Kyra Simone, Palace of Rubble

 

COUNTY FAIR

He hopes to fly a giant helium balloon a record twenty-five miles into the earth’s atmosphere and parachute down. This is a moment worthy of fanfare. Six teenagers stand with their heads spinning. A farmer throws down his pillow. A quarry worker lets his shoulders go weak. A communist boss kneels down in the street and begs the man in the balloon to stop. The crowd calls out to him with weary arms. ‘Fly off to new realms,’ they cry. This is what life has been like. Mothers make kites out of junk-mail leaflets searching for missing people. They fly them over houses that have fallen off the market. A lemon drops from the sky into the hands of the assistant who counts new shapes. she works for the chief. She is busy in his saddle. As he thrusts her the usual afternoon earthquake, tops spin, lakes threaten to flood, postmen ring doorbells with overwhelming force. Hunters drop their shotguns and explode with dreams of mounting their wives on walls. ‘This is no Sunday in the park,’ thinks the assistant. She spent her school years studying maps of the chief’s insides, and how, as he approaches nuclear disarmament, she finds herself quietly lost, unequipped for the weapons of Europe. After twenty-five years of extraordinary bad news about childhood obesity, the balloon inflates and floats away, leaving the gondola with the man inside on the ground. In Moscow, when this sort of thing happens, it is not unusual for a man to throw his face in a barrel. Today, a bit breezy. Tonight, clear, light winds. Tomorrow, plentiful sunshine.

I’m enjoying the assembled forty-nine self-contained short fictions of Brooklyn, New York-based writer and editor Kyra Simone’s full-length debut, Palace of Rubble (UK: Tenement Press, 2022). Cited as a collection of short stories, each comprised of a single, occasionally extended paragraph, the description almost seems an oversimplification: these assembled bursts of prose, layering and collaging phrase upon phrase, sentence upon sentence, towards something far deeper. As the back cover offers: “Initially inspired by a photograph of one of Suddam Hussein’s demolished palaces printed on the cover of a newspaper Simone found discarded on a café table during the fall of Baghdad in 2003, Palace of Rubble has since evolved into an accumulation of texts invoked by a historical moment spanning the eras of Bush, Obama, Trump, and into the present day.” Composed of exacting lines, she writes of a sequence of destructions, consequences and disconnections, even through the book’s design, that provides an impression of installation: a tangibility that text isn’t always allowed. She writes of losses and destruction, including those that have become cyclical, even ongoing. As the story “OBITUARY FOR MRS. H.” reads, towards the end: “Remembering her youth is like standing before a crowd of G.I.s, of which there will be no survivors. The screen is blank. The bed is empty. The planet turns. It moves invisibly, fuelled by the cries of women slipping into obscurity.”

Simultaneously dark and light, Simone’s incredibly agile fictions (interspersed with photographs by John Divola that add resonance to the book’s tone) are constructed via a concrete assortment of words, thoughts and ideas that flow, pivot and connect into each other, somehow managing to create a kind of occasional ethereality through direct means; she offers sentences that remain both separate and weave together to form an entirely new and different shape. “His death is announced Tuesday,” she writes, to open the story “STILL LIFE WITH PARROT,” “the same day he is buried in the village, the day of the great race. A day for bicycles to speed past maps of the universe sagging on walls, held up by women still trapped in Romanticism, searching other planets for signs of a second bloom. Dogs have long proved useful in detecting explosives, or to find bodies left by crime or disaster, but rarely do they find the men that are the most missed.”