Any Further West by Kali Fajardo-Anstine, 2014
The magic trick:
Putting a young protagonist in the role of parenting her childlike parent
It’s Christmas in California in today’s story.
Lovely as that might sound, it doesn’t play out so great for our protagonist. She’s been moved from her Colorado home with her beloved grandmother to chase some kind of California dream that her mother has. It’s not going well. So when her mother decides that they will spend a special Christmas together with her boyfriend/landlord, our protagonist is not optimistic.
It’s a classic tale of role reversal – the parent as the child; the child as the adult. And the reader is left to cringe and hurt with every word.
And that’s quite a trick on Fajardo-Anstine’s part.
The selection:
On Christmas morning, I woke up from a dream of snow. When we lived in Saguarita, I would have run to the living room to hug my mother, kiss my grandmother, and open my stocking filled with practical gifts. The kind no one wants but everyone needs – socks, underwear, floss, ChapStick. I walked through my mother’s bedroom and opened her closet. My face was against her things. Cheek to sleeve, lips to collar, nose to cotton. I fell into her jackets and blouses, dresses and skirts. I breathed in, smelling a thousand different spices, all of them sweet.
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