Introducing Tess Allard

Tess Allard’s first published story, “All That is Beneath Pulls Me Down,” begins with a drowning: “Mateo fell into the water.” These first words, their directness, their open posture, hint at one of the story’s guiding principles. From its first line to its last, Allard’s story asks the reader, gently, to not turn away. It requests that we reside, alongside the characters, with a terrible secret. The reader feels not just permitted, but also subject to, the exquisite pain of the secret. The secret itself is achingly sad. Elias and Mia, brother and sister of Mateo, have seen the boy fall. They cannot save him. They pull his body from the water. Fearful, they hide the body between the roots of a tree, in a hole carved out by the river. A futile search takes place. Elias and Mia wait to be found out.

I had the pleasure of discovering Allard’s story when I was Fiction Editor at Hayden’s Ferry Review. It was the kind of submission that commands an editor’s attention immediately. Tess was previously unpublished, yet here was a story that seemed to understand something that more experienced writers frequently get wrong. It trusted the reader’s tolerance for the sometimes-painful “present moment” of a story. Her story was attentive, maybe even radically attentive, to our desire to inhabit the story’s present moment fully. Kevin McIlvoy calls this quality in stories: “Imminence.” He says in an essay, “The reader is always a child. And that child is always making a wish. To be a reader is to be a wisher willing the next moment into being.” Tess Allard’s story offers us imminence in a big way. She does not balk at our readerly desire to enter the story, to feel the shame and dread that Elias and Mia feel. Instead she ushers us further in and entreats us to feel more deeply. She keeps the camera focused tightly. The effects are often astonishing. Here is one of my favorite passages:

“Halfway through the afternoon Elias shut himself into the pantry and sat there among the cans of peas and condensed milk and dried bundles of chiles, his knees drawn up to his chest. No one looked for him, not even Mia. Strips of light came in through the high-up window, and he watched them shift with the passing of the sun. He spent a long time staring at the dried-out bodies of three flies. They lay beneath a shelf, thin and delicate as ashes, their tiny feet sticking straight up in the air like somebody dead in cartoons.”

This is the passage that hooked me. Another writer might have made the fatal mistake of swerving, of not lingering too long with Elias in his most heart-wrenching moments of pain, but Allard knows what the reader really wants. That is, to be there, beside Elias in the pantry, staring at the corpses of flies, sick with fear and shame.