Separation by Clare Sestanovich, 2021
The magic trick:
Demonstrating the cumulative effect of life’s events
It’s always exciting to read new(ish) authors and genuinely enjoy their work. This is a very good one here.
“Separation” presents us with a dramatic, tragic situation very matter-of-factly to start the story. Woman and man meet. Woman and man marry. Man gets sick and dies.
Its tone is almost flippant it’s so plainly delivered. The reader wonders if maybe the events aren’t as tragic as we assume. Maybe the woman in the story will turn out just fine.
And she is. But then again she isn’t. It’s not that simple.
The remaining story takes us through the decades following her husband’s death. The text moves quickly and covers a lot of ground, never ruminating too long on any particular situation or character – which can be frustrating when the particular situations are so intriguing as this that they seem to warrant entire novels.
But the particular situations are not the point here. This story is more concerned with the totality of the situations; the way episodes start and end throughout our lives and the cumulative effect that endless stream of hellos and goodbyes has on us as we grieve.
The tragic events of the story’s opening come and go like anything else. But, as the story demonstrates, their effect lingers on and on.
And that’s quite a trick on Sestanovich’s part.
The selection:
First, the mothers left the room for five minutes. This was just practice. They timed themselves and returned as soon as the second hand permitted.
“Ta-da,” they said, waiting to see relief mirrored on their children’s faces.
Next, the mothers said goodbye in earnest. Kate told them to wait in the hallway—in case. Sometimes children drifted out the door, crawling beside dump trucks or steering shopping carts of plastic produce, and were surprised to find the mothers hiding, towering over miniature chairs. They drove their trucks into the high heels or sensible flats blocking their way.
“Beep beep,” they said.
“Move,” they said.
Kate worked at the nursery school for too long.
The women she worked with had gray or orange hair and arms that jiggled when they scrubbed the tabletops. Kate wondered if she really belonged there. Her stomach sank between her hips, her muscles showed through her skin. She didn’t think this looked attractive. She thought it looked a little grotesque.
Each year, Kate separated a new group of children. Some of the mothers envied her stomach and her throaty neck, her bare face a reproach to theirs, which were painted gold and pink with time they didn’t have. There were occasions, Kate suspected, when they despised her. When their clothes were no longer clung to, when they entered the classroom and no one looked up. Or all the times in between, at a desk or a sink or a jammed-up intersection, when their children surged back into awareness, when the mothers realized—a crest of guilt and fear—how long they had managed to forget.
Short Story Magic Tricks 