SPEED READING: Small, Burning Things / Cathy Ulrich
Small, Burning Things
Cathy Ulrich
Dinner Bell
Review by
Lauren Parker
Welcome to Speed Reading, our fast, occasionally flippant, review column where we attempt to spread the love of a recent new release in a very short amount of time. We’ll take the time to find some incredible books, you spend your time reading some incredible books.
So, what’s Small, Burning Things?
Small, Burning Things is a collection of flash fiction that is part folktale, part omen, part prophecy.
And, who’s the author?
Cathy Ulrich
What’s their deal?
Cathy Ulrich is a flash fiction powerhouse who incorporates fabulism and surrealism into character study.
What’s a single reason to read Small, Burning Things?
Because in the high summer fires, you have thrown open a trapdoor to only find another trapdoor, and then another, and then another, and now you smell smoke every time you fumble with a latch.
What are a couple more reasons to read Small, Burning Things?
An emotionally arresting collection, the brief fiction stories has the impact of stealing your breath before the break of a storm. It’s about women and motherhood and despair, and the form of flash fiction is so compelling for these stories that you’ll wish there was more.
If you’re a fan of these books, you should give Small, Burning Things a chance:
The New Low by Jennifer Lewis
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
The Moons of Jupiter by Alice Munro
A small taste of Small, Burning Things:
They tell you that your sister has died, and you are lying in the bottom half of the bunk bed and looking up at the empty space above you and thinking, I know, I know, I know.
Your sister was born twelve minutes before you were. She has always existed in this world before you. You feel the minutes stretching out between you, the hours, the says. You feel yourself growing older, older, older than she ever will.
A little more from Lauren Parker:
Books are built to make the reader feel something and sometimes feelings are long and wide and tall and loud.
Death once knocked at my door. It wrapped itself in plague, the sort of howling that breaks blood vessels in your cheeks and around your eyes. A dramatic finery.
I was in the bath. I had tossed in the usual self care bath items - a glacier and a cliff of salt, so that I could feel what it was like to be Earth, a great melting thing, that dissolved into only the depth of the sea.
But Death burned hot, and soon the walls, the floor, and the ceramic of the tub started to melt in its fire.
But still, as the heat seared everything around me, the rose wallpaper, the sandalwood soap, the lipsticks liquified into a murky puce, I held the melting ice block to my chest and felt the gentle surrender to salt.
Small, Burning Things made me feel that.
