Few of the characters in The Company of Strangers, Jen Michalski’s third collection of short stories, meet as literal strangers. Rather, Michalski relays states of strangeness forged in breakups, homecomings, familial estrangement, and immature love. Whether the relationships are new or long-term, Michalski’s characters form intimacies by pushing and pulling each other into altered states. Michalski’s prose achieves this kind of intimacy as a literary alchemy.

In “Long Haul,” Ray visits his estranged Uncle Tony to work out the childhood trauma of his sister’s disappearance. Guilty over leaving Ray and Joelle alone in the car twenty years earlier, Tony confesses that he still looks for Joelle on his long-haul trucking routes. Ray has spent those years, “blam[ing] myself, Tony, my mother, the monster who took Joelle. But blame is a completely useless verb, noun, whatever. It doesn’t change the past or the future.” Horrible things happen for no reason. The terrible events of one night have bound Ray and Tony more closely than twenty years of birthdays and holidays. Blaming and searching may not have been how they wanted to spend those years, but reuniting and recognizing each other’s grief brings them closer. 

The collection features several stories told in the second person. Such a choice can center underrepresented points of view, literally as the other in the reader’s consciousness. Michalski’s title story uses this voice effectively, placing the reader in the inner monologue of twenty year-old Casey, a young woman who was living with her brother Clay and is kicked out after sleeping with his wife. Casey’s “you” is delivered as self-talk, as if the reader has a front-row seat to her decision-making and self-recriminations. 

When Casey meets a gay couple, Walter and TJ, who are camping outside of town, their kindness prompts Casey’s awareness of her emotional and physical dislocation. She tells herself: “You are an alien here but without Clay, without a place to call your own, you’re strangely free now to move about, to enjoy the company of strangers.” As Casey becomes less reliant on family to provide her with a sense of belonging, she develops a wholly integrated self. Through her bond with two strangers, Casey awakens to her own motivations and responsibilities.

Departing from the realism of the rest of the collection, “The Loneliest Creature on Earth” veers into speculative territory and tells of parents whose son disappears into the ninth volume of Weird and Amazing Facts. The parents take their son to the hospital and explain his strange behavior to another visitor. The stranger is entertained by the boy’s retelling of facts from the book, particularly the whale that made the same unusual mating call for twenty years. The visitor proclaims, “I bet he’s the loneliest creature on Earth.” Hearing the words of this stranger, the parents’ loneliness echoes to their son as he slips away from them into the book.

Two stories explore starting a new relationship as a way to cope after a break-up. In “The Meteor,” a meteor lands in the yard of a troubled couple, forcing an unexpected end to their marriage. The man quickly remarries, only to find the same problems carry over to his second marriage. The meteor acts as a metaphor for emotional blocks that stultify relationships and often put an end to them. In “Eat a Peach,” two women go on a first date in Los Angeles. Lynn, who is reticent about the date, still thinks and talks about her ex, an actress who didn’t love her. Relaxing into the possibility of a new relationship, Lynn sees that her willingness to go without love kept her stuck in a doomed affair. 

In “Scheherazade,” Dan and Karen have been drifting apart for a while. Their dissolution accelerates when Dan begins to spend more time with his older co-worker, Regina. Dan lives by a code of saying yes to everything, which seems more the rationalizing of a codependent and less a philosophy of life. His decision to spend more time with Regina, whose daughter committed suicide several years before, becomes about finding and making meaning from terrible loss. His closeness with Regina makes him realize that his agreeableness was not making his life easier. The story, arguably the most poignant in the collection, is an evocative example of a character’s transformation under the influence of a benevolent stranger. 

Whether they are cast as acquaintances, lovers, or family members, everyone in Michalski’s collection is forged—pushed and pulled—by relating, Strangers, both known and newly connected, make memorable company in the worlds Michalski creates.

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Jen Michalski is the author of three novels, three story collections, and two novellas. Her novel, You’ll Be Fine, was a 2021 Buzzfeed “Best Small Press Book,” a 2022 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist, and was selected as one of the “Best Books We Read This Year” by the Independent Press Review. She’s the editor of the weekly online literary weekly jmww and currently lives in Southern California.

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Jeannine Burgdorf is a writer and storyteller on stage in Chicago. Her fiction has appeared in The Signal House Edition, New Reader Magazine, Orange Quarterly, and Writer Shed Stories, Volume 2. She recorded an essay about her mother’s death and her infertility on the podcast Daring to Tell. Her nonfiction has appeared in Quail Bell, Chicago Review of Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Masters Review.