Arrangement by Merridawn Duckler

Arrangement, a collection of thirty-five fictions by Merridawn Duckler, includes voices glib, clever, stoic, cynical, and profound. The narrators are alternately marginalized, disillusioned, suicidal, vulnerable, playful, or imaginative. We see the author as a child, a preteen, a teenager, sister, and mother.

Though usually female, sometimes male, the author speaks to gender in two fictions specifically: “Deep Woods “and “Game Theory”. In “Deep Woods” the narrator is a young child hanging out with her Uncle Sal who refers to her as baby girl. She thinks, I am not a baby. But when he repeats this endearment, she thinks, I am a child. As the exchange continues he speaks to her as man. Man, I’d be set with a boat. In her literal mind she wonders What if I was a man? After Sal addresses a girl in the wood as girlfriend, she wonders But was that his girlfriend? The piece concludes with:

I get out of the truck, and she [Mom] slams the door and runs toward us. Everyone is small. With every step I imagine I’m a baby, a child, a girl, a grown ass woman. I am a giant, stepping over the whole river and the parks and the woods, the deep wood.

Does Mom slam the door because she was worried about her child? The child is on another page, imagining a bigger life to come.

In “Game Theory,” Corey is Becky’s sister. She sees her sister’s emerging sexuality and understands the danger she flirts with regarding men and lust. Becky ignores the men in cars whistling through their teeth, making a rolling motion to take down the window, while Mom stands in the grocery, reading ingredient lists.

Mom is oblivious. Becky does not seem to recognize her vulnerability, but Corey does. When her mom is tucking her into bed, Corey wishes she was a boy…

The author expands on the confusion and vulnerability of being a teen in “Window on the World.” There were four of us. Girls often traveled in fours at that time, like free restaurant crayons. This group of three with a rotational fourth spent a lot of time in a defunct bathroom, smoking and playing cards. When Carly trims her nails with a box cutter, she bleeds onto the floor, reminding us of our notoriously copious periods when we would cry, for many reasons. Others in the bathroom, fixing a face, just let that slide. Just another girl, crying.

I’m a baby, a child, a girl, a grown ass woman. I am a giant, stepping over the whole river and the parks and the woods, the deep wood.

The teenage Merit Scholar, from “A Care in the World,” doesn’t seem to care about anything. I don’t care how on a beautiful day on the lake I got in that accident and went down to the bottom and saw that we are a hair’s breadth from death.” Of her overly subscribed life designed by other’s expectations, she says, I don’t care that I don’t know what I’m doing or how it will end. Sitting in her boyfriend’s Mazda that won’t stop, she reflects on a poem from her English class by Li Po about wanting the moon and how we will always stagger around alone and how we care anyway and how we care.

In “A Reading,” we get closer to what might be the most genuine voice of the author, who performs and captivates and fights to maintain our attention.

The last poem falls, we stand to applaud, or to get to you or to get away. It’s not really about women. What you find sexy, dumb, and irresistible, the fount of all your inspiration, is your forever lover, death…. Then, it is over. What have we learned?

What I have learned from Duckler’s book is that this art of becoming yourself, especially if you are female, is fraught with risks that you are lucky to survive. And if you are lucky, you have a sister or find a sister with whom you can stagger around alone.

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Rachel Barton is a poet who edits her own Willawaw Journal and serves as associate editor for Cloudbank Books. Her recent collection, Jacob’s Ladder (Main Street Rag 2024) and previous book, This is the Lightness, are available here: rachelbartonwriter.com. Barton lives in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, the land of the Kalapuya.