Associate Editor Molly Reid: In Angie Ellis’s story, the narrator insists on protagonist Rosemary’s well-being through the use of a passive-aggressive negation (“Rosemary does not avoid her reflection in the hall mirror when she passes. She is not afraid to be disappointed. She is, please understand, not so shallow.”) But this technique doesn’t flatten the narrative or come off as a simple trick, as it may have in less adept hands. Part of this has to do with specificity of detail (“She does not think of the song ‘Manic Monday’ by the Bangles and how she should have first eaten her favorite thing: Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia.”) Part of it involves humor. But part of it is an alchemy that can’t be teased out. This piece manages to be voice-driven, image-rich, quirky, funny, and heartfelt. And there’s an eagle.
Rosemary Is Fine, Thank You, How Are You?
Rosemary is not sick, and her arms are not pulled down by the weight of a dull and quiet marriage. She does not pluck that one hair on her chin, and her mind is not a cavernous and echoing chamber that previously housed sparkling things—dreams of dense Amazonian forest, an embarrassing catalog of animal facts, a hankering for a lager on a hot day. And fantasies, oh yes. Fantasies, once thrilling, about the man who changed the oil on her Ford Fiesta—scarred hands, black-rimmed nails—what a man. (And as he closed the hood of her car and smiled, she did not promptly recall that the brown antechinus—Australian marsupial—mates until it dies. What a death.)
Rosemary does not avoid her reflection in the hall mirror when she passes. She is not afraid to be disappointed. She is, please understand, not so shallow.
Oh. Rosemary is not old (what is old?). She is not young (again, I ask you). She is not happy or sad (define these, anyway). She most certainly, and most emphatically, does not reject oversimplified but culturally accepted labels for complex states of mind. She is, quite simply: Fine, thank you.
Rosemary does not drive her Ford Fiesta on the old logging road, where on her left is the densely packed forest she did not once love (towering firs and gnarled oak). Where on her right is the downward slope of the mountain, down, down and onward, to the small town and the sea beyond. Can you spot her house among the swath of tiny gray roofs? If you could see inside, you would not see her husband standing in the shower with his forehead pressed against the tiled wall. Taking himself in his own hand, because there is no other hand to take him, etc., etc.
Rosemary does not drive fast. She does not speed over potholes and fallen fir boughs while listening to celebrities discuss healthful living on a popular podcast. (One: All meat. The other: Omegas, omegas, omegas). She does not silently resent each for their self-absorption and lack of factual evidence.
Oh Rosemary, once so sparkling.
She does not get out of her car at the top of the mountain and tread the slippery moss to the very edge. She does not think of the song “Manic Monday” by the Bangles and how she should have first eaten her favorite thing: Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia.
An eagle, swift and silent, does not catch her eye as she steps over. He does not watch her plummet like too-large prey, wind-whipped blue top, arms out like wings. Nor does his gaze shift quickly to the brown hare in the brown grass. He does not then dive, touching the ground just before Rosemary, in a strange race between human and animal. And Rosemary’s last thought, before she becomes one with the earth, is not: Eagles soar at speeds of 160 km an hour; of course he beat me to it.
Angie Ellis lives on Vancouver Island where she is finishing her first novel. You can find her work in Narrative Magazine, Juked, The Lascaux Review, Pithead Chapel, and others. She has recently had stories nominated for Best of the Net and Best Small Fictions. You can find more here:www.angieelliswriter.com
