Reviewed by Erin Vachon
Midway through Avitus B. Carle’s debut collection These Worn Bodies [Moon City Press 2024], I find myself crying over a flash fiction sneak attack. Carle’s elegiac love song to a trans kid, “A Girl Called Boy,” catches me unsuspecting. A loved one returns home, so I read the flash aloud, and they start crying too. Emotionally guarded reader: don’t run. Carle masters what great flash can do, uplifting and undoing you with every compressed narrative. These Worn Bodies is a propulsive collection, a dynamic chorus of girls and women barreling through personal transformation. By turns, their stories are funny and heartbreaking. Like Carle’s character who keeps Rick-rolling his partner at the end of the world, her writing surprises you with the familiar made strange, then demands sharing the experience, again and again. Her characters stride toward the end of the world, or at least the end of their own, confronting abandonments, deaths, and apocalypses. To read Carle is to be harnessed by her collective of women, as if by a hurricane or the voice of an oracle. But These Worn Bodies crafts beginnings out of every ending. With her highly anticipated collection, Carle writes women as powerful as superheroes, jet-fueled by their ability to evolve right when the world appears to be over.
Awarded the 2023 Moon City Short Fiction Award, These Worn Bodies delivers both character-driven flash and experimentation with form. Carle unfurls a single-sentence narrative of a life in “I Double-Dog Dare You,” punctuated by the memory of a single kind person. Then “The Waitress Draws a Ketchup Heart Within the Mouth of a Denny’s Platter” competes with Hemingway’s “For sale: baby shoes, never worn” for maximum damage in short space. Carle stretches and shrinks bodily proportion through Kohl’s fitting rooms and over-sharers at drive-thru windows. She crafts crossword flash to explore the underpinnings of abuse, then pins down a shallow Author with meta-flash told by a Woman character. Carle’s writing is playful and tender, but never saccharine. When her girls bite bullets, they do not submit, only pause to aim at their target.
Carle shies from easy conclusions in favor of character evolution. Alzheimer’s turns mothers into children, and children become parents by the abandonment of their own. Mothers are cast as trolls to disguise their failures, and fathers become peach trees bearing no fruit at all. Grandmothers steal lovers away from their descendants with homemade pie, while girls wait outside with red velvet cake. Mothers swap spoons for Sugar Babies, hiding addiction under a sweet tooth. A club of women initiate members via rollercoaster, even though the ups and downs of life already test them. Carle’s women walk out the front gate to escape enslavement and challenge systemic injustice by speaking unfiltered truth on their teaching resume. The characters in These Worn Bodies do not open doors to self-realization, so much as burn the whole house down.
Uncanny stand-ins populate the collection, beloveds who turn strange before perplexed narrators. A husband aspires to be a cardboard cutout at the last Blockbuster on earth. Dead family members reanimate as scarecrows. A crash-test dummy romances their date at Friendly’s. A bunny insists on a new identity as a fox. A sex doll named Lorraine somehow gets between the two last people on Earth. Carle builds escape hatches where there should be dead ends. These Worn Bodies is liberatory, insisting on self-determination for everyone from trans boys to rabbits. When Carle’s characters witness change in each other, they leap-frog forward themselves. Her collection shines with hope, like a succession of people waking each other up, one story after another.
If These Worn Bodies creates gorgeous cycles in its stories, Carle’s sentences echo these loops. She writes in waves, lyrical and insistent. Carle’s prose rocks a distinct rhythm like water slapping the side of a boat. “Maybe, before you became the Black bottom, swamp bottle Black woman, you were just a Black woman. In a boat. In the swamp.” In “King of Tent City,” her paragraphs weave into each other, like a pantoum merging with flash. Carle’s lyricism gilds every life into something beautiful, even restoring dignity to maggots by paying careful attention to their entire life cycle. By ventriloquizing insects, animals, and humans, her flash narratives home in on the individual while ensuring a home for everyone within her ecosystem. These Worn Bodies is at once expansive and deeply intimate. With this spectacular debut, Carle creates a luminous manual on how to live in this world, if not fearlessly, in spite of fear and beyond.
Avitus B. Carle’s debut collection These Worn Bodies is available from Moon City Press via The University of Arkansas Press.
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Erin Vachon writes outside Providence, RI. They are the Multigenre Reviewer-at-Large for The Rumpus and the reviews editor for SmokeLong. Their writing appears in the Wigleaf Top 50, Black Warrior Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Pinch, DIAGRAM, Brevity, and The Anarchist Review of Books, among others. Their writing was nominated for The Pushcart, Best of Net, Best Microfictions, and Best Small Fictions. They were a SmokeLong Emerging Writer Fellow, and they received an MA in English from The University of Rhode Island.
