YOU ARE THE SNAKE

Short stories that expose the rages, obsessions, and plights of girls and women.

In “The Hot Girl,” the narrator’s best friend stabs her boyfriend in the leg in a jealous fit of rage, nearly killing him. In “Roadkill,” a group of restless and unhappy college-aged girls spend their weekends partying and taunting their peers; one night, they sexually assault a boy. In “The Ryans,” two teenage girls vengefully trash the room of their friend, Ryan, who has sold them fake pot. Escoria’s raw stories span from early childhood (a third-grade girl’s friend, Katie, wants to “play girlfriend and boyfriend” and simulates having sex) to adulthood (in “Hazel: A Diptych,” a relative learns about the life of the now-deceased Hazel, who was bipolar and was raped by her father and sexually assaulted her own son). All of Escoria’s characters seem to exist in the same fraught and relentless world—one rife with violence, addiction, partying, sexual assault. Many of the stories feature heavy drug usage: a student who tries meth before a midterm, a recovering addict who takes her 60-something heroin-addicted uncle to AA. Escoria highlights apathetic, almost sociopathic women—characters who, upon learning of a hated co-worker or fellow student’s death, “wanted to laugh but…didn’t.” Her stories are permeated by violence, both physical and emotional, and seek to expose the dirty underbelly of everyday, more peaceable life. At times, these revelations can feel refreshingly peculiar; in these moments, the secret pains of womanhood feel collective, shared. In one such tale, a young woman and her boyfriend wait out a storm in Brooklyn while in the middle of breaking up: “My heart was still pounding from the ride but also from the knowledge that this was a person fading, someone who was there in my life but also wasn’t.” But more often, the stories lack an adequate contextual framework, and feel unnecessarily—even irredeemably—cruel.

A damning, if not wholly successful, examination of the violences of womanhood.