A Record of Our Debts by Laura Hendrix Ezell

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Record of Our Debts by Laura Hendrix Ezell Jamie Utphall Laura Hendrix Ezell. A Record of Our Debts. Moon City Press, 2016. The 2016 winner of the Moon City Press Short Fiction Award, Laura Hendrix Ezell’s debut short story collection takes place in a gothic post-apocalyptic South, in which a cast of feral characters grapple with deprivation, loss, and monstrosity. Before each story, a passage labeled “Heresay” tangles readers’ perception, creating a grotesque web in which the boundaries between narrative and myth, and the real and the unreal, dissolve murkily across the interconnected stories. Presenting a battered, sometimes dreadful version of humanity, Ezell’s collection explores both the heartbreak and redemption of characters left savagely abandoned in decay’s wake. The collection’s characters struggle to survive in a rural wasteland, in which food, resources and even fertility are scarce, yet the horrors Ezell intimates most deftly are those that could affect any of us, at any time or place. In the magical realist story “Flight,” Rachel gives birth to Isabel, an “owlish child,” who “shredded the bottom of the blanket she was wrapped in, all the while shrieking and slapping her wings against herself, the sounds of it like a far-off storm of locusts fighting the wind.” Such Hitchcockian descriptions demonstrate Ezell’s ability to defamiliarize the commonplace anxieties of parenting to reveal a mother’s shameful fear of never truly understanding her own daughter. Later, the story leaps in time to describe Rachel’s concern for Isabel’s imminent coming of age, which Ezell symbolizes as a premonition in the form of a giant owl: “Rachel saw it as a hole swallowing the uppermost branches of the tree—a passage of sorts, the hungry, open mouth to a darker world.” As Isabel approaches womanhood, Rachel vacillates between grieving the loss of her baby girl while confronting the profound disgust she feels towards this foreign, unnatural creature. Ezell portrays how Rachel must come to terms with the realization that her offspring is entirely different from herself. For Rachel, as perhaps for many parents, it seems extraordinary for children to grow up, to refuse protection, and stretch their wings beyond their parents’ reach. Thus, while Ezell’s landscape is something freakish and sometimes macabre, her characters’ battles with such fundamental human conflicts reveal their recognizable humanity. However, Ezell also portrays the darker, bestial side of humankind, especially in the collection’s titular story. In “A Record of Our Debts,” the towns-people of Abel blame a young disabled child for the curse of “the damps,” a mysterious illness that leaves their community “wobbling and mumbling,” and subject to torrents of animal rage. The story is narrated sympathetically by Selma’s unnamed older sister, who witnesses not only the townspeople’s,’ but also her own parents,’ desire to turn on her sister. Ezell portrays Selma suffering from “blood fits” and eating wood with her “legs splayed, kicking, swinging...teeth grinding, shiny wet lips, and... dark little mouth chewing hard,” yet Ezell’s narrator notices Abel’s townspeople aren’t all that different: “some people pretend it’s only her...Crazy Selma, they’ll say, and laugh. And then they’ll go back to chewing the bloody skin around their fingernails, hoping nobody notices who else is sick right along with her.” In a scene reminiscent of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, the townsmen arrive for Semla, “wild past fearing guns, or needing them.” The narrator notices her best friend Lon Henry, an eleven-year-old boy with a twisted leg, has joined the mob. But Lon convinces the older men to retreat. Ezell’s rhyming disability across characters demonstrates the irony of bigotry. The real tragedy of the story is not its senseless violence but how such atrocity is paid as necessary tender. But for the narrator, these reparations bring no relief. Thus, Ezell’s telltale strength is juxtaposing the sinister landscape against the wisdom and humanity of her narrators. In addition to Ezell’s evocative rendition of the horrors of the post-apocalyptic gothic South, she [End Page 28] also illustrates the unlikely places in which grief and hope tangle and persist...