A Girl Goes into the Forest

by peg alford pursell

A Girl Goes into the Forest is short stories that are slightly offset, eerie and intriguing. Halfway through the collection, you find yourself having bought a pair of prescription eyeglasses from a midnight craft fair–held in a warehouse in Greenpoint, Brooklyn–and are surprised when they actually show up to your small apartment mailbox, lenses intact.

The stories fit together—kind of. They barely overlap in their shared-not-shared reality spaces: a pink fingernail strumming on a desk; another buried deep a collective memory. Vaguely referenced, but clearly demarcated. Stories and their details don’t strive to elucidate but only muddle what it means to exist in the world. I picked the book up from the library after seeing it on the staff picks at Green Apple Books, in part because my faltering quest to complete The Wheel of Time skewed my reading list heavily male. I figured a collection of stories about how women move through the world would serve to counter-balance the male-centered power fantasies that were the plurality of my 2021 reading.

There is real bravery in presenting so many disjointed and abrupt tales, real danger that as many will fail to hit the reader as land in any meaningful way. Some stories are shorter than a page, some are thicker than mud, and it might serve as Rorschach test of Buzzfeed quiz to map out which stories meant what to whom. My Father and His Slim Beautiful Brunettes was, to me, the first remarkable note in the collection. It had the allegorical feel of Joyce Carol Oates. Moreover, its length served to juxtapose how well the micro essays carry weight in their scant few lines. It made everything up to that point better in hindsight.

Perhaps a Kite was an astounding—and extremely short—piece. Love Carnival, another standout, was nearer to standardized length and as perhaps my favorite of the entire work. It also left my the most uncomfortable, as I saw my own reflection far too clearly:

The pile of chopped onions was too large. She’d absentmindedly cut more than needed. Now she would have to set aside the extra or increase the amounts of the other ingredients—the carrots, the celery, and the olive oil, in which the vegetables would sauté, along with the garlic that her husband was still mincing. She didn’t want to suggest he mince more garlic. He would want to know why and the answer would lead to a debate on the merits of cooking more than what the recipe called for.

He liked precision. He preferred to adhere closely to a recipe…He paused in his story and waved his hand over the minced garlic. Was the amount correct, he wanted to know without asking. But he wouldn’t care if she were to say that it wasn’t quite enough. She know from experience he’d argue that he’d used three cloves, exactly as the recipe stipulated, and once again she would have to counter that all garlic cloves were not equal size.

There is more, much more, and it is all too uncomfortably close. Certainly worth a read, to me, for those three alone. I’m not certain whether the book found its stride or I found mine in reading it, but after a hesitant start I was compelled to return to the forest until there was nothing left to uncover.