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anderbo: Night
by Jessica Pishko

It’s interesting how much pain can be packed into a human being. We’re dynamic creatures, if only insofar as we can suffer. We can suffer terrible pains and humiliations without even showing it. Youth can hide that pain. A smile can hide that pain. Numbers—just the fact that there are so many of us—can hide that pain. But “Night,” by Jessica Pishko reminds us how much a person can suffer, how much people are suffering right now. This story is a call to remember that how a person appears and what they perceive can be wildly different.

The story takes place outside where two young women contemplate their relationships. Each is upset; each is drunk, and maybe that’s why they’re able to be honest without another. They stand outside in a desolate setting, surrounded by lifelessness and decay: “Kim and I are standing on the dried-up lawn next to Daniel’s pick-up truck, which is mostly white, but has been outside too long, so parts of it are rust, dirt, and what I like to think is the original material of the car beneath.” There is no hope for their relationship, at least not within the context of this story, and that is where Pishko succeeds. This story is effective because there isn’t an easy, no simple path to redemption. Instead, she shows us how two women compare emotional wounds.

The narrator doesn’t lament her position; she is paralyzed in her inability to control her relationship. We see this particularly telling moment, a scene of intimacy where trust and physical contact is used to humiliate and hurt. Pishko writes, “When Carlos did see me, he grunted. ‘You look fat,’ he said, and walked away with his friend Tony, after giving me a half-hearted swipe of a hug around my waist, pinching the flesh above my jeans.” Even at the end of the story, we see how intimacy has failed, “I know that Carlos will be so drunk that his breath will smell sickly sweet, that he will bob and weave around as if he were on a sinking ship, that he will grab at my shirt so forcefully it might tear, that he will pull down his pants and steer his penis towards my face; all the while Kim and Daniel will be having sex in the other corner, her sighs and moans gentle purrs reaching deep into my ears.” The speakers sees herself as ugly, as unworthy of love or genuine affection, which compels the reader to ask who she really is. She suffers, and no one seems particularly concerned with her pain, but then we can ask if her perceptions are correct or if everything she experiences is colored ugly by her experiences.

Read the story for yourself and tell us what you think.

About the Reviewer
Jeremy Trimble is a graduate student at Sacramento State University in California. He is a writer working on his first novel.

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