What an apt title for this memorable debut collection! Stuber’s grownups are often sad, both in terms of their affect and in performance of grownup tasks—notably, parenting. Happily, though, a wry humor and compassion give these well-crafted, moving stories balance and warmth. Stuber has created characters who are our contemporaries—strangers in a strange time—making it easy to recognize the flavor of their mistakes, the choices that have brought them down. Still, existential dread intrudes, as when the omniscient narrator of “Little Women” lists things that are coming to an end: “species, previously infallible trees, ease, acceptable sea levels, edible fish, computers as human-dominated plastic boxes.” Throughout this collection, Stuber lets her disappointment show; she ends that particular story, “humans, good fucking riddance.”

In one of the collection’s saddest stories, “Cinema,” the narrator, just out of the hospital, finds a job at a movie theater where the patrons, most of them her age, have time to visit the cinema, exclaiming “this is so wild, we’re empty nesters now.” She performs pedestrian duties, seeing her son Joes as she wanders through the theater picking up trash. She remembers that one of the doctors at the hospital warned her, “[t]hey might come to you sometimes.” Joes appears to her as a teenager, but was four when she last saw him. Her second child, Sams, begins to visit her, too. “Joes, Sams, those were the nicknames I’d given them when I thought I was young and clever, when Joey and Sammy felt too expected.” This confession deepens the story’s darkness, as the narrator castigates herself for overvaluing the trivial.

When the narrator remembers the happy connection she enjoyed with infant Joes, she wonders if “maybe having had it was enough.” The narrator’s memories of her postpartum depression, her husband’s reaction when she tried to tell him about it, and a visit to a pond near the narrator’s former home suggest how to fill in the horrible blanks:

The metal skeleton of [my bicycle] leaned against the willow tree by the pond where my ex-husband and I had strung hammocks on some weekend days. Maybe Joes or Sams would jump on it and ride it over water or up the hills where in summer dandelions made a yellow sea.

“Dead Animals,” an ambitious tale set in San Francisco, is interspersed with in-your-face ars poetica. The piece begins “Take me on a journey. Make me feel something. Surprise me. Make me change.” A dead cat appears, and then so does Frida, “thirty-four, sixteen towns in fifteen years. Retail worker, serial bad girlfriend, three green stars tattooed on her wrist.” Frida is hired to pal around for the summer with thirteen-year-old Kyle, the daughter of two moms. As in “Cinema,” motherhood looms large. Another ars-poetical injunction—“Give me backstory. Let me hold this up next to something old to see why it matters”—precedes the revelation that Frida was neglected by her own mother, who turned their garage into an animal hospital. There, young Frida observed an opossum her mother was rehabilitating, “her tail an obscenity, consuming her own sickly and apparently never-coming-back-from-it opossum baby.” 

Kyle and Frida visit the beach, restaurants, and bars. The cat from the story’s opening is struck by a car, and a whole leg of an animal hangs from a restaurant kitchen’s ceiling. Kyle decides to set free some dogs who’ve been left tied outside shops, which leads to the story’s bloody finale. Another story line, about Frida’s sex life, is braided through the piece, not to mention the inclusion of Frida’s occasional musings, such as why “given all the options for humanity, for growth, for community, was this the world we imagined for ourselves?” Despite its complexity, “Dead Animals” doesn’t overwhelm its reader or its creator. Stuber pulls it off, giving us a muscular tour-de-force, complete with bonus lessons on how she does it. 

“Dick Cheney Was Not My Father” leans more into Stuber’s humorous register and is narrated by a man whose father was Richard Cheney, no relation. Richard’s crimes, according to his son, rose only to the level of eating “more than his fair share of the shrimp and [diving] into the pool drunk in his clothes because he thought everything he did was a fun spectacle.” Richard and the narrator’s mother lose their savings after Richard invests in cryptocurrency. Most of the story takes place during a vacation at a Missouri state park where a million snow geese congregate. The narrator tells a little about the geese, then admits, “that is the extent of my snow goose knowledge.” After learning that the goslings become independent from their parents a few hours after hatching, the narrator wonders whether “the years humans spend with their parents infantilize them forever.”

Smart, touching, and sometimes frightening, this is a collection not to be missed. Stuber succeeds in making readers care about her characters while surprising them with turns that feel just right, and—who knows?—maybe even changing them for the better along the way.

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Amy Stuber‘s writing has appeared in the New England Review, Flash Fiction America, Ploughshares, The Idaho Review, Cincinnati Review, TriQuarterly, American Short Fiction, Joyland, and elsewhere. She’s the recipient of The Missouri Review‘s 2023 William Peden Prize in fiction, winner of the 2021 Northwest Review Fiction Prize, and runner-up for the 2022 CRAFT Short Fiction Prize. Her work received a special mention in Pushcart Prize XLIV, appeared on the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2021, has been nominated for Best of the Net, and appears in Best Small Fictions 2020 and 2023. She has a PhD in English, has taught college writing, and worked in online education for many years. You can find her work at www.amystuber.com.

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Sarah Holloway is a former tax accountant who’s now enjoying the writing life. She lives in Savannah, GA, with her husband, dogs, and lots of books. Her work has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly’s blog, Roi Fainéant, Emerge Literary Journal, Cowboy Jamboree, Third Street Review, and elsewhere.