Compression Scars

Kellie Wells (hardcover, 208 pages, University of Georgia Press, 2002)

In Kellie Wells’ Flannery O’Connor Award-winning collection, Compression Scars, the body is a problem. The bodies in these stories are blind, deaf, pierced, headless, scarred, ridden by tumors and shingles and leukemia, plagued with heart palpitations, ugly, and, more often than you’d expect, dead. They suffer from what the fatherless narrator of “Star-dogged Moon” calls “the corporeal rap.” Characters occasionally approach sex, that most body-affirming of acts, but it remains out of reach. After one failed seduction, a woman, apparently by way of “good-bye” to her uninterested partner, “raises one side of her shirt, exposing a breast as small and fragile as a teacup.” Strange, sad and beautiful, a chord this book plays many times.

It’s no surprise, then, that these characters often want spiritual relief. The stories use mystical means — seances, ghosts, imaginary and rhetorical flights — to escape, transcend, ascend; or to use Wells’ own consistently brilliant language: each story is “a fast burning centrifuge spinning spirit from flesh.” At the magical conclusion of the title story “Compression Scars,” bats descend to brush bugs from the protagonist’s bare belly, a spectral touch that contrasts with the earthier sex she can’t accept from a young man with devastating compression scars spreading throughout his body. But Wells occasionally balances this spiritualizing impulse with a character willing to give the flesh a go. Even the pre-adolescent Hallie, in “Hallie Out of This World,” when confronting a knife-bearing sexual predator who “just” wants to look at her, exhorts him to “Touch me.” Whether that touch would be worse than what the man has already subjected her to is hard to say. In any case, the story withholds that touch, as these stories generally do, as if, in Hallie’s words, “a plate of glass separated us.”

Plotwise, these stories also tend to be a bit disembodied. A typical narrative puts a character suffering from the loss of a loved one through a seemingly meandering series of memories and encounters, set to the music of Wells’ inventive, finely detailed, funny, and sometimes bracingly intellectual sentences. When the music is about to stop, we find that the story has deftly managed to locate itself directly above a trapdoor leading into feeling or insight—and out of the story. Without the unfolding of dramatic action to bring on their resolutions, something which depends on purposeful bodies moving through time, the stories often require imagined rather than enacted endings: a dead father returns for a conversation in "Star-dogged Moon”; Hallie imagines leaving this world with her friend Oedipus and an experimental cow named Gretel. But, in most of these cases, the power of Wells’ language leaves me feeling that definitive plot action is for squares.

Interestingly, the story most grounded in familiar emotions and motivations is the amazing “Secession, XX,” a story which also has the most body-crazed premise: conjoined twins, brother and sister, survive long enough to attend high school and fall in love with the same person. It’s as if having paid off a massive debt to strangeness, Wells feels comfortable getting down to jealousy and desire. Here the climactic rhetoric (climactic maybe for the collection as well), spoken by the brother who has begun to thrive as his sister declines, gives the body its due: “I sense that it is, after all, in the body that one knows whatever one can claim to know about God; redemption occurs, courageously, at this site of pain and decay.” But in the last story, the will to escape the flesh is re-ascendant. Yet as the characters at the end of “Hallie Out of This World” rise into the sky, ready to “burn ourselves out of this world,” I’m tempted to say, “Not so fast. Down here, in our bodies, is the only place we can live.” Then again, Wells knows this, deeply, and that’s why she’s written these beautiful, pain-streaked stories.

Reviewed by Andy Mozina

Andy Mozina teaches creative writing and literature at Kalamazoo College. His short stories have appeared in Fence, Alaska Quarterly Review, Mississippi Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere.