People I Wanted to Be
by Gina Ochsner
(Mariner Books) $12

Gina Ochsner’s second book of short stories, People I Wanted to Be, is concerned mainly with these subjects: dead people, living people thwarted by dead people, people who get stabbing headaches, people who fish, dead animals, dead children, and birds. Most of these were center-stage subjects in Ochsner’s first collection, The Necessary Grace to Fall, a book that I recommended several times in print and continue to love. That book won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, which seemed fitting, and was published in beautiful hardback by the University of Georgia Press (and because it was published in hardback by a university press, subsequently disappeared). The stories in The Necessary Grace to Fall were moody and stunning, but there was something blurry and distant about a lot of them—it was one of those books where the author has the characters spend an awful lot of time staring toward the sky.

The stories in this new book are bolder, smarter, and less ghostly—although there are ghosts everywhere (including three in the first story). There is also sex: “Evin recalled his lovemaking sessions with Irina: they were grim affairs, lacking joy, which, he had discovered, was not the same as passion, which they also lacked.” In another story, the prettier half of a pair of identical twins makes out with her “lopsided,” less-attractive sister. Shortly thereafter, she dies.

In another story, in another story, in another story—short story books are hard to sell and hard to review. I’ll be brief: You should buy this book. It is packed with greatness. These three stories below are, to me, the best. The one story that originally appeared in the New Yorker doesn’t even make my cut.

“Last Words of the Mynah Bird”

It’s the second story in the book and it’s narrated by a 38-year-old fat man with an overbite. (By the way, the first story is maybe the weakest in the book, and actually both of these stories end with characters staring toward the sky.) The narrator comes home with a mynah bird with “glossy black feathers” because he thinks it will calm his tumultuous marriage. They name the bird Tima, and they wait for him to start talking, because mynah birds are talkers. Eventually he does. He says all the things he has picked up from them, things like, “Shut your cake hole” and “How can you live?” He makes them famous, and their marriage so much worse. They can’t get him to shut up: “I secretly longed for an aircraft to drop on half the apartment and level Tima to a pulp.” I won’t give away the ending. Flight is involved.

“The Hurler”

The shortest story in the collection and easily the weirdest. It reminds me of George Saunders’ stories: absurd premise, heavy on mortality, a funny narrator. The narrator’s parents have just died, and it’s her job to clean out their house. She constructs a machine that hurls furniture, trash, dead animals—whatever—over a fence and into a dump. She pitches her father’s stuffed hedgehog, Ferdinand, and as she sets him on the machine she says, “Sorry, Ferdinand.” She hurls things for other people. She hurls her friend Simon’s mother. She hurls people’s ripped-out hearts. Then she rips out her own heart and puts it on the machine.

“From the Fourth Row”

Jiri is a nervous artist with small hands, small teeth, and zero charm. He lives in an apartment in Prague that he shared with his mother until she died, and he paints illustrations for an advertising company (advertisements for hangover pills, housing complexes, photocopiers). His work begins to look odd, and then just bad, and then it begins to rebel—the characters in his sketches get up and move around and say things to him like “We feel stifled” and “Give us something better.” The blood pounds in Jiri’s ears, causing a “five-alarm cluster headache,” and he wonders if he’s sick or crazy, wonders if he has a bad heart, wonders how a girl in his drawings can have “sultry grace” even as he is unraveling. There is unrequited love in the story—he offers a light to a pretty girl in the office and burns his thumb, burns “the specific part of my thumb that was paying my rent”—and a riotous outdoor clock, and smooth trains, and pills, and a lot of sharp agony. There is a moment when he stands in his apartment and he shouts, “Slay me now!” There are fleeting thoughts about cosmogony and magic. The final moment is clear, unforced, and amazing.

Gina Ochsner reads at Elliott Bay Book Company (101 S Main St, 624-6600) on Sat May 21 at 3 pm. You should go. It’s free.