Bruce McAllister’s “Why My Mother Killed Herself” seems to promise explanations but then refuses to give them. Or, if it does, they take the form of an elliptical trace. The movements of the story suggest that a space might be found at the center of the three apparently disparate episodes that make the narrator’s mother cry—an absent event connecting the death of a pet dog, a book of Chinese poems, and a remembered story her father used to tell. The story’s brevity, barely skating along the edges of narrative, offers sketches of disparate but resonant objects—like the lovely, odd, potentially found poems—which allow the connections between them to hover at the edges of what can be seen or felt. Birds fly but do not sing in flight.– The Editors and the Fiction Staff
Why My Mother Killed Herself
There were three things that made her eyes, which were not like mine at all, tear up. The first was animals—animals too weak to live. When our dog died, a little bull mix that whined too much, I didn’t know for days that it had. I was a teenager. When I found her in the backyard, on the dead lawn, by the fence, she could barely tell me. “She’s always been sickly” was all she could manage. I wanted to know why she was really crying. It was terrible not knowing.
The second was poems in Chinese—a little book her mother had given her in Morelos before I was born—which she really loved.
Clouds float into a great expanse.
Birds fly but do not sing in flight.
How lonely are the travelers.
Even the sun shines cold and white
And this:
She rides a red leopard, striped lynxes attending,
Her chariot arrayed with banners of cassia and magnolia,
Her cloak made of orchids and her girdle of azalea,
Calling sweet flowers for those dear to her heart.
The third was a story—one she told to anyone in the neighborhood who would listen. It was one her father used to tell before he left them—about a boy with a limp who tried to help a wounded man in a saloon gunfight in Juarez a hundred years ago, and how he was killed by a heartless man for trying. “Just for trying,” she would say, unable to stop crying.