cover image Meat Eaters & Plant Eaters: Stories

Meat Eaters & Plant Eaters: Stories

Jessica Treat, . . BOA, $14 (159pp) ISBN 978-1-934414-22-4

In her skillful third collection, Treat offers short, sharp glimpses into her characters' yawning existential anxiety. A wife vanishes from her home in the first tale, “Beached,” narrated by her husband who recalls her “fatal flaw” in seeking out crowded, noisy places in order to fill up the quiet inside her. Similarly, in “Hans and His Daughter,” a wife and mother abandons her home inexplicably, forcing her husband to care for their two-year-old and manage, sorrowfully but rather ingeniously. In the space of two pages, Treat can convey a powerful epiphany, such as the sad state of middle-aged love in “A Visit,” in which an emotionally stunted man prepares his home for a rendezvous with his married love interest, who already recognizes that they will never connect sexually. Moreover, Treat moves among different POVs with marvelous fluidity, as in the vivid and ferocious “More Than Winter or Spring,” about two girls who love and hate each other in equal, cunning measure. Treat has a keen eye for the floor-falling moment. (June)