"Astral bodies" by Jay Merill (Salt, 2007)

Stories from Stand, MsLexia, London Magazine, Staple, The Interpreter's House, etc. Some are only 3 pages long.

• Beacon - Weeks ago, Tilly had given the narrator a houseplant that the narrator has neglected. Tilly was raped when a schoolgirl by a boy who seemed gentle at first. She decided that truth is deeper than appearance. She wanted to be an actress. Later her father contacted her. She hadn't seen him since she was 5. She visited his big house and new family. She preferred her simple life. She befriended a homeless couple who turned out to be druggies. She decided that truth can be what's obvious. She visits the narrator for the first time in weeks, sees the plant and sets it alight - "She says we need a beacon to tell us where we are". The narrator hears a noise - birds or car horns? It's too dark to see.
• Yellow plastic shoe - Alternating between the PoVs of a beachcomber and a gardener - in sight of each other, both female, both thinking the other self-deluded about life. Each has a moment of self-satisfaction - one finding, one planting. Each sees the other in their private bliss and there's a moment of understanding.
• The other side of Diane - The narrator, 8, has a baby sister Glenda and a friend Mel who had a sister a year older Diane (naughty but fun) and a baby brother Robbie. Her father had died. Diane had a serious, dutiful mother side, once claiming for Robbie some wellies that the narrator's mother had paid for.
• Blue movie - Puff, the narrator Squeak's friend, has asthma. They've both been in a home. Puff suggests they do a blue movie together. She suggests they pick up a client and nick his wallet. She gets caught shop-lifting. The blue movie idea sounds good again.
• The outsider - Josie is boozy. It's hot. She gets into a cool, empty house, acts like a latterday Goldilocks. The family arrive. As she runs away, she's happy that she's left an indelible mark on other lives - "it means everything to her to be blended in, to be connected"
• Salamander - There's a meta feel to some of the pieces. Self-actualisation is explicit. Both these traits are in this story. Nerine's about 40, a nurse. She plans to follow her brother Stephen to Canada. He once saw a salamander on her, and called her Salamander ever since. Stephen fell in love with his twin sister Babe. Don (Juanita is his girlfriend) is Nerine's flat neighbours. In paragraph 3 we're told "This is a story about how there was a brother even though Juanita, and Don, who knew her later, hadn't thought so ... It is also about how Nerine was burdened. ... Her life it seems, was a battle that she couldn't win ... longing for a past which perhaps had never happened, a future which couldn't be". Don gets on with her, Juania somehow fell out. They wonder why she should have made up a brother. "This is the preamble to their discussion of the why's and wherefores". Juanita thinks she's mad, and blanks her. Nerine tells Don that she thinks Juanita wants to get rid of her. There's a fire in the tower block. Nerine has to be rescued. "She doesn't survive but it isn't till some time later that Don and Juanita know this". After, "She leaps and twists before his eyes at unexpected moments. In the hallway, in the street at places he most frequently used to see her. Light and shadow". Then there's a change of narrative viewpoint. I don't know why - "I know it's wrong to fall in love with your sister. ... This is what the brother Stephen would have like to hear himself saying to them" Then there's

  But who is Babe? Don asks self-consciously, the name Babe embarrassing him as he shuffles out the question.
  But who is Babe? Don asks self-consciously, the name Babe embarrassing him as he shuffles out the question.

  which may be a misprint. Stephen turns up at Don's. His twin sister left him to marry 5 years before. Had Nerine ever forgiven him? He returns to Canada. The ending is "Where did this idea come from that a salamander could not burn? He himself was guilty of believing Nerine was protected in some strange way by something bigger than all of them, by the charisma of some reifed glory, by perfection, a story larger than words. But he knows now Nerine was just a woman. It's a lesson that is painfully difficult to learn."
• Tango - Waitress Rose is getting the tables ready for breakfast at the hotel. 7am. It's her 5th year. Bella the receptionist looks (condescendingly?) on as Rose nearly cries. The tables laid, she perks up. Suddenly they dance around the tables, as usual.
• Chicken eye - Nadia's tongue is misbehaving. "she always has this sealed up feeling about her, Nadia ... she's feeling insecure because of the cousins ... she once tried to kill herself, ... she was once committed to a mental institution ... She's known me all my life ... Nadia's my sister, she's fifteen years older than me ... I'm twenty five. I am divorced - and Nadia was married once." Nadia imitates people. "I" explains to the cousins that Nadia married at 17, was pregnant and then a widow, miscarriaging. It's a story she often tells, and adds details to the description of the accident, making it sound like a story. Their parents locked her in afterwards, but she still nearly threw herself out of the window. Nadia likes listening to her story. "It's one of the tragedies of Nadia's life that the more she tries to reach people the more she turns them away from her"
• Billie Ricky - The narrator Lorraine, 10, is holidaying with Sandy (adopted) and Annette. "And I know it's because of the net in Annette, those times I keep seeing fish as helpless and floundering, and all caught up". Lorraine and Sandy play in a river, saying the assumed name of Sandy's biological mother into the water - calling for her. The ending is "This place is definitely the best place in the world to have a wee in and this when you come to think about it is more than likely because of the we in weir"
• WatchTower - Clara, 24, is married to Bill, 33. They have 2 children. When Bill's friend Francis (33) comes round on Saturdays they regularly invite Jehovah Witnesses in and the men debate with them. One day, Francis and Clara have sex on the floor and Bill watches. 3rd person omnipotent for the most part, though the 5th paragraph starts with "All the energy led up to one special moment which she promises she'll be coming to by and by. Not yet, because first she wants to give a few details about where they lived then and what life was like". We learn that "she had ambition. Her name had started off as Clare but she herself put the a in, it was more noisy. She felt like a loud musical instrument. Twang. She had strings and a belly and a mouthpiece. She played the part of a woman. They could all agree what this part meant and that equalled harmony". Later, she thought about sex with Francis - "this play or film she was in started to seem far better than the dull life she'd been living. Maybe it didn't matter if there was true meaning there or not". Later "All this energy did lead up finally to the one special moment and this is how Clara puts it: Francis had his charming side which was pleasing, exotic and erotic". During sex with Francis, "Bill has right there towering above her"
• The Girl Can't Help It - Jessamine is sleeping with married Rick. Her friend Beb is going out with Robin and wants sex with him. Beb has helped Jessamine think of herself as a dizzy blonde rather than the plain girl she thought she was. Again there's a narrative surprise - a section begins "Towards the end of the week here they are in a bar" - why is the "here" inserted? Later Jessamine asks him who the lady was that he'd been walking with. She screams, he punches her. She falls. Later they make it up. Beb is still going on country walks with Robin.
• Tailbacks - Jan is being driven to Laura's wedding by Matthew, a friend of Laura. There's a roadblock - a dog's been run over on the hill ahead. She has a moment of bliss, a mad moment, "deeply believing in that intense and isolated act". They go in a field, have sex. After, driving past the dead dog, she realises that she orgasmed just as the dog died. "And I knew then that a very significant part of me would always remain stuck on that hill, that I'd never be entirely free of it". They didn't go to the wedding reception, taking a different way home. Nor after that did they ever do more than occasionally speak together.
• The sadness story - Celine, a beautiful actress who keeps fiddling with her hair, tells a group of people about a man who keeps phoning her. She turns him down, though he's a perfectly lovely man. Bwcause of his intensity, they can't just be friends. The last sentence is "The well-it-can't be-helped sadness and we,-none-of-us,-can-help-what-we-feel-even-though-we-might-be-fools sadness, of her smile"
• Astral bodies - Sisters Sharon and Isobel, both about 50, complement each other. Sharon is past-oriented, reminiscing from previous lives, whereas Isobel want to control the future. She regularly drops into an amusement arcade, thinking she has intuitions about One Armed Bandits, etc. She loses.
• Lady of the spin - 3 pages. Brenda, thinking of Sir Lancelot, buys freshly made candyfloss from Ms Della Gira at the seaside. There's a storm.
• Waving with rabbit - Magician Jon and Louise are in Tenerife for perhaps their last season - Jon's going blind. They've been together 9 years. Her father did a disappearing act when she was 9. When she was 11, her mother died. Louise is afraid of change. She is cut in half, then recovers. The audience have to believe, but also have admire the illusion. Does Jon really love her?
• Monkey face - "A coin in my hand, held up between my fingers like a crisp silver moon. Now it's gone again, too fast for you to see. The most real part of me lives in the palm of my hand, a hidden self that I conjure up out of nothing". A mother is with her 1 year old daughter. Andrew, the father moves to New Zealand, only returning briefly with the baby's 10. The mother had a lover or 2 but nobody since her daughter was about 3. She thought her toddler had been snatched on the street but she was ok
• The gold-road - Schoolfriends Emma and Lou head for the beach to swim as they've done each day. Today it's cold and Lou says she's not going in. "strangely, perhaps mystically, this is a turning point. Sometimes, without warning, the world does change in this way.". Emma goes in the sea - "there's this long golden path which links her to the horizon. From her own tiny section of the sea she feels connected to the sky, and to everything". Lou "feels the past through contact with the stone and gets this sense of harmony". Reminds me (too much) of "Yellow plastic shoe".

There's much to like. "Salamander" and "Waving with rabbit" are my favourites. There are sudden shifts of narrative mode (especially changes in the closeness of the third-person) which are often combined with foreshadowing. Two people momentarily share a state of mind that hitherto was private. Two characters find themselves simultaneously. There are "infodumps" (2nd or 3rd paragraph) about prevailling mental states and life hopes. People and what they say are evaluated as if they were in a story or play. People become narrators of a short story. Seasides are common.