![]() ![]() Show yourself!”Īlthough it’s true that lessons can be learned from folk tales, those lessons often back the power structure that already exists. “You evil bitch!” “You monster! Get out of here! Why are you hiding from us? We know what you’ve done. In the latter, the legendary figure is the Woman of Echoes, who lives in a dark tunnel the main characters went to when they were children:Īs young girls angry for reasons we didn’t understand, we screamed obscenities into the tunnel all during our childhood on the ranch releasing emotions too dark for us to process. In case they might find her and take her back home again. The things her family did to her are so horrific she’s afraid to speak to anyone or to come out of hiding. I don’t like to think about what he says, don’t believe when he says the girl in the lighthouse ran away from home and is hiding in the lighthouse. In the former, the legend is of a character named Lighthouse Girl: “What Goes on Near the Water” and “Longtime Passing” both take on the mantle of the folk tale by transforming female pain into darkly magical stories. Sometimes this violence is revealed quickly, as is the case in “Abandoned Nest,” while other times it’s incorporated into a folk tale. Quiet could protect it.” Suburbanites are also in denial about violence, then, especially violence against women. In “Abandoned Nest,” the narrator is raped and never tells anyone because she fears the repercussions: “What good did it do to report crimes? The neighborhood was a living thing. If Gillian’s response to death seems idiosyncratic, based purely in youth, throughout Suburban Death Project, Parkison gives us characters who are willing to go to great lengths to protect the sanctity of their cul-de-sacs, no matter their age. Gillian, however, just laughed and laughed and laughed, never quite learning what was definitely going to come. In life, David used to play a kind of Harold and Maude (1971) game where he’d pretend to be dead. The idea here is that our undertaking practices are firmly rooted in the delusion that nothing bad will ever happen, that even in death we won’t look quite so dead, no, and if the deceased would stop being such a bum, he’d finally jump out of the box and join us, his joke being the only thing that isn’t aging very well. To Gillian, and likely to many of us, this plan sounds outrageous, seeing as how the mushroom suit of the title is set to devour her husband’s body, instead of giving her what she really wants: the illusion that David is still alive. Well, until her husband’s parents inform her that David had been part of something called the Suburban Death Project, which eschews toxic embalming chemicals for a more nature-friendly style of decomposition that allows our bodies to enrich the soil and feed plants. She doesn’t expect this desire will be the least bit problematic. Thanks to the (supposed) inherent safety of the suburbs, though, no one is able to deal with this inevitability.įor instance, in “The Mushroom Suit,” the very young narrator, Gillian, wants a traditional funeral for her husband, David, with an open coffin and a preserved corpse. And why would they when we have everything you can imagine here.Īimee Parkison, in her superb story collection, Suburban Death Project, points out that these winding, maze-like streets may not be as safe as you think because, sure, everything you can imagine may be here, but so is death. Not sub, not less than, not below super, greater than, above. Sure, the name is suburb, but the idea for so many, the attitude was different: superurbia. As the suburbs pushed out farther and farther, as their design plans rejected grids for labyrinths ending in cul-de-sacs, they became their own domain. Originally, they were more closely associated with urban areas, though removed from the inner city where everyone lives so close together, where anything can happen. The suburbs are supposed to be safety incarnate.
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