The Producer, an important character in the first story in Meg Pokrass’ First Law of Holes: New & Selected Stories, isn’t really a producer at all. He’s a ninety-year-old man with “a hole in his heart,” who had wanted to produce a film but never did, and who is cheating on his wife with the story’s much younger narrator whose life is “filled with love tragedies.” Like many of the quirky characters in Pokrass’s collection, she is hoping that things will get better but isn’t sure how they can. Knowing that Pokrass is writing complex tales in small spaces, the reader is similarly wondering how these stories will conclude within a page or three—or, in some cases, a mere half-page. 

The producer isn’t alone among Pokrass’s characters in his need and his longing. In “Zigzag Openings,” for example, the narrator, a female telemarketer in the middle of an amicable divorce and on the verge of losing her job, meets Douglas, a retired quilter who “didn’t seem to feel that being a middle-aged telemarketer sucked.” The quilter teaches her to patch herself up, and she begins to feel hope. All of that happens in a page and a half. The narrator observes, with wonder, “If he hadn’t been able to patch me up, right then and there, I might never have believed I was curable.” Meanwhile, the reader is left to wonder how Pokrass is able to bring the story to such a satisfying conclusion within so short a space. 

Of the more than one hundred and fifty stories in this collection, the first twenty-one are new. The remainder are gleaned from previous collections published between 2011 and 2019. The shortest of the stories is four sentences, and the longest runs to just over four pages. While the stories are short, they are not slight. They are like pop rocks shoved into a deceptively small and innocuous-looking lipstick compact, tiny but packed with feminine power.

Characters and themes recur throughout. Animals are particularly abundant. There are birds, for instance, both literal and metaphorical. Some are free, some wish they were, and some are afraid of freedom. In “Champion Pigeons,” the narrator notes, “The pigeons were champions of living in cages.” The narrator, divorced and unhappy, both craves and fears human contact and decides that she will be more like the champion pigeons, content in her cage. 

Continuing the animal theme, in “Guarding the Heart,” a devasting tale of heartbreak, a couple alters their behavior in response to the loss of a beloved pet. The wife goes to grief meetings. The husband becomes critical of his wife’s behavior and begins swearing. That’s when the wife realizes how heartbroken her husband is over the death of their dog. In another story, “The Bug Man,” the child narrator mourns the loss of her mother’s apparent lover, an exterminator who kept their house pest-free. After he dies of cancer, her mother slams her cup, splatters coffee, and cries. What lingers and burns here is yet another creaturely detail: as the mother melts down, the narrator’s ankles itch with flea bites. With her mother’s lover gone, the narrator feels this loss both physically and emotionally, as a loss of someone who kept household pests at bay. In his absence, “families of spiders would bubble up through the floorboards.”  

California’s heat and aridity bedevil many of Pokrass’s characters. In “Here We Are On Planet Earth,” schoolgirls go bikini-topless, burning their too-white skin, while a middle-aged jogger stops to judge them. In “California Fruit,” the narrator, originally from Pennsylvania, moves to California where meets a boy who tans more easily than she does and tells her not to worry about the way her white skin burns. Later, missing him, she observes that, “[m]y chronic sunburn peeled in tiny pieces like snow.” In “Desert Air,” a vacationing girl in a bikini is disappointed when a boy shows interest and then doesn’t, observing that “[o]utside, the desert air feels fake, like a blow dryer.” 

Stories of the very young and innocent jostle against stories of the middle-aged and jaded. Contortionists fall in and out of love with clowns, and aspiring actresses work awful night jobs selling diet aids while eating Three Musketeers. The observations even in the shortest of stories feel sharp and true. For example, in “Primping,” a two-paragraph story, the narrator, who is thirteen, notes that she is “rushing from mirror to mirror, removing childhood by applying blue eye-shadow, black eye-liner,” a poignant evocation of the transition to adolescence. 

Long after the reader has finished the collection, the details, the characters, and their specific aches will linger. The reader can only hope that many of the characters will learn to fly, free as birds. 

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Meg Pokrass is the author of eight flash fiction collections, two collections of hybrid prose, and two novellas-in-flash. Her books include Damn Sure Right (2011), The Dog Looks Happy Upside Down (2016), Alligators at Night (2018), Alice in Wonderland Syndrome (2020), The Dog Seated Next to Me (2019), The Loss Detector (2020), Spinning to Mars (2021). She is also co-author of The House of Gran Padano (2022) with Jeff Friedman, and of Disappearing Debutantes (2023) with Aimee Parkison. 

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Lori D’Angelo is the recipient of a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, a fellow at the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts, and an alumna of the Community of Writers. Her work has appeared in various literary journals including BULL, Gone Lawn, Moon City Review, Rejection Letters, and Salvation South. Her first book, a short story collection, The Monsters Are Here, is forthcoming from ELJ Editions in 2024.