Danger lurks beneath the surface of Rebecca Bernard’s Our Sister Who Will Not Die. The characters in Bernard’s eleven finely crafted short stories live on the cusp of hazard. From a mother struggling with rumors that she had sex with her recently deceased son to a librarian whose husband wants her to have an affair, Bernard’s flawed characters skirt psychological cliffs, leaving the reader unsure if they will leap into the void or retreat to safety. 

Bernard’s stories are geographically agnostic, and her sense of place transcends location.  Although one story is set in Maine and another in central Texas, the rest exist in a kind of Midwestern everywhere. Enclosed spaces are important in these stories, which take place inside kitchens, bars, restaurants, cars, prisons, and hospital rooms—tight spaces that create communication deserts. In “First Date,” Jamie is an ex-con recently released from prison for killing his father. He meets women in coffee houses and restaurants. His apartment is neat. He struggles to understand when he should reveal his past, knowing that “what he doesn’t say, he doesn’t say, but not for lack of trying.” In “Harold, Protector of the Children,” the eponymous central character has pedophilic thoughts upon which he never acts. He sits in his car; he waits patiently on a porch. “Mouse” shows the struggles of a teenager in the throes of a breakdown after murdering classmates at school. His world consists of small rooms, including a jail cell. The title story takes place in a hospital room where a family struggles to understand their shared dysfunction with a dying sister. 

Like the siblings in the title story, Bernard’s characters live in spaces that once were “intimate and now distant.” Malcolm, in “Our Daughter Whose Blood,” is new to a relationship with a woman named Veronica. His daughter Aileen lives in a vegetative state, and he has “not told Veronica the full story of Aileen, though I want to, I do.” In “We Have Disappeared,” Mack can’t tell Sammy that he loves him or that his sister’s mental health is shaky. They live alone amongst other people, desperate to connect and feel something. Despite the physical proximity of enclosed spaces, the people in this collection often feel as though “there is no voice besides” their own. 

For Bernard’s characters, spanning those newly widened distances proves difficult. They often live on the fringes of the middle class, as students and workers. They oscillate between knowing love and feeling abandoned. They share “the pains that life may give” but they can’t always articulate ways that pain might bring them together. Sandy, burned and disfigured when her mother “accidently dropped boiling water on all over my face and my neck and my chest,”  wants desperately to fit in. Maggie, a woman who’s been in love but “never had the love returned,” similarly longs for connection. But even for characters dealing with less severe trauma, their peaceful moments feel hollow, and love is almost always elusive, just outside the door. 

This displacement, though, is part of who they are—damaged people filled with self-destructive longings that they quietly project onto others. In “Gardening,” Sophia’s husband confesses to an affair and wants her to “sleep with someone outside the marriage. . . .  He said it was the only way he’d feel normal, to know that I was as at fault as he was. To know that the imperfection was something we had in common.” Witnesses are drawn in and made complicit. In “The Pleasure of Television,” Beau and Sandy see a father “put his hand on Tammy’s belly, only it was lower than that, . . . and he kissed her, only this was not the kind of kiss that you see from a daddy to his daughter.”

At times, these quiet longings turn loud and violent. When Malcolm all but abandons his daughter after her injury, Aileen keens with the sound of a “flute-like beacon, the light of noise, the prehistoric channeling of loss.” In “Sweat,” a husband abuses his wife: “I pushed her down, and she was so soft and so easy to push down, and then I fell on top of her, and something inside me said, just once, just once you can do it, so I punched her.” Bernard peers below the surface to consider mitigating circumstances—an abusive father, a neglectful mother. Eating lunch at the skate park, Malcolm shows his ongoing preoccupation with the daughter he mistreats, revealing that place is “my church. . . .  I hold my breath. I pray. The vision of my daughter as she was eclipses my sight.” Without asking us to ignore or forgive, Bernard encourages us to rethink first impressions and to search deeply for compassion. 

While there is violence in these stories, there are also moments of insight and hope. After learning of her husband’s affair, Sophia says, she “went out to the garden with the intention of hurting my tomatoes,” explaining that “self-destruction is one form of remedy, is one form of violence against those who claim to love you.” She resists the temptation, though, opting instead to step away from her psychological cliff’s edge and keep her garden growing. The stories in Bernard’s collection remind us that facing our fears and connecting with others allows us to “come, at last, to honesty, to ugliness, together.” 

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Rebecca Bernard’s work has appeared in Colorado Review, Southwest Review, Juked, Pleiades, and elsewhere, and has been recognized in Best American Short Stories. Our Sister Who Will Not Die won the 2021 Non/Fiction Prize.

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John Wegner is Professor of English at Angelo State University and the author of Love is Not a Dirty Word and Other Stories (Lamar University Press, 2014) as well as several critical studies of Cormac McCarthy.