It is worth noting the absence of a question mark in the title of Jody Hobbs Hesler’s debut collection, What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better. These stories do not ask sarcastically or bitterly why we feel entitled to feel better. Rather, the collection explores surprising moments that do offer a possibility of feeling better, if we’re willing to take it up.

Framed as a question in “Sorry Enough,” the collection’s title returns as a surprise that conveys a nuanced embrace of reality. Buckley, the story’s central character, secretly offers his labor as reparation to a woman he permanently disabled in a hit-and-run, for which he has spent a year in prison. By the time she reveals that she recognizes him, everything in the story has prepared him—and the reader—to expect her rejection, anger, and contempt. But the moment shifts these expectations: defensive anger is reduced to a haunting, a possibility evaded, a danger escaped.

In imaginatively varied ways, this kind of turn appears frequently in these stories, which often start with a deceptive mildness, in the midst of mundane action, before pivoting on expectations based on plot or character, or simply on a startling phrase. In Hobbs Hesler’s hands, this strategy—shared by many thoughtfully crafted stories—plays with the reader’s expectations, both of life and of the form, only to overturn them with an image or an unanticipated narrative detour, such as the reversal in “Sorry Enough.”

Early in the opening story, “Alone,” the narrator, a wife and mother living on a socially busy suburban cul-de-sac, reflects on the life of a reclusive neighbor who has recently died alone and undiscovered in his house. “Everyone else on the street was like us,” she says, “with newborns and toddlers. No one was like Beane.” When he was alive, she “would often fantasize about slipping into his house, invisible, to see what it felt like on the other side of so much human noise.” This small memory turns the story, and the narrator slips into Beane’s house after his death.

In “No Good,” Leslie, a middle-schooler adjusting to her parents’ divorce, resists her mother’s attitude toward their new neighborhood. While her mother sees it as “a disease in need of a cure,” for Leslie the neighborhood is the “only antidote for summer boredom.” Every evening she and Della, a neighbor, track down “the only chance for excitement”—a.k.a. Robby—“two years older and nearly a foot taller, who only seemed to come out after dark.” We get a glimpse of Robby’s cruelty when he handles a newborn kitten roughly and Della tries telling him to stop. As Leslie watches “the tone of Della’s voice register on Robby’s face, a tremor of skin under one eye,” Hobbs Hesler’s compression of sound, sight, and flesh all but shouts “Wake up!”

Such moments of precise observation shine a bright if narrowly focused light into these stories’ dark places. Mostly set in residential neighborhoods, among struggling families and watchful neighbors, the stories are generally quiet. Characters are haunted by dangers that rarely materialize, or that loom larger in approach than on arrival, and what arrives in place of the unrealized danger is finally what is important—sometimes an awakening to a harsh reality, more often a small, redemptive release from that harshness. For instance, in “No Good,” a rising dread is felt more keenly by the reader than by Leslie herself. Once she’s escaped danger and made it home to her anxious mother, her final recognition may be more painful than the threat she faced: “She could feel the power of her mother’s desire to help […] but the world she had taught Leslie to fear didn’t exist. The one that did was scarier.”

Thoughtfully crafted and skillfully realized, the most satisfying of these stories explore subtle shifts of psychological and ethical awareness, and at a critical moment, with sudden clarity and great economy, with an image or a phrase, provoke a brief but intense emotional response. The narrator of “Next to the Fortune-Teller’s House,” observing her “gray-haired neighbor in her boho clothes,” considers asking for a fortune for her baby-to-be. Delayed first by the fortune-teller’s many visitors and later by two miscarriages, she becomes “afraid of what I’d see in her eyes when we met. I started to dislike her.” Now a mysterious fire burns in the neighbor’s perfect garden, the narrator is in her fourth pregnancy, and a year has passed since she first became afraid. She reflects:

I wake up each morning thinking of polar bears. When it isn’t cold enough for them anymore, they will die. One day, there will be a last one. Is today my baby’s last day? My body her shrinking ice cap?

If you say something like that with a doctor listening, something mystical and worried, they prescribe pregnancy-friendly antidepressants or refer you to a support group. I don’t want these things. All I want is my babies.

The plot advances only after this emotional moment, which fully exposes the narrator’s fear and pain. The climate imagery and the directness of her cry for her babies unite her personal anguish with the fate of life on this warming planet, as does the fortune-teller’s burning garden. Clearly, there is more than craft and strategy at work here.

These seventeen stories are peopled with characters trapped in their own histories, perspectives, neighborhoods, class, race, and gender limitations. More than one cul-de-sac appears in their suburban streets, where withholding may be a way of life. In story after story—told from many points of view, with a fair amount of solitude and often minimal interiority—Hobbs Hesler’s characters catch, or are shown, glimpses of what they have been withholding. Their fear of discovering what they already know—more than the obvious dangers—is finally the source of their accumulating dread. What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better breaks open this withholding, and the collection’s rewards come in moments of insight and release.

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Jody Hobbs Hesler lives and writes in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Her writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Valparaiso Fiction Review, Necessary Fiction, CRAFT, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. She teaches at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, Virginia, and reads for The Los Angeles Review. Her debut novel, Without You Here, is forthcoming in November 2024 from Flexible Press.

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Catherine Gammon’s new collection is The Gunman and the Carnival (Baobab Press). She is also the author of four novels: The Martyrs, The Lovers; China Blue; Sorrow; and Isabel Out of the Rain. Find her @nonabiding on Substack and Bluesky.