Both Nostalgic and Sinister

In the language of dream, narrative moves differently. Time is elastic. Signifiers and symbols populate our dream worlds with seemingly perfect clarity. A teakettle or a dust mote might make an appearance and fill us with poignant emotion. Ten minutes after waking, the dreamer remembers a stray image or object, a sudden shift from joy to fear, and the dream unravels.

The stories in Jac Jemc’s A Different Bed Every Time have the uncanny ability to capture the time and movement of dreams without waking us from her dreams. Jemc achieves this through precise, clear, often poetic imagery, a pacing that interrupts standard expectations of traditional narrative, and an uncanny grasp of motifs and archetypal characters that are easily identifiable—the passive princess, the threatening bearded lover, the heroic prince and his kiss of life-giving magic. In these stories, Jemnc works on our pre-conceived notions of these archetypes and rips into them with language that is often surprising, and always deliberate. She is a fan of the metaphor, and this book is not easy reading. Metaphor and simile that would seem overwrought out of context sears and her sentences build and work off of one another. In “A Violence” the narrator “stuns herself with gin.” As the story gains momentum, Jemc breaks into staccato and for a moment, we could be inside Raymond Chandler’s hardboiled prose. “I drank too much coffee. The city felt like a pinball table, like I might slip between the sewer grates and become lost to the game.”

The stories in this collection are at times meditations on a theme: violence, desire, loss. Some, like the stand-out story “Bent Back,” take a more traditional approach to narratives and plot, yet still break with expectations. In this piece, an adolescent girl is diagnosed with scoliosis, which, she tells us with the poignant vulnerability and bravado of smart kid (or a woman remembering what it is to be a smart kid) is basically her “spine kept trying to sneak west.” The story begins as many coming-of-age stories do, capturing the ambivalence of young adulthood and the blows the young narrator does not always see coming. Rebecca is growing apart from her artistic older sister and feeling alienated from her parents. And yet, just as an ordinary dream can suddenly switch off or on and into nightmare, the story turns on us in one short paragraph. “Cecile cranked some sad song and I heard her scrape another cough out of her throat. She’d been smoking. Suddenly I knew.” Suddenly, too, the reader is thrown into a new reality; Cecile, Rebecca’s sister, chains a pigeon to a table. Cecile, from this new perspective, exploits her younger sister’s bent back and displays it for art’s sake; her new lover, a projectionist and a “real dude” who at first seems the love interest from a tender, well—written young adult novel becomes dark, sinister, a character worthy of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898). There never is acceptance or release from this dark and sinister turn in perspective. It’s an unsettling, risky story, but Jemc manages to make it work on the strength of her confident voice and daring imagery.

Some of the stories are fabulist, some realistic, and some operate as short-short fictions in that Jemnc plunges us into intimate detail right away, allowing her readers to fill in the blanks. How does she do it? After reading these stories, I came to the conclusion that even the seemingly more traditional stories operate, structurally, much like poems. Many of these pieces, like sonnets, are fundamentally a dialectical construct examining contrasting ideas, emotions, states of mind, by juxtaposing them against each other, revealing the tensions between the two in the final movement. The result is stunning conclusions that often led me back to the beginning and read each story with a new understanding. The unusual associations she makes with language—hard, concrete images are often associated with abstracts—are...