The best fiction these days isn’t found at Barnes & Noble or your local bookstore. It’s coming out in small independent publishers, like newcomer Rejection Letters Press, which started out as an online literary magazine. I hope that they, and other indie presses, can thrive outside of the Amazon octopus. With books like Emily Costa’s Girl On Girl, maybe that’s possible.
Girl On Girl is a thin book. Nineteen stories in 110 pages. Costa’s stories aren’t quite “flash fiction”—they have more depth than just a short moment. Costa’s style might be called minimalism though—she assumes readers know what high school is like, or a high school party, so doesn’t let her stories bog down. Instead they zip along to their unexpected endings. I wouldn’t say they have punch, but there’s an energy that I’ve only read in the short stories of Kim Addonizio.
Costa generally uses normal paragraph breaks, though she can up the ante a bit with stream-of consciousness block paragraphs, like in “What Ever Happened To Glow Stick Girl?” which starts off the collections, and where she uses a “chant” repetition technique, used by Addonizio and also the poet Anne Waldman. Starting each line with “Remember how....” anchors the thoughts of the narrator, towards the ending, while also still sounding like how a young woman might talk excitedly:
Remember how at school dances they would sell tiny glow sticks for a dollar and you’d all buy them and hide in the seas of bodies slow dancing to Sixpence None the Richer and crack the glow sticks with your hands and then your molars, careful not to spill, and drip the glow in star-shapes on your arms? Remember when you thought the boys would notice that, would think how cool you all were as the luminosity enhances your gooped-on body glitter? And remember the girl who took it too far, who was at the fringe of your group, who was maybe looking for any fissure to squeeze into?
The characters in Girl On Girl are generally high-school age, and the stories are mini-comings of age. The title phrase is a porn search term, which is a clever way to make the book sexy, but the stories are mostly based around high=school girl relationships which can verge into ambiguous frenemy territory. Thus the “on” isn’t about “girl on girl sex” but more “girl on girl violence” or “girl on girl competition.”
Above all, Costa’s stories tend to end ambiguously, as if a short time period in the main character’s has opened up, then closed unexpectedly. There are no real resolutions to any tensions, much like Chekov, though a more modern comparison might be to Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son collection. This is the strength of the short story—allowing readers a visit into the mind of someone we might otherwise not want to spend time with.
Ambiguity is at its highest in the longest story of the collection, “Gavlik,” a story within a story, in which a twentysomething woman tells her boyfriend about an incident in high school with her science teacher, a Mr. (or he would say Dr.) Gavlik who, it seems to her, is eyeing her, and who, at some point, offers to help her move her B up to an A. To do so, he tells her to come to his office. The woman telling the story says she was aware that it sounded like some quid pro quo. She doesn’t go, and proceeds to tell all her friends (though not any authority figure) about his offer, so word gets around. The last she sees of Gavlik is him pulled physically from the school, yelling, “I did nothing! I did nothing!”
The woman narrating this story feels like Gavlik got what he deserved, and that she had something to do with it. To her surprise, her boyfriend is sympathetic to Gavlik: “It’s sad. It’s like his whole life was ruined.” The woman’s surprised at his reaction—she thought his sympathy would be with her. The implication is that this disagreement may signal the end of their relationship. Or at least a change.
The kicker detail is that, while she did not go into Gavlik’s office, she does say that she walks by the door right at the time he suggested. She even looks in to see if he’s there. He sees her, calls her name, but she leaves. Why did she even go that close? That’s the lingering question. But if she did nothing wrong, it seems that Gavlik didn’t either.
It’s unclear what Costa may think. I’d say that the situation is so ambiguous that there’s not enough evidence to fire a person, but other readers might disagree. That’s good writing, when your story generates a conversation.