Review by Emily Webber
In Zoe Ballering’s short story collection, There Is Only Us, each of the eight speculative fiction stories is surprising, funny, and thought-provoking. In stories spread across time—biblical times, pandemic times, future worlds—Ballering’s characters often face a frightening unknown trying to stave off loneliness, figure out where to stake their beliefs, and deal the connections that endure regardless of how much chaos the world spins up around us.
In two stories, “Ark” and “Luz Luz,” the characters face God’s wrath. In “Luz Luz,” God starts to disappear everyday objects in retaliation for how humans have treated the earth. Then it escalates into people disappearing. Luz is left on earth due to a mix-up because of her name. In this story, there is not a growing sense of loneliness, but the realization that the loneliness is always there:
But as for loneliness—that was not some new and startling discovery. The new fact of loneliness was not that it existed, but just that it would never go away.
“Ark,” like “Luz Luz” and many of the stories in this collection, is funny and absurd. The choice to incorporate comedy makes these stories even more effective. Even in the most significant dramas, there is a lightness, something you have to laugh at, and it makes these stories even more powerful to see the whole experience and range of emotions. In “Ark” you can almost put off noticing the building loneliness and longing in it. Karis has been tasked with getting two chickens—one male and one female—for the ark. Eventually, they realize she’s accidentally brought two males on board:
Of course she let me take her chickens. She wanted to keep the hens for their eggs and the rooster for breeding, but she let me choose two hatchlings from her flock. I did check. I tried the venting method, the one where you squeeze the feces out of a chick and then inspect the open anal vent for an “eminence”—a pimple-sized bump that indicates a male. I determined that I had one male and one female chick. Admittedly, I read all this in my mother’s poultry manual five minutes before I gave it a try. Admittedly, it did not work out.
Karis is chastised by Noah and sent off the ark to produce a female hen or be kicked off the boat. She returns to her mother. When Karis visits her mother, we fully see what the world takes from us and how we long to be good for those we love. In Karis and her interactions with her mother, we see how we often take things for granted and think people will be around forever, but time passes quickly, and eventually, we will lose those we love.
In addition to “Ark,” mothers and daughters appear throughout the collection. In “Mothers,” there’s an inoculation that eliminates the need for sleep allowing people more time to work, innovate, and help transform our damaged planet. Roya, who is not inoculated because her mother is against it, is pregnant with her first child, and must decide what is best for her baby. Sometimes the most challenging part of parenting is to know when we must make different choices for our children in a changing world.
These stories also touch on how we are bound to others even if our differences. In & two twin brothers who are astronauts navigate their relationship when one is sent to space for a year and the other serves as the “baseline” on earth. “Substances: A School Year” is an odd and compelling story where a group of students become obsessed and live in fear of everyday substances. Through this constantly shifting story, the reader sees the push and pull of adolescent relationships as they navigate through a confusing and constantly changing world they don’t entirely understand.
“Here I Am” and “Is That Sweet?” show the effects of grief and loneliness. In “Here I Am,” sisters grapple with the unthinkable, the death of a child, and what to do when all you are left with is pain and sadness and in “Is That Sweet?” an all too familiar pandemic loneliness.
There Is Only Us is Zoe Ballering’s debut collection of short stories and was the 2022 winner of the Katherine Ann Porter Prize. Ballering’s stories show how the larger, uncontrollable events of the world change us, force us to make certain choices, and deal with loneliness and grief that may not have an end. Each of the eight stories are engaging and strange, set in real and unreal places, and you won’t regret spending time in Ballering’s mind.
There Is Only Us by Zoe Ballering
University of North Texas Press
11/2022, Paperback, 192 pages
ISBN: 9781574418804
Emily Webber has published fiction, essays, and reviews in the Ploughshares Blog, The Writer magazine, Five Points, Split Lip Magazine, Brevity, and elsewhere. She’s the author of a chapbook of flash fiction, Macerated, from Paper Nautilus Press. You can read more at www.emilyannwebber.com and @emilyannwebber.