The Weight of Masks

A disgruntled Snow White at Cedar Point theme park begins dating Sleepy-neé-Rick, who claims to be the anonymous philanthropist "whose acts of generosity had recently been sweeping across [the] town." But Snow White's summer-long job induces a rising state of frustration, highlighted by the reveal of the city's true philanthropist, who is notably not Rick. She abruptly quits mid-season and decides to leave her costume garb in her now-ex-boyfriend's doorway, where she accidentally discovers his harem of five little women "cavorting in negligees." This is the first of thirteen stories in Virginia Konchan's 2017 collection entitled Anatomical Gift.

Konchan's prose is wry, but dense with a sobering veracity that lights the dark places of contemporary culture. Though several stories in the collection are told from a male perspective, the majority are female narrators. Every story employs the benefits of first-person narration. In this way, we gain total access to each character's thoughts and experiences, a skin in which to disguise ourselves as part of the anecdote itself, an immersed observer.

Anatomical Gift is Viriginia Konchan's first short story collection, published by Noctuary Press. She's also published a poetry collection entitled The End of Spectacle (2018) and two chapbooks, That Tree is Mine (2017), and Vox Populi (2015). The through-line of the stories in this collection threads a recurring observation of consequence—a look at where someone has come from, and how personal history influences one's current state of existence. Readers are also privy to norms of a cultural consciousness, and challenged to consider how individual agency contends against it.

In "Nude," we meet Diana, a woman in an abusive relationship with Victor, with whom she lives. To meet her financial obligations in this arrangement, she poses nude for a college-level art class for $10 an hour. The math is simple: two classes a day, six days a week is enough to live on temporarily. The emotional math is not quite as straightforward; a conversation overhead at a restaurant reveals the instructor's dismissal of those "Eurosluts," a commodity of subverted sexuality and assumed power. "You should see her when a breeze comes through the window. Nipples hard as rocks!" the professor tells a colleague. Later, the professor corrects Diana while she sits and warns her not to think. When she questions this, he replies, "You're the class nude, not the class genius." Here, we gain access to the interior thoughts of a woman made invisible by proxy. Though she is a literal art form, that is all she is to the class. Her body may become numb from air conditioning or drafts, but her mind is likewise expected to be numb by virtue of what she represents to the students and professor alike: a nude art model, empty of opinion, hollow. Her humanity is revoked for the price of $10 an hour. When her boyfriend Victor brings another woman to the apartment and begins sleeping with her, Diana tells him she plans to leave. "You have it pretty good," he says. "You get paid to represent the human form." But Diana has studied philosophy, through which she built a foundation of self-value. She tells us her Hungarian professor is the only one who's ever valued her mind and, ultimately, Diana's internal strength relies upon this basis of self-worth. Despite Victor's abuse, Diana arrives at a place of acceptance and peace, of solidarity with herself. Her last words resound: "I survived."

Konchan's prose is at its highest poignancy when exploring the realm of resistance to cultural expectations. "Adaptation" recounts Rachel's experience living in New York City. She "occasionally meet[s] a human being while crossing the street" but otherwise seems to live in a state of isolation. She asserts that most people wear masks that disguise a true self. This is the definition of success for our world: the ability to blue Bluetooth stock. We discover that Rachel has had an abortion. She tells us the baby "wouldn't have had a chance." We learn the character...