SOME OF THEM WILL CARRY ME

A debut collection of three dozen stories with the logic of dreams.

Like dreams, Scodellaro’s stories can feel like a jumble of puzzle pieces that are hard to put together. Take, for example, “Freedom of White Boys in the Sand,” which opens with a girl shouting obscenities at a group of White men, who enjoy a kind of privileged obliviousness while also being on the verge of extinction. Meanwhile, other people dressed in secondhand suits watch her, speculating about why she’s there: Is she a widow looking for a new partner? Or a ghost in search of her murderer? Later, she reveals she’s trying to find her sister, who went off to buy a helicopter. Instead of featuring conventional plots, these pieces, whose protagonists are often Black women, map physical spaces, focus on characters’ bodies and gestures, and inventory objects. All this detail, however, is the opposite of grounding: instead, it creates a profound feeling of dislocation and disconnection, one of the collection’s themes. In “YYYY,” the narrator prides himself on being observant but fails to see the important things—like his companion’s tears. Another character notes that while objects can “tether us,” they also “can be meaningless garbage.” While some of the longer stories feel wandering, Scodellaro’s shorter ones often land with striking intensity. “Cabbage, The Highest Arch” paints an incisive portrait of a woman in two pages, while “The Foot of the Tan Building” contemplates our indifference to tragedy by examining the body of a woman who jumped to her death, “her running shoes exposed, her childlike ankles exposed,” and “Forty-Seven Days Ago” uses a grocery list’s worth of liquids—“vegetable broth, apple cider vinegar, low sodium soy sauce, extra virgin olive oil…”—to evoke the narrator’s heartbrokenness.

Singular stories that will reward patient readers.