Reviewed by Erin Vachon
Naked Ana and Different Tales
by Robert Shapard
Regal Home Publishing
February 2025, Paperback, 128 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1646035328
Within the title story to Robert Shapard’s first full-length assortment, Naked Ana and Different Tales (Regal Home 2024), two expectant dad and mom go to a tattoo studio above Honolulu Harbor to get a prenatal tattoo, “a priceless present” for his or her unborn baby. “It’s your id at beginning; it says your dad and mom care.” By way of the recent lens of speculative metaphor, Shapard unpacks entrenched pre-birth id rituals, like our world’s gender reveal social gathering pattern. An expectant mom, Ana is the uncommon human who walks the world naked of tattoos. (Arguably: trans icon.) She declares: “I don’t need my child’s identify tattooed on her like a label.” She rejects the identification figuring out a child earlier than their first breath. In the meantime the narrator-father frets over the kid’s first tattoo inside the womb. If not a reputation, then a coronary heart? A rose? As soon as Ana goes into labor, the supply nurse is “not within the tat, however getting the infant into Ana’s arms,” whereas the physician broadcasts: “Congratulations. That’s a nice dragon.” Shapard’s writing reveals that who we love usually will get misplaced beneath the yoke of what we wish them to be.
A spectrum of characters populates the prismatic flash in Naked Ana. Each story sings a shock or a change of perspective. A pair honeymoons in Wakiki, however the husband falls off a twelfth-floor balcony. A younger lady in a leotard flips an inconceivable set in entrance of a judges’ panel. A climate forecaster flies off – to not one other tv station – however on a renegade climate balloon.
The prose in Naked Ana all the time slices clear, essential of uninvestigated motives, whereas deeply compassionate towards the susceptible at coronary heart. In “Thomas and Charlie,” named after a personality’s mispronunciation of “Tamazunchale,” two dad and mom and a baby drive to Mexico Metropolis on trip behind a backfiring diesel. When the diesel slams right into a pickup truck pushed by “a village household,” the narrator’s dad and mom fret in loops over serving to, resorting to doing nothing in any respect: “‘They’ve acquired assist,’ my father stated. . . ‘They’ll name for assist,’ my father stated. . .’However what if there’s no phone?’ my mom stated. ‘How will they name for assist?’” Because the mom insists that providing support will result in blame, even arrest, the household drives on. The narrator, a baby grown into grownup remembering the journey, calls Tamazunchale “a number of whitewashed homes in a dusty bend,” evading the whitewashed nature of the journey itself. He displays, “I understood solely that my mom and father have been misplaced,” however neither does the narrator outline a transparent path of his personal.
Shapard circles automotive accidents once more in “Motel.” Two lovers smash right into a motel room after a pickup cuts them off, disturbing a person sleeping inside. A brand new trio weighs a violent occasion: not dad and mom and baby, however two lovers and their witness. They drink bourbon to kill the trauma, disguising drinks they downed on the street. Alongside “Thomas and Charlie,” the characters stew over complicity, then surprise methods to sneak out of blame. Shapard holds all three in an odd snow globe of time, strangers remodeled into familiars, revealing how trauma tends to drag each other nearer, remoted from the bigger world.
Shapard’s delicate hand at intimacy makes his love tales a specialty. Within the lovely “Aperçus,” lovers who’ve solely recognized one another a month channel the idea of aperçu, instants of cosmic consciousness for somebody to consciously declare aloud: “That is the that means of my life.” Andy asks Amanda to marry him, even nonetheless married himself, a lot to the world’s doubt. Shapard’s prose unfurls in Amanda’s opening consciousness: “The imaginative and prescient grew, a phenomenal dwelling lacework of pure patterns – the return of spring rains, the music returning. . .Is that this the that means of my life? she questioned. In the identical second, she realized that regardless of the that means of her life was, she had to decide on. An aperçu couldn’t inform her what to do.” Shapard (and Amanda) flip towards love with deep generosity and vulnerability, permitting romance to bloom in methods each destined and chosen on the web page.
However Shapard reveals that decades-long love surges as heat as ever, if by a distinct shade. An extended-married couple in “Cardinals” anticipate a Viagra to work, overcome by a flock of feminine cardinals on the window and confused on the shade of their plumes. “I assumed cardinals have been pink.” Possibly the birds know one thing people don’t: “So cardinals divorce?” Their earned intimacy softens mutual concern, providing want that blooms softer, however simply as brilliant.
In “Two Phenomena of Roughly Equal Significance,” two lovers orbit one another like spacecraft of their thirties post-divorce, years after three dates in faculty. “He favored to kiss the within of her knee. She couldn’t perceive why, however was affected person about it.” She feels “bitter and snarky” after her breakup, involved that she silences her lover. Whereas he performs at docking a ship inside her, she hopes for simultaneous breakthrough: “Now we have to dock collectively.” The difficulty is: he’s already inside. Do objects in house fly by one another, perpetually alone? “Are you going to knock first?” she asks, then surrenders: “‘By no means thoughts,’ she stated, ‘I’ll simply preserve speaking. . .Simply preserve…knocking.”
Shapard knocks one final time “On the Again Door,” turning capitalism into the need engine to harmful impact. Hoffpauer repossesses automobiles for the financial institution. The job pays him to grab gadgets from individuals who “can’t make funds with no job.” The financial institution is a grasping mouth, by no means glad. The financial institution needs “these small planes parked in potholed airstrips up and down the Mexican aspect of the border, and the financial institution needs them now, as in yesterday.” Hoffpauer will get “horribly crushed,” virtually shot, and falls forty toes by means of the air. Capitalism retains consuming. When the knock comes, it’s for the unsuspecting reader: “Up the again steps, knock, knock, knock. Who might it’s? You open the door.”
Shapard asks, “Will you reply?”
Order Naked Ana and Different Tales from Regal Home Publishing.
Concerning the reviewer: Erin Vachon writes exterior Windfall, RI. They’re the Multigenre Reviewer-at-Giant for The Rumpus. Their writing seems within the Wigleaf High 50, Black Warrior Evaluation, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Pinch, DIAGRAM, Brevity, and The Anarchist Evaluation of Books, amongst others. Their writing was nominated for The Pushcart, Better of Web, Finest Microfictions, and Finest Small Fictions. They have been a SmokeLong Fellow for Rising Writers, they usually acquired an MA in English from The College of Rhode Island.
Evaluation first revealed in Smokelong Quarterly
