Hollay Ghadery is a writer who will not waste your time.
Hollay Ghadery is a writer who will not waste your time. By which I mean both that she says what she has to say succinctly, and that her observations are inevitably worthwhile. I feel confident in making this pronouncement, having read—and reviewed—all three of her full-length collections to date: Fuse, Rebellion Box , and now, Widow Fantasies. Ghadery has accomplished much in her career in a few brief years, and her stories, likewise, accomplish much within a few short pages.
How does she do it? To start, her prose is spare and elegant. Consider, for instance, the opening story, “Jaws,” in which a husband’s callousness toward his wife’s cherished goldfish becomes the catalyst that ends their long-deteriorating marriage. The climax of the story is sudden and violent:
Now light from shattered glass ricochets skyward from the driveway. A few minutes after I’d heaved the empty tank at Reza’s head, I heard the pop of gravel under his tires as he shot out onto the road. Good riddance to him. I was sorry about the tank though. I hadn’t been thinking.
Similarly, many stories’ denouements occur within the space of a concluding line or two, seeming in this sense to be structured more like poems than like stories with traditional arcs. In “Waved,” for example, a mother struggles to come to terms with the fact that her son has killed a girl. Rather than face this gruesome reality, she repeatedly dwells on how, lying on a gurney and about to be executed, her son looks, improbably, like a man on a cruise ship:
His eyes an algae blue sky, a seagull floating overhead, a key-lime margarita sweating in his hand, which he’ll raise to me as the ship pulls out to sea. And I’ll make sure to keep waving, even after he’s stopped.
With that single image, Ghadery encompasses the depths of the love—and denial that a mother in an impossibly tragic situation relies on to sustain her.
As one might guess from the title, and from the excerpts above, Widow Fantasies often presents for our consideration the many, many ways that men can be disappointing. Men carry cruelty in their pockets like a tennis ball, and they lob it casually at everyone around them, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it has all the destructive force of a small grenade.
The people hurt by it are often the women closest to them. There are cheating husbands (“Audience as Patio Furniture”), boyfriends who look at their phone too much to ever have a proper conversation (“Ragnar”), murderers (“Waved”), rapists (“Three Takes with Dee”), sexist grandpas (“Tennis Whites”), deadbeat dads (“Massospondylus”), dismissive doctors (“Well Enough, Alone”), and an assortment of men who are simply unnecessary and a bit annoying (“Top Dog/Underdog”; “Like Your Shit Don’t Stink”).
To be sure, disappointing men are a common enough subject in contemporary fiction. One need only look to the virality of the now notorious short story “Cat Person” by Kristen Roupenian. There are, however, two qualities that set Ghadery’s work apart from her ostensible peers.
First: the disappointments are varied, unusual, and surprising, while still maintaining a recognizable ring of familiarity. A standout for me was “Related Conditions,” which initially appears to be about an abusive husband. Ainsel has just gotten “violent” with his wife, pinned her against the wall, but now is sobbing in her lap and asking for forgiveness. Their son has advised his mother to call the police. She refuses. So far, this story is going the way we expect. But then we learn this is a decades-long marriage, this behaviour is uncharacteristic, the family is considering trying to get Ainsel into a long-term care home. All at once we understand that a medical condition is likely at play, twisting Ainsel’s normal habits into something sinister. His wife is waiting, watching, for the moment when she will be forced to turn him over to the care of others to save herself. The story prods us toward a brutal ethical conundrum, alongside the protagonist.
The second feature that sets Widow Fantasies apart from many of its peers is the sense that the disappointments of men are, in many ways, superficial, bordering on superfluous, to the stories themselves. What I mean is: men are plot points. They happen to be men, but they could be anyone. That they are men informs the types of disappointment they enact, and their actions cause movement, propelling the story forward. But what really holds these stories together is women. The most profound, complex, life-sustaining relationships are often the ones women have with each other, with their children, with their pets.
In “Nothing Will Save Your Life, but This Might Buy You Time,” a woman who has just suffered yet another miscarriage is being kept company and consoled by her dear friend, Mellie, a trans woman. It is Mellie who holds the narrator’s hand, who tells her a story about how she was once suicidal because transition, though for the good, could not fix the emptiness inside her, and how she wanted to jump off a tall building but was stopped by a pencil skirt that was too tight (an embedded story whose wisdom is gnomic to say the least), and it is Mellie who is “magic” to the narrator. Meanwhile, the protagonist’s husband Geo is off paying for parking and causing her worry because she thinks he’ll try to pressure her to get pregnant again even though she is worn out from the pregnancies she has already lost. Geo, one senses, neither cares for nor understands the protagonist as much as Mellie does, and likely never will.
Elsewhere, in “Horse Girls,” Nina’s beloved horse Hela—intentionally or maybe just coincidentally—exacts revenge against Nina’s chauvinistic tormentor Mr. Boyd, crushing his nose and mouth with a well-placed hoof. Nina and Hela are allies against Mr. Boyd’s self-absorbed insensitivity, which they have both suffered. Their affection for one another is strengthened by a mutual oppressor, while he is made vulnerable by his own inability to recognize the reciprocity between them.
After all that, I have something to confess; I have never been a fan of flash fiction. I did recently read a few flash prose pieces by Murgatroyd Monaghan that stopped me in my tracks (see for instance, “Bean,” which appeared in Off Topic Publishing). Oh, I had to admit to myself after reading them, Now I can imagine the possibilities of the genre.
Widow Fantasies sauntered and curled up like a cat. I wouldn’t dream of asking it to leave.
Into that more open frame of mind, Widow Fantasies sauntered and curled up like a cat. I wouldn’t dream of asking it to leave. Every story in this book feels like jumping into a lake, like the flare of heat in your throat after a shot, like missing a step on the way down the stairs at night. These are works all the more powerful for their brevity. Hollay Ghadery’s book, in short, has made me a convert to the flash fiction genre.
Hollay Ghadery is a multi-genre writer living in Kawartha Lakes, Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have been published in various literary journals and magazines. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released in Spring 2021. Rebellion Box, her debut collection of poetry, was released in 2023. Her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies from Gordon Hill Press, was released in 2024.
Publisher: Gordon Hill Press (September 1, 2024)
Paperback 9″ x 6″ | 92 pages
ISBN: 9781774221143
Jade Wallace (they/them) is a queer writer, editor, and critic. Their books include a genderless novel, ANOMIA (Palimpsest Press 2024), and 2 solo full-length poetry collections, Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There and The Work Is Done When We Are Dead (Guernica Editions, 2023 and 2026). Wallace is also the cofounder of the collaborative writing entity MA|DE, which has authored 3 full-length poetry collections to date; their first, ZZOO, is available now from Palimpsest Press. More: jadewallace.ca + ma-de.ca