Liquid Papers by Nicolette Polek, 2022
The magic trick:
Page-turning suspense
I wound up reading “Liquid Papers” about three years after it was published so I might be wrong, but as I remember it, this story created a minor buzz (minor buzz being quite major as far as short stories go) when it was new. Something akin to “Cat Person Lite.”
It certainly taps into our modern dilemma of a life lived so much online that we don’t – and really could never – truly know each other, even our closest loved ones.
Here, our protagonist finds a very brief start of a story written by her husband, apparently fantasizing about killing her. Ironically – given the aforementioned couching of our modern malaise as an online problem – the story is found written by hand in a notebook tucked behind the bed. Anyway…
The plot moves quickly from there and brilliantly ratchets up the suspense of a great thriller film, as our protagonist makes a series of strange (even to her) decisions that lead her into a precarious spot.
That right there is the magic trick. It really becomes quite the page-turner.
My complaint then would be that Polek almost immediately lets go of the rope. She releases the tension in a disappointingly vague conclusion that neither satisfies – at least for me – on either the level of plot or deeper meaning.
But the series of plot developments that brought on that tension in the first place? Outstanding and memorable. I just wish the story had stuck the landing.
And that’s quite a trick on Polek’s part.
The selection:
Perhaps it came from her own self-consciousness, or how an undergraduate degree in history led to what she considered to be a fixation on surfaces. What had started as a summer job pricing Staffordshire lamps and Regency-era tables for an auction house gave rise to a sticky eye for all jewelry and signed lithographs, imagining what they would look like in her own home.
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