Elizabeth Kirschner: "Because the Sky is a Thousand Soft Hurts" (Fiction)
“I may have to break your heart… but it isn’t nothing to know one moment alive.”
You can be forgiven for not understanding what’s in your hands when you pick up Elizabeth Kirschner’s new fiction collection, Because the Sky Is a Thousand Soft Hurts (June 2021, Atmosphere Press). Is it poetry or prose? Short stories or a novel in short stories? Is there one narrator or many? The work reads like a shattered mirror “which [shows us] that the outer derives its magnitude from the inner.” What it lacks in traditional plotting and characterization it makes up for in voice and recurring subject matter, giving the collection cohesion in spite of its fragmentary nature.
My first exposure to Kirschner’s work was her submission of “Everyone Needs a Place” to ORP’s fourth annual issue. I remember feeling arrested and compelled by her writing. Her style is paradoxically lush but lean. One sentence cuts like a blade while the next lands like a club. Still another wraps you in an embrace so smooth you don’t realize you’ve gone breathless. There were places in the story where I had no idea what has going on, but I still sensed, as Kirscher describes, “bits of my body migrat[ing]: bone dust, breakage.” Her work forces us to struggle on multiple levels—with the sentences, with the stories, with our own expectations. I felt like Jacob wrestling the angel by the end of it—bruised and blessed.
Her new collection is divided into four main sections, each containing about eleven stories, plus a novella, “Only the Dead Suffer Butter.” The recurring names and images indicate that Kirschner is cycling through her characters, playing with them in intervals, then leaving them to marinate in our minds. “Rebirth,” she tells us, is “more exciting than birth,” and indeed the reader’s appreciation of these characters grows each time they appear to ground us in the familiar. Another cohesive force is the subjects that Kirschner writes about: love and abuse between parents and children, between lovers, between strangers, between humans and nature. There are no sacred cows here, only the holy dirt of humanity: “Even snow knows it’s unclean, that each flake makes its geometry around dust, where everything begins.” Whether these stories are ultimately interconnected or independent, Kirschner establishes the haunting sense that things we took to be simple and discrete are not. My story is your story, and yours is mine. If we can’t see ourselves somewhere in these stories, it’s because we don’t want to.
To discuss in traditional terms what these stories are “about” would be to misunderstand the collection and to rob the reader of their own sense-making adventure. We would do well to learn, from the narrator, to read “without trying to piece anything together, especially not me.” Kirschner writes in fragments that invite the reader to play with them, associating and assembling them in a never-ending kaleidoscope. They gleam like ten thousand tiny diamonds, each sentence a world that at once fits inside your heart and threatens to crack it open. Under this pressure, the white space between her fragments becomes a mercy, a margin in which to pause and breathe. Her scenes are impressionistic and ephemeral: stand close and admire their aphoristic quality, but it is only in stepping back that one can begin to take in the whole. Time seems elastic and fungible, doubling back on itself and then racing ahead so that the question of order and causation becomes moot and uninteresting. What has happened in the world, what has happened to us, Kirschner seems to be saying, has happened. It is, perhaps eternally and atemporally. Each fragment of our lives sits not in some orderly line of causation, but instead tumbles inside us and re-emerges as fresh and raw as the day we thought we buried it. “I realized,” she writes, “that the shard, not the whole, comprised a life, the image, not the narrative, and that one can collapse into another, like the after-hours in a library.” Kirschner’s prose is a crucible in which characters, causation, and language itself are broken down and recast. But it is ultimately our own hearts that emerge, pulverized and purified, from her fires.
—Jonathan Freeman-Coppadge
Fiction Editor
Elizabeth Kirschner is a writer and master gardener. She has published six volumes of poetry and an award-winning memoir, Waking the Bones. Her story “Everyone Needs a Place” appears in ORP Issue 4.1. Her forthcoming collection Because the Sky Is a Thousand Soft Hurts is available at Bookshop.org. (ORP receives an affiliate commission when you use this link. Thank you!)
