets to all of that—but first she shows us a scenario that our dread-filled, hormone-addled minds might not even have touched on. There’s a dead mom, see, and a living baby. Thing is, the baby is unborn. So there’s a young mom-to-be, lying in her casket, stiffly, prettily, and “you could see the baby circling around inside of her, like a hand moving under a sheet.” Ah, bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been eight months since my last period. Please cut this livin’ baby out of me. After the writer hears about the unborn baby circling in its dead hostess, she obsesses. Who wouldn’t? And where was she? Not there. Shame on me. To the funeral, she should have gone, she should have gone, she should have gone. Cut it out! Cut it out before it stops. Later, or maybe earlier, the Twin Towers fell and her own fetus went down the toilet. I heard the news today, it reached me through these tight red walls, and I swear to you I am not coming out of here alive. Once you get this shit in your head, I’m telling you, your life becomes nothing more than a fright flick. So she finally gets a keeper, but is it? Over and over she checks her signs. Haven’t we all been there? I mean, even men. Is everything still there? You count the heartbeat in your belly. You cover your falling hair. You feel, inside, all the little cells splitting. I shouldn’t have gone off. Please indulge me. This is only to tell you the places I went because I liked a story. Actually, Circling is creative nonfiction. So it’s not a story, quite, is it? Although some of it is, surely. That is, how long could a baby keep moving in its dead mother’s womb? A few minutes, maybe, but an entire funeral? C’mon. Couldn’t happen. That’s nothing but a story! How, then, do I get it out of my head? All content in SmokeLong Quarterly copyright 2003-2013 by its authors.