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Reviewed by:
  • Thieves I’ve Known by Tom Kealey
  • Raul Palma (bio)
Tom Kealey. Thieves I’ve Known. University of Georgia Press.

Winner of the 2012 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, Tom Kealey’s debut collection of stories, Thieves I’ve Known, joins a thirty-year tradition at the University of Georgia Press of bringing emerging writers to a national readership. Stories in his collection have appeared in Story Quarterly, Glimmer Train, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Kealey is perhaps best known for his work in the Creative Writing MFA Handbook.

“Introduction, or Nobody,” the first story in Kealey’s collection, follows brother and sister, Nate and Merrill, as they finish their shift at the grocery store and wander home. Kealey writes, “Nights at the store, the brother and sister bagged the groceries.” Referring to Nate and Merrill first by their relationship to one another, rather than by their names, intensifies the intimacy of their sibling bond. In a sense, Kealey sets the tone for his collection here by drawing attention to the intimate relationships of his characters. The blurb on the dust cover claims that “most people don’t see” the kinds of characters Kealey writes about. While this is explicit in “Introduction, or Nobody” with customers who simply nod and [End Page 179] thank the siblings for their help, Kealey’s narrative is intent on following Nate and Merrill past the bright lights of the checkout line.

Outside the supermarket, the setting seems otherworldly. At the train tracks, “They waited, watched the dark boxcars . . . the moon ahead, low. It seemed the train might be headed there.” Later, cutting through a cemetery, Nate and Merrill find a line of nameless tombstones; these are unclaimed nobodies, immigrants burnt alive in a warehouse fire. The ghosts of these immigrants are said to haunt the grounds; the ghosts might reach up from the earth and snag trespassers’ names, “And after that, you [are] just nobody,” legend states. But Merrill isn’t afraid; she feels the ghosts can have her name if it will do them any good. What she cherishes cannot be stolen: harmless shenanigans at work, a walk with her brother through a quiet neighborhood, a game that involves looking through strangers’ windows and imagining their secret lives.

One of the great strengths of this collection, which is about many things—triumph within hardship, social exclusion, basic human kindness, redemption, transposition—is the way that Kealey represents the youth and marginalized, not as victims in an unforgiving society but as real people, misunderstood, flawed, carrying their humanity on their shoulders as they actively engage and seek out community and companionship. Like many of Kealey’s characters, Nate and Merrill live on the edges of society; they are undervalued people on the move, nobodies stationed within America’s economic machine, scraping by in menial but interesting roles. Their economic roles in society, however, hardly construct their identity. Many of the characters in Kealey’s collection are poor and working to get by, and they are often most concerned with the relationships they have to one another, which makes them endearing and sympathetic characters that are worth rooting for.

In “From Bremerton,” for example, Shelby accompanies Phillip, a boy from her trailer park whom she has a crush on, as he steals his way across Washington State to visit his imprisoned mother. Without enough cash to get there and back, Phillip and Shelby hitchhike, sneak onto a ferry, solicit a drive from a crazy-eyed barber named Otis. Along the way, they repay the strangers they meet with origami. Tucked into the pockets of strangers or placed on dashboards are paper figurines left in the wake of their journey; these figures, produced by Phillip and Shelby, are a sort of intimate currency, offered to kind strangers in place of monetary rewards. While these origami figures have no real value, they act as symbolic gestures that interrupt the expectations of traditional economic exchanges. Otis, who was at first reluctant to help Phillip and Shelby reach the prison, later finds himself in a state of wonder over the small paper frog they offer him: “Otis was leaning forward, against the wheel, flicking the back...

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