Sophie Klahr and Corey Zeller, There Is Only One Ghost in the World

 

My mother was reading a book to me in bed when we saw the reflection of flames on my bedroom wall. Across the street, the neighbor’s house was burning. I remember being outside in my nightgown, barefoot, my feet in the runoff the firetruck bled, ambulance-men rustling onto the stretcher something dark. My parents told me later that our neighbor, the old woman I called Aunt Heppy, had died, and that her old white dog had died too, but that her German shepherd puppy had survived. It jumped through the big glass window of the living room, breaking the broad pane. At school, everything was uniform. The kids all wore the same outfits and their parents all had the same medications. You looked out the window most of the time. You learned more than anyone should ever know about the sky. You drew a line with a stick in the new snow and dared a friend on the other side to cross it. Once you cross it, you can never come back, you told him. He was reduced to tears, and you got in trouble, even though his explanation made no sense to anyone. They told me I could never come back, he wailed. Only when I was grown-up did I realize that it couldn’t be true, that the puppy could not have broken the glass. I asked my mother, and she admitted it wasn’t true.

Selected as the winner of the 2022 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest is Sophie Klahr and Corey Zeller’s collaborative There Is Only One Ghost in the World (Tuscaloosa AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2023), an accumulation of untitled self-contained first-person stories, none of which are each longer than a single page, that appear to connect or thread only loosely through structure and tone. I’m startled by how each narrative of seemingly random turns allows for a different kind of structure, one that composes fiction almost akin to the arc of a poem, moving from moment to moment, and allowing the collision and accumulation of these varying threads to provide connection only through the act of reading, and the reader themselves. There is nothing straightforward here, and there are some stunning and powerful moments throughout these pieces, woven into the larger fabric of this incredibly interconnected book-length quilt, offering wisdoms, comforts and important truths. “A girl you loved once loved you more and got angry when you didn’t love her like that,” the two of them write, “like, back enough. She is angry enough to say that you aren’t queer enough. This is always the problem—others drawing little boxes around your desire, waiting at a long panel like a spelling bee competition, waiting for you to fumble.” Another piece offers: “Optimism is a chandelier. It swings to one side catching some light. It swings back and catches the dark. Pessimism, on the other hand, is nothing but a weathervane, a lightning rod.” Or elsewhere: “A piece of what elegy can do is hold an absence by naming it, as if, by saying its endlessness, it is, for a moment fixed in time, when so often there seems no end to grief, only its opening. Even a poem on endlessness has an ending, a hand, for a moment, resting on one’s shoulder.”

The stories touch on, and even return, like a skipping stone bouncing across water, to subjects including queer desire, loneliness, trauma, politics and culture wars, hope and memory, one thought immediately following another, moving through moments and references that fade in and out of view with remarkable clarity. As one piece offers: “Being pansexual doesn’t mean that you are attracted to more people than anyone straight or gay might be. It just means that desire is a kaleidoscope, and you are all of the pieces inside.” I’m curious at how the back-and-forth between these two authors worked, exactly, if each composed individual pieces that bled together, or if each piece itself has the hands of both authors within; in a certain way, none of it matters. There are certain directions that make me wonder if a handful of pieces were written by one author over the other, but on the whole, the tone is incredibly consistent, providing a wonderfully coherent whole between these two writers, during the pandemic era. As they write as their “Note on Creation” at the end of the collection: “This book was written collaboratively over the course of eight months during the Coronavirus pandemic (November 2020-August 2021), in a single shared Word document, from six states away.” I’m now curious to see further of their individual works: on her part, Los Angeles poet and editor Sophie Klahr is the author of the poetry collections Meet Me Here at Dawn (YesYes Books, 2016) and Two Open Doors in a Field (Backwaters press, 2023), and Corey Zeller is the author of MAN VS. SKY (YesYes Books, 2013) and YOU AND OTHER PIECES (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2015), none of which I’ve seen (I’m clearly behind on my reading). Oh, this is a book I wished I’d written; and I am terribly jealous.

Fish have something in them called a lateral line—this is what helps their schools stay together. When they want to stay still, they face upward. Into the current. The day closes itself like an orphan’s locket, the lip of a candle resembling lace almost touching the inside of a thigh. Now, and only now, you fail to find a difference. Some handless beauty. Blinking and squinting at the clearest possible scene. Truth reversed does not make a lie. A lie reversed does not make truth. The truth of a person is different than the truth of the poem. You try to make a Venn diagram of this, but can’t figure out what to put in the third circle or in the pill shape of the intersection. A certain type of ants collect the skulls of other ants to decorate its nest. There is a type of shark that new theories say may have a lifespan of up to six hundred years. In Greenland, one is caught that scientists estimate as being between two hundred and seventy-two years old and five hundred and twelve years old. There are certain types of crystals in the eyes of this shark. The oldest type of poetry is poetry with a riddle inside.