Sibling Circus & Hooked by Meg Pokrass
In these two microfictions, “Sibling Circus” and “Hooked,” each under three hundred words, Meg Pokrass wields breathless, fragmented form to bring the reader into charged moments in the lives of her young narrators. In both pieces, form reveals emotion and emotion drives form. The unusual choice of diction contributes to the pace, the urgency, and the sense of disorientation. Both pieces draw the reader into a sense of motion, of being pulled along almost helplessly, much like the depicted children. “Hooked,” in particular, makes use of brevity to create a sense of danger, and the uncanny. The reader is dropped into the narrator’s memory just as the scene unfolds: “And that the time….” Each chosen word does its share, even the title, which brings to mind not only the story’s central metaphor, but also images of addiction, of being caught, even corrupted as the word echoes the name of the debased villain of a classic childhood story. What is unsaid here is just as crucial to the narrative. The story’s silences open the door to the reader’s imagination, allowing the reader to fill in the blanks with their own private horror. —CRAFT
Sibling Circus
My brother was addicted to dog biscuits and this might have been how our act started. When our mother arrived, he’d pop one in his mouth, throw one to the real dog and then toss one to me. I’d catch it in my teeth. “Good dogs, we are,” he’d say, watching me chew then patting me on the head, telling the other dog to sit pretty. Today Only Live And In Person. Him wearing my Bozo slippers, the real dog sniffing our mother’s jeans as if finding an old buried rabbit. The spectacle of all of us all being together again in the living room! Our father sometimes laughing, our visiting mother opening her milky eyes, saying, “bravo, bravo.” Shorebirds crying while circling our house as if hoping for comps. Our mother saying, “the light in this place is distressing.” My brother singing “Nellie the Elephant,” crooning directly to our mother with her tightrope smile. Papa, juggling old tennis balls. Our mother suddenly undoing the magic by glaring at him, saying, “you’re letting them eat dog biscuits again?” Papa dropping his balls, saying, “we need to drive your mother back now, can you give me a hand, kids?” Our mother with no resistance, rising like a dove from a hat, saying, “what will these terrible con artists think of next?”
Hooked
And that the time when Papa hooked me on my way to school. I was running and late and he said let’s go the other way Guppy because the day was too cheerful for school, and Papa was holding my hand, saying his new life adventure was ready to begin, and I had a part in it, he sure had a lot to tell me, when I noticed the stains on his shoes, the blotches on his shirt, and said to him are you doing okay, and he said your mama is not very kind, not like you, and he held my hand tight as a rose and I could feel the petals on his fingers bending to mine, and I said that this was fine and dandy by me I hated school anyway, and he said Guppy, I have purchased a big ol’ fish and the poor fish needs to be eaten today or it will rot from neglect and I said yay, he knows I like fish and Mama does not. What does it taste like I asked, is it white or is it pink? It’s good and firm he said, just the way a fish tastes when you catch it before it’s full grown, so I laughed and I let him lead me home to his sad old fish, to his house with his paintings of girls like me all over his walls. And I stood there feeling jiggly, almost glad to be back with him. I was his daughter again, whatever she said to me didn’t matter, and that was how it happened. That was how I became a fish who never knows what ocean it wants to swim in.
MEG POKRASS is the author of nine collections of flash fiction and two novellas in flash. Her work has been published in three Norton anthologies of flash including Flash Fiction America, New Micro, and Flash Fiction International; Best Small Fictions 2018, 2019, 2022, and 2023; Wigleaf Top 50; and hundreds of literary journals including Electric Literature, McSweeney’s, Washington Square Review, Split Lip, storySouth, and Passages North. Her new collection, The First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories by Meg Pokrass, is forthcoming from Dzanc Books in late 2024. Find her on Twitter @megpokrass.
Featured image by Dannie Jing, courtesy of Unsplash.
