Imagine your life like this, Sarah Layden urges her readers in this collection of stories—and we can, all too easily. The characters who inhabit this collection exhibit at once frailty and strength, wisdom and profound stupidity, cruelty and compassion. Theirs is a world that’s easy to recognise, universal and personal in the same breath.

Layden’s characters all seem to have emerged, confused and blinking, from lives on the periphery; they are people living slightly below, to the side, or behind the main event. There is, for instance, Marva, who grades children’s academic scores in what seems to be a factory; she has fallen so far between the cracks that she is forced to risk her dead-end job to answer her unhappy brother’s increasingly rambling calls. Yet he was not always such a burden: on childhood beach holidays, there were “days mandated for play, so long as he didn’t bother his parents or terrorise his little sister by splashing salt-water in her eyes. Easy rules to follow.” With childhood’s end come new problems, so that those beach vacations, now seen in the rear-view, become distant and foreign compared to her brother’s new reality of “wearing a life cut from a cloth that itched against his skin.” 

In this awkwardness—this oddness, this inability to function in quite the same way as the rest of the world—Marva’s brother exemplifies the lives on which Layden sympathetically and non-judgmentally lifts the curtain. In elegiacally written sashays through doctors’ waiting rooms and seedy bars, she introduces characters on the cusp of emerging into better lives. Will they take the leap? Will they realise the significance of the thresholds at which we leave them?

Annie, managing a seafood shack, returns to college after leaving the abusive man for whom she flunked her classes to marry first time round. She has kept his violence a secret from absolutely everyone, including her parents and her boss. She has learned that “life is trash, but you had to stand up straight and smile anyway.” Her real professor never appears; instead she meets an odd woman who encourages her to write the story of her marriage. Even though Annie knows the paper will count for nothing, she watches this impostor tutor read it and is somehow released from the life she has been scrabbling to escape. As the story ends, she is watching an ASL class in progress, the students signing ‘I love you’ in unison as she realises, “The signs weren’t hard to learn, once you knew them.”

Layden teaches us not to believe everything is as we see. A woman who is pitied by the firemen and her soon-to-be-brother-in-law to whom she teaches CPR was in fact not jilted at the altar. She never tells the truth, but we leave her having her photograph taken with her boss, another small-town bar owner, who stands, “his shaky hand at the small of her back. She leans against Lloyd and the two of them freeze, smiling on cue, acting as if this counts.” 

Layden’s cinematographic perspective—roaming across dark roads where streetlights putter and neon flashes brokenly, peering into coffee shop windows to see unlikely first dates, eavesdropping on office conversations in cramped cubicles—feels at once small-town and universal. She shows hopes, love found and lost, kindness, cruelty and everything between. Layden’s soaring themes encompass the full range of what it means to be human. And what it means is what we discovered after the petty slights and sights of lockdown faded: that there is far more to hope for, and to celebrate, than to mourn.

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Sarah Layden, assistant professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, is the author of novel, Trip Through Your Wires (Engine Books, 2015), and The Story I Tell Myself About Myself (Sonder Pres, 2018), winner of the Sonder Press Chapbook Competition. She is co-author with Bryan Furuness of The Invisible Art of Literary Editing (Bloomsbury, 2023).

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Educated in the West Indies, Saudi Arabia, Scotland and Belgium, Elizabeth Smith studied modern languages at Durham University in England. She reads anything she can, especially pre-war books by obscure women and modern European writers. She lives in an old house on a small island where she often pretends it is 1936.