Lisa Fishman, World Naked Bike Ride: Stories

 

Magic

Here it is summer and Else has forgotten something. She knows she has forgotten something—it is a distinct feeling—but she does not know what she has forgotten. The distinct feeling is a sureness shaped around a gap.
            Another time, she was remembering what hadn’t happened yet. Andre had not yet pulled a hat out of a rabbit’s mouth but he would do so when she forgot. Now there was black silk sliding along the rabbit’s pink tongue. Hat coming out! Else put her hand to her head.

I’m behind on my prose reading, so I’m just now getting into Wisconsin-based poet Lisa Fishman’s debut work of fiction, World Naked Bike Ride: Stories (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2022). The author of a handful of poetry titles, including Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition (Wave Books, 2020) [see my review of such here], the stories assembled in World Naked Bike Ride hold a blend of contemporary and timeless fable, offering a distance around a gap, writing sly and sideways and delightful. “It was the summer we turned against heat and light,” opens the story “Starting as Someone Else,” “against daylight, the outdoors, sun. We were too hot and sought the night. Becuoming winter we thought we were, put to sleep by the sun, awake only in crisp cold air, light without heat: forest light or indoors or the moon’s. We weren’t picky but we needed to cool down.”

The stories throughout hold a variety of lengths, purposes and shapes, as Fishman’s fiction debut is built as a collection of moments, composing familiar stories with magical turns, providing a remarkable freshness to both prose and narratives, especially once echoes begin to appear, providing threads that begin to wrap in and around each other, linking moments between stories, between pages. Some stories are uniquely surreal, some rather straightforward, each of which allowing a bleed into the other. Some stories suggest a meandering, but one that is purposeful, slow. These are some very fine stories assembled into a very fine collection, with every moment held in its exact space, such as the story “Mean Sun Time in Halifax,” that begins:

I was thinking about Edna O’Brien and a sentence she wrote: “Everything began to be better for Mrs. Reinhardt from the moment she started to sleepwalk.” At the time that I was thinking about Edna O’Brien’s sentence about Mrs. Reinhardt, I was walking from one winding path to another and crossing unexpected footbridges over streams. Some of the paths lead to fountains and some to a large pond where people used to skate all winter when the pond still froze in the Public Gardens. All of the paths are shaded by towering trees, so many that it is really a garden of trees, carefully tended so as not to become a forest.