Any good book teaches the reader how to read it. “The Sea,” the first story in Kirstin Allio’s Double-Check for Sleeping Children, does so by inviting the reader to participate in its meaning-making. The story’s wave-lapping lines reveal depths that shimmer with suspense and anxiety and are disorienting in the most dangerously delicious way. Enter here, the story seems to say, and you will be rewarded by a world where poetry reigns, sentence after sentence. 

Double-Check consists of twenty formally inventive stories that engage memory and shadow, desire and danger, love and shame. Allio’s protagonists are lost souls whose lives are probed in taut, atmospheric prose. 

The title story offers a new revelation with each paragraph such that the characters’ lives form an interconnected puzzle that moves into clearer, sadder focus with every page. “Mother’s Helper” explores the insecurity, mistakes, and fears of motherhood and has one of the most charged nursing scenes I’ve ever read. In “Ambush,” the narrator describes her girlhood love of dance training: “to track yourself for hours a day as if from the outside, by which I mean mirror training—as if through others’ eyes. It was training for empathy, and dissociation.” It is a kind of mirror training that Allio enacts in all of these stories: protagonists are observed so keenly the reader both watches and merges with them. 

Allio is a genius of description. Her narrators paint the weather—the sun is “rotting like a lemon;” capture the crash pad—“the trunk of the toilet was cracked, and cockroaches pimped the rim;” pinpoint the time of life—“The first few years of your twenties everything in your head is in the second person;” and nail the epiphany—“with a clarity you won’t have again for decades, you understand it’s no country for women.” 

Heartbreak is a constant theme, one that Allio captures in all its devastating physicality. She understands that the body and the self are intimately intertwined.  “Don’t break my heart now,” thinks Ray, a middle-aged bachelor deacon in “The Distance,” a story that takes place during a car ride from Boston to New Haven. “But Ray’s heart if not broken had broken off, and it moved in his blood so that the ache was even in his feet and hands.” In “Soldier,” when the twenty-two year-old protagonist falls in love with a Russian soldier, her “heart hurts like a stomach.” 

And lest one think Double-Check is a totally serious collection of heartbreaking stories, there is humor! It sneaks into descriptions like this one, of a woman’s secret feelings about yoga: “She was privately appalled that the teacher wore a microphone.” Or this one, of another woman’s understanding of her demographic: “My comrades, mothers-in-arms, were ladies who picked at leaf-based lunches.” Or still another’s description of her legs, which “had not seen the sun in years, and unsheathed, they looked like they were defrosting.”

Characters range from the down-and-out to the uber-rich, from children to middle-aged, straight to gay. They are green card-seeking, they are white, they are Black, they are drug addicted, they are ex-seminarians. Time, too, is a recurrent character, intruding in sudden bursts, as when a mother “realized startlingly that my son had thoughts of his own now,” and sliding backward and forward, as when a woman in her mid-fifties recognizes that “there were no special brakes, nothing to hold me in middle age.” Time even shows up cleverly as the player in a double-entendre when Hope, the protagonist of “Carte Blanche,” is described as “an atheist of time but it wasn’t reciprocal. Time believed in Hope.” 

Perhaps the collection’s most rewarding moments are those in which Allio reveals hints of her own process, as when Serena of “Inheritance” visits an exhibit of Ellsworth Kelly with her daughter at the National Gallery: “That’s what she would have painted, she thought, had she stayed in school. Pursued a career. Depictions of the thin plane between inner and outer worlds.” It’s as if Allio is winking at the reader, whispering in her ear, See? I’m giving you that thin plane between inner and outer worlds. In “Janus,” the narrator, upon Googling an old friend and listening to her in an interview talking about her old life, says, “It wasn’t my own name I wanted to hear, but the sense of eavesdropping on my own past with someone else as the main character.” This is Allio’s gift: to be eavesdropping on the pasts we might have had, were someone else the main character of our lives. Ultimately, like the stick chart on its cover, Double-Check for Sleeping Children maps patterns, disruptions, and swells, leaving a framework of clues by which to navigate a bravely shared journey. 

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Kirstin Allio is the author of Garner (Coffee House, 2005), Buddhism for Western Children (Iowa, 2018), and Clothed, Female Figure (Dzanc, 2016), which won the Dzanc Short Story Collection Competition. Double-Check for Sleeping Children won the 2023 FC2 Catherine L. Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize.

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Lynn Schmeidler is an award-winning writer of fiction and poetry. Half-Lives, her new collection of short stories, was selected by Matt Bell as the winner of the 2023 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize in Fiction. Schmeidler’s stories have appeared in BOMB, Conjunctions, Georgia Review, KROnline and The Southern Review and have been nominated for numerous awards. Her story, “InventEd” was chosen by Jonathan Lethem as the winner of BOMB’s 2023 Fiction Contest. She is also the author of three poetry books: History of Gone (Veliz Books, 2018), Wrack Lines (Grayson Books, 2017) and the award-winning Curiouser & Curiouser (Grayson Books, 2013).