In Morse Code for Romantics, people search for love, romantic and familial, but are generally disappointed by it, as if love were written in a code no one knows how to read. Anne Baldo weaves myth, legend, and science into her stories, and her characters yearn for something unavailable in their daily lives—perhaps sea monsters, perhaps everlasting love. But despite making cameo appearances in these tales, Baldo’s vampires, mermaids and monsters are more metaphorical than real, and Morse Code for Romantics is more about magical thinking than it is about magic. 

The fourteen stories in this collection are set in southern Ontario, sometimes on an island in Lake Erie, generally in the summer, and the characters are mostly young. Baldo’s language is lush. In the title story, which takes place at a less-than-joyous wedding, the young women who attend the bride are compared to mermaids: “We are hazardous girls, ready to wreck you on the coral reef of our teeth, tangle you with the cold kelp of our hair.” In a later story, the young women “shine like mermaids, scaled with glitter, our anemone hair.”

In contrast to the glitter of the young women with their sparkling dresses and makeup, there is much that is grim and sad about their lives. Many of the characters live in bleak, dead-end towns “where there was nothing to do but gape at the roadkill.” About another town, Baldo writes: “It was the kind of small Ontario town where people wore camouflage even when they weren’t going hunting.” The exteriors of houses show their bones and roadsides are “littered with skinny blue-flowered weeds and bottle caps, broken lighters and dead birds.”

Unlike the towns, nature is full of beauty: a field is a “blue crush of chicory,” and leafless trees in spring are “a thousand black stitches against the sky. The cutwork of angels.” In stories where love seems doomed to die, the characters study stars and marine life and collect fossils. They contemplate the three hundred and thirty-eight species of hummingbirds.

Like hummingbirds, the nineteen-year-old girls in “Last Summer” live fast. They’re agile, and they glow in their rainbow crop tops and frosted lipstick. They are also cruel, as the narrator declares early on: “We are unkind in love, and we are loved unkindly.” For the hummingbird, mating is brief. The male moves on and doesn’t participate in building the nest or caring for young. The young people of “Last Summer” are also promiscuous out of “sheer necessity,” like the birds they are compared to. Love is as flashy and transient as the darting flight of the male hummingbird as it moves between flowers.

Love is fickle and untrustworthy throughout Baldo’s world. Lovers cheat, girls sleep with each other’s boyfriends, fathers abandon their sons and are cruel to them, and mothers struggle with eating disorders. The final story, “Wishers,” takes place in winter, significantly the day before Valentine’s Day. In it a daughter is lost to an evil boyfriend and to substance abuse. Her mother tries to rescue her but doubts her maternal instinct, chalking it up to merely the influence of oxytocin, and ultimately she finds that instinct’s vicious side. The story ends with a question: Will this dark side of love save her daughter? As readers, we might ask ourselves, does love save anyone?

Ontario summers are short, and love may be as fleeting as the fine weather. The stories in Morse Code for Romantics are full of human unkindness, infidelity, abandonment, and loneliness—and possibly even a murder or two. Even so, they aren’t depressing. Instead, they are luminescent, like the mermaids’ scales or the hummingbirds’ throats that shine so brightly in these moving tales. 

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Anne Baldo‘s short fiction has appeared in a number of publications, including Broken Pencil, Carousel Magazine, Hermine, Qwerty and SubTerrain. Her creative nonfiction piece, “Expecting,” was longlisted for the 2019 CBC Nonfiction Prize. Morse Code for Romantics is her first collection. She lives in Windsor, Ontario.

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Shara Kronmal is a physician, writer and translator from French to English. She is an editorial assistant at CRAFT Literary Journal. Her essays, reviews, and translations have appeared in Please See Me, The Journal of the American Medical Association, Hunger Mountain Review, Chicago Review of Books, World Kid Lit, and Necessary Fiction. She lives in Chicago.