Aimee Parkison, The Petals of Your Eyes. Starcherone Books, 2014.
www.aimeeparkison.com/
The debut novel by an award-winning author of short stories.
Kidnapped girls trapped in a remote theater surrounded by mountains and jungle are forced into illegal performances, displayed in cabinets with curiosities, delicate limbs bound by straps, accompanied by dancing puppets fashioned of dead children's bones. The Petals of Your Eyes conjures up a painful, poetic world that won't soon be forgotten.
Aimee Parkison’s newest novel, The Petals of Your Eyes, offers a conundrum: it solicits both a literal and an allegorical reading, while never allowing the reader to comfortably settle one way or the other. I read this as literary fiction inflected with horror, with similarities to Blake Butler’s postapocalyptic Scorch Atlas and Jessica Bozek’s The Tales, though it is its own beast and owes allegiance to neither.
In lyrical, paratactic sentences, Parkison unfolds a fable of young women—girls, really—kept in captivity as part of an ongoing theatrical performance, its provenance and purpose unknown. The book’s tone is sinister, and the imprisoned, kidnapped actors in this theater all have petals over their eyes, petals that are soft as an eyelid, but also conceal, as the girls themselves are imprisoned and concealed. This tone, combined with a near-complete lack of scenes, keeps the reader suspended in a dream-like state, in much the same way as a fairytale might. Our disbelief is also suspended, as a litany of horrors washes over us: “Some of the theatergoers like to view the dead girls in the cabinets…some of them like to keep a living girl locked inside with a dead girl (9).”
Are we intended to read lines like this one literally? And if so, how can we keep on reading in the face of such abject horror? And yet the book commits fully to its childlike, naïve perspective. We are offered little to no context for how the girls ended up in their predicament, and none of the characters are given names beyond static objects or their position within the text. There’s the rose, our narrator, and her sister, the gardenia. The rose has a lover called no one’s daughter. The theater where they are kept and displayed to various theatergoers is run by the new director. There is an old director. There are trainers, and actors, and a women butcher, and in all of these cases they are unnamed. Once again we are in the realm of fairytale: the prince, the princess, the queen, the soldier, the pauper. I kept capitalizing these terms in my mind as I read: No One’s Daughter. The Woman Butcher. Much fairytale scholarship (Bruno Bettleheim and Maria Tatar especially) involves close reading of the tale through a psychological lens, a process resembling allegorical reading practices wherein submerged content is brought to the surface. Parkison solicits this kind of reading, but The Petals of Your Eyes ultimately refuses it.
I read The Petals of Your Eyes as an allegory, even though Parkison is at pains to remain in a dreamspace of complete abstraction. Angus Fletcher, in his critical work Allegory: Theory of a Symbolic Mode, produces a taxonomy of literary devices that solicit allegorical reading, and Parkison uses many of them: repetition that invokes ritual, abstraction, and the grotesque. From Fletcher:
Allegories are far less often the dull systems they are reputed to be than they are symbolic power struggles. If they are often rigid, muscle-bound structures, that follows from their involvement with authoritarian conflict. If they are abstract, harsh, mechanistic, and remote from everyday life, that may sometimes answer a genuine need. When a people is being lulled into inaction by a routine of daily life…an author perhaps does well to present behavior in a grotesque, abstract caricature. In such a way may he arouse…criticism, and the method will be justified. (23)This argument, that allegory is best suited to investigating relations of power, goes a long way to explain how Parkison’s unsettling fairytale speaks to this historic moment. The Petals of Your Eyes offers a conundrum: when a real-world tragedy like the sexual slavery of young women is so horrible that we want to look away, does allegorizing this tragedy offer us a way to look anyway—and perhaps see more clearly—or does it wind up sensationalizing the horror, reinscribing these young womens’ victimization? Parkison offers no easy answers, but many arresting images, sentences, and juxtapositions.
Joyelle McSweeney, writing for The Brooklyn Rail, provocatively refers to Parkison’s style as resembling “a screen memory”: “[Parkison] unfolds a fairy tale so harrowing it reads like a screen memory—so harrowing it must be true.” This precisely articulates how allegory works in Parkison: her work asks to be read as allegory, as a story concealing some far more horrible truth beneath. And yet its grotesqued surface is horrifying enough already.
Perhaps the most interesting question posed by this text, and ones like it, is why this turn to the mode of allegory? Why now? Fletcher argues that the mode resembles religious ritual. Perhaps it speaks to our desire for meaning and order in our lives, a mission that is, on the surface at least, at odds with the ethos of risk promoted by experimental fiction.
The allegorical style slips—I would argue deliberately—toward the final third of the book. We reach a passage that stretches toward realism, in that this uncanny world we’ve learned to maneuver suddenly bears too close a similarity to our own, with one too many telling details to believe it’s pure fiction:
In childhood, my father was a missionary…Just before my sister and I were taken to the secret theater, my sister, my mother, and I went on a ship with my father on a Christian cruise. Mother said we were never to see our home again, that the Lord would take us to places where people needed us. Then a man put a blue pillowcase over my sister’s head one night. My mother was crying when she saw the gun. My father was on the floor with me when the man told him to put the red pillowcase over my head, and afterwards everything was red ,red, red. (Parkison 93)Our narrator is the rose. Gardenias are usually white, not blue, but can be dyed alternative colors. The man carries the narrator to a boat, then a plane, then a car, then “another boat, another plane, and then a truck that drove into the jungle.”
A quick Google search of incidents to which this might refer turns up everything from Boko Haram’s alleged kidnapping of Christian girls to sell them into sexual slavery, to the hundred or so people annually who disappear on ocean cruises. This specific narrative, though, of a missionary whose daughters are kidnapped off a cruise, doesn’t appear to have a real-world referent. Not that it needs to; this is fiction. And yet this moment is the first in Parkison’s book that had me seeking out a search engine, the accretion of telling details sufficient to seem plausibly real.
The cover of the first edition features collage illustrations that resemble shadow puppets, some featureless, and others clearly made of distorted bird skeletons, their limbs askew in a way that turns their wings humanoid and arm-like. This is a wholly appropriate set of images for a book that is itself a shadowbox, its unnamed protagonist a puppet in someone else’s theater: “…she will sing to the soul, calling it like a bird, coaxing it as she manipulates the bone puppets inside the garden of the secret theater.” This line appears in the novel’s epilogue.
Then there’s the puzzle of the poems that interrupt the narrative. They are all strikingly similar (“He is lost. Find him and set a nourishing dinner beside him./He is shivering. Warm him in a room of bright light…”), repeated with minor variations over the course of this brief book, and usually including an alteration of the speaker (sometimes no one’s daughter speaks these words; other times it’s the woman butcher, or the new director). Too, the pronouns shift: the he changing to she changing to they, and finally to I. This is a poem of failed self-making, and the epilogue points to the narrator as becoming a director of sorts, presiding over bone puppets of her own.
Much like the repeated, mutating, mutable poem that repeats like a ritual throughout, the narrator has, in the epilogue, occupied the space of her victimizer, becoming the one who forces her bone puppets into action. It is this, the way in which the allegory never permits itself to be fully cognized, always casting the reader back into doubt—but without sacrificing the reader’s feelings of complicity with what he or she is reading—that marks Parkison’s work as experimental fiction worth seeking out and reading closely. - Brooke Wonders
Aimee Parkison, The Innocent Party, BOA Editions, 2012.
"Parkinson’s prose flows with a subtle, musical rhythm that only prose can achieve, and then rarely... Every sentence, every sentence, is exquisite."—Debrah Lechner, Hayden's Ferry Review
"Aimee Parkison most often begins softly, slowly stripping away each layer of social interaction to get at what is numinous and frightening and necessary about living in the real world. These are stories both about the difficulty and the intense suddenness of human connection, about the profound link that exists between being in love and being alone."—Brian Evenson
"Parkison is a storyteller, conjuring characters who harbor festering secrets, lurid urgencies, and violent compulsions. Like Joyce Carol Oates, Parkison deftly works the caricatures of Southern Gothicism into terrifying clarity.”—Joseph Dewey
From "The Glass Girl":
On certain evenings in dark motels, she could transform her lip into the edge of the bottle, imagining her face was made of amber glass and the men paused above her only to take a drink of breath. Over the years, men drank and drank until there were only two sips left inside. They began sucking the air out of the glass that grew warm in the wrong places because of heat radiating off their hands. The men's breath along with white feathers fell over autumn winds drifting through open windows.
In this collection, Kurt Vonnegut Fiction Prize–winner Aimee Parkison's characters struggle to understand what happens when the innocent party becomes the guilty party. With magical realist flair, secrets are aired with dirty laundry, but the stains never come clean. Carol Anshaw writes, "Aimee Parkison offers a distinct new voice to contemporary fiction. Her seductive stories explore childhood as a realm of sorrows, and reveal the afflictions of adults who emerge from this private geography."
The work in this volume by Aimee Parkison could be classified as imaginative realism, and while one of the pleasures of her writing is that it transcends categorization, these stories overwhelmingly do justice to that categorization, perhaps even elevate it.
The piece "Locked Doors" was satisfying to read, and exemplifies many of the stories in this collection. This particular story is organized in sections of doors: bedroom doors, car doors, and breakdown doors and doors of the imagination. This enhances the lyricism that Parkinson is so adept at utilizing.
At the same time, this story also incorporates a familiar narrative form, told from the point of view of a boy whose sister Gale shatters into three, and this story line is irresistible. His sister’s other two names are Ruby Canyon and Marilynn Glass, and each of them has just the right mix of reality and unreality to make their characters unforgettable.
But perhaps the piece most brilliant is a mere two pages long, "Murder on the Pasture." I must have read this two dozen times, so that the spine of the book, though not yet broken at that place, is inclined to open at page fifty-five.
This piece appears to be set in the Oklahoma dust bowl, and be a monologue by the ghost of a 17-year-old girl, but oh, that description is quite inadequate and almost irrelevant: though I spent a couple read-throughs attempting to determine just who was talking to me (because the narrator addresses the reader) by the third time through it was obvious that who I was listening to was mostly up to me.
It was not an entirely new experience to become part of a writer’s process of creation as a reader, but this was one of the few times I felt it was entirely successful.
"Murder on the Pasture" quietly bypasses the very significant perils of reminding the reader that they themselves exist by simply beginning with a short description of the pasture, and then laying down the rules:
“Touch the door to my old house and you’re in this, too.”
And you know you want to touch that door, open it, so you’re in this. The turmoil you’re going to experience begins immediately with the next short, arresting sentence:
“Red paint peels like skin.”
Hallelujah. When five words can have that kind of effect on me, it renews my faith in writing.
Parkinson’s prose flows with a subtle, musical rhythm that only prose can achieve, and then rarely. It is such a gift, and she never uses it more powerfully than in "Murder on the Pasture." Every sentence, every sentence, is exquisite.
Aimee Parkinson has received a Christopher Isher Fellowship, a Kurt Vonnegut Fiction Prize, other awards, and has been published in numerous journals. She can also write. Boy, can she write.
I am inclined, for the first time, to quote a blurb on the back of the book:.
“These stories are like running a finger around a seemingly smooth edge of glass―you don’t know you’ve been cut until you bleed.”―Cris Mazza
I wish I had said that.
Do yourself a favor and read this book. - Debrah Lechner
The stories in Woman with Dark Horses are atmospheric and dark, incorporating murder motifs and dissociated voices and characters. Mazza praised the collection's "raw, loosely sewn, sinuous narratives which surprise the reader frequently with astonishing climaxes — frequently a lack of climax where, in a different tradition, there seemingly should have been one." "A keen eye and ear for unique detail are at work here," said Mazza.
"These sometimes violent, sometimes visionary stories haunt the reader for days, and make the ordinary world look stranger." -- Alison Lurie, author of Foreign Affairs and Boys and Girls Forever
"Aimee Parkison offers a distinct new voice to contemporary fiction. Her seductive stories explore childhood as a realm of sorrows, and reveal the afflictions of adults who emerge from this private geography." -- Carol Anshaw "With a poet’s eye for resonant imagery and a cinematic sense of fractured pacing, Parkison’s stories live on the page as in few first books I have ever read. What a debut. Starkly beautiful, unflinching, unpredictable, and compelling as dreams, the after-images of this book will remain on my eyelids for a very long time." -- Mark Cox author of Thirty-Seven Years from the Stone and Smoulder "Aimee Parkison's stories always surprise us, telling of the search for elusive identities, the quest for slippery selves and for what it means to be human, a woman. Her narratives lure us through many permutations of connection into a world as marvelous as it is mysterious, showing how fictions are usually truer than facts. Parkison is an exciting and memorable new voice." -- Robert Morgan "Lyrical, murderous, quietly vicious, Woman with Dark Horses is a disturbing and brilliant collection from a writer destined to be a force in contemporary fiction. This debut--reminiscent, to my thinking, of Angela Carter, Christine Schutt, and William Faulkner--positions Aimee Parkison as both an experimentalist and a Gothic Southerner. With a cold, precise eye these stories mine the darkest terrains, unearthing great terror, great beauty." -- Aaron Gwyn "In Woman with Dark Horses Aimee Parkison most often begins softly, slowly stripping away each layer of social interaction to get at what is numinous and frightening and necessary about living in the real world. These are stories both about the difficulty and the intense suddenness of human connection, about the profound link that exists between being in love and being alone." -- Brian Evenson
Fearless and surprising, Parkison's stores are not meant to be summarized, analyzed, or categorized. Rather, like the most memorable pleasures, these dream paintings told with vivid color and startling images, must be experienced. For example, from "Collecting": ". . . the case bounced hard on her right knee. Inside, the lemon seeds poured out of the pouch and trickled over her mother's wedding ring, the dog's tooth, the blue bottle, and one of Shane's eyelashes. When she lifted the case over her head to put the strap around her neck she heard the woman who used to live in the burned house pouring cereal into a bowl before the storm." As readers are taken on a wild ride into the subconscious, they learn that even as Parkison reveals her characters1 darkest secrets, holding nothing back, she also protects them. The character in Baroness with Strange Eyes tells readers: "Not even Mother knows what it1s like for me walking from one mirror to another . . . Whenever I1m alone, I undress in front of the long mirror in my room and confirm my darkest suspicions. My breasts are gone. . . . Scrutinizing my thighs and stomach, I cup the small weight of my hips in my hands and chastise myself for what food I1ve eaten." Parkison's faith in readers is deep and wide and, as she earns readers' trust, they will trust her in return, because she deserves it. A stunning collection. - G. Duberchin
What Happened with Gilbert That Night
Allison's Idea
Theater of Cruelty
Aimee Parkison talks about what inspires her:
In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner writes that the “fictional dream that will eventually fill the reader’s mind begins as a largely mysterious dream in the writer’s mind. Through the process of writing and endless revising, the writer makes available the order the reader sees. Discovering the meaning and communicating the meaning are for the writer one single act.”
Perhaps this explains why I find inspiration behind my eyelids before falling asleep. My mind reveals strange and beautiful things before I lose consciousness. Who knows what this means? In that moment when the unconscious mind takes over to let the conscious mind rest, images like paintings of people and places appear in flashes. Some of the flashes linger and start to stick to each other, connecting to make stories, dreams. Unfortunately, I sometimes forget them upon waking.
I write from two minds: the unconscious mind that finds surrealist truth in illogical images in the midst of disconnection and the conscious mind that longs for control and wants to make everything logical, creating meaning, even when there is none.
Years ago, I began a story by imagining a lonely woman who has an affair with the ghost of her lesbian lover, who committed suicide. “Dummy” is the only “ghost story” I’ve written so far, yet it’s shaped by reality and the conventions of contemporary literary fiction. In writing this “ghost story,” I learned something about life. I was able to answer questions I had been asking for a long time: Why do people commit suicide, and what happens to those left behind? I’ve known people who have committed suicide—some of them in my own family—and these are the questions that remain.
This is what my stories are about—not the “damage” of living but what damage makes possible in the lives of survivors. In “Paints and Papers,” an alcoholic artist is attacked; a young boy hits him on the head with a lead pipe. The “damage” to the artist’s brain allows him to paint the world in new ways. Damage is like that—it changes our lives so that everything we see is suddenly altered.
The more I learn from my characters, the more something odd starts to happen. The guilty suddenly appear innocent, and the innocent appear somehow guilty. This is probably why I became a fiction writer—to gain some sort of control over everything that’s raging out of control. I’m a storyteller, attempting to communicate with the heart as well as with the mind.
Moral ambiguity changes the nature of “reality” in my book, The Innocent Party. In “Warnings,” a dyslexic teen runs away from home to have a love affair with a divorced sheriff, only to realize her attraction to the sheriff is connected to her missing father and her memories of murder. In her mind, a secret is born. That secret will always be part of her.
I wrote “Allison’s Idea” in a single night in college, after waking from a vivid dream I wrote in longhand. In that story, a group of lonely college girls go on the black market to buy children to keep as pets and learn a startling truth about people and animals. Readers who are parents often ask me about this story. They say it frightens them and that they’ll remember it for a long time. It also frightens me, even though I have no children of my own.
“Allison’s Idea” was birthed on a sleepless night, but the story was born—fully formed. My other stories are sometimes born without hands, missing faces or eyes, without legs. I have to perform a sort of triage to save them; my workspace becomes a narrative ICU to keep damaged, wounded, and unformed stories alive so they can grow and heal in revision.
The mind is a womb, but some stories are born too soon. How does one attempt to save them? Should they be saved?
The shortest time it has taken me to write a story is ten minutes. That story was a flash fiction – a poem disguised as a story disguised as a poem. My story “The Glass Girl” was like that—written fast in a flash of light that came out of a lot of darkness. Very few stories come so quickly, but when they come that way, as flashes, they are gifts.
The longest time it has ever taken me to write a story is ten years. That ten-year story was no better and no worse than the ten-minute story. It was just different—written from a different place, a different mood, and a different state of mind. It was a struggle, a battle rather than a pure flash of inspiration.
Even when I’m most alone, there’s always a sense of community while working, as I read to understand how to write. Brian Evenson, David Foster Wallace, Beth Nugent, Paul Bowles, Jane Bowles, Tobias Wolff, Amy Bloom, Charles Baxter, Lydia Davis, James Purdy, Joyce Carol Oates, and Raymond Carver are my favorite writers. When I first read David Foster Wallace’s “Little Expressionless Animals,” it was electrifying and opened my eyes to all sorts of possibilities about image, tone, mood, character, and narrative architecture. I remember wondering if a writer could get sued for some of the things that happen in a story. I remember wondering if it was risky to unlock the secret door, if that wasn’t what made the act of reading and writing worthwhile. - http://thestoryprize.blogspot.com/2012/05/aimee-parkisons-two-minds.html
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