The Girl In The Flammable Skirt and Other Short Stories

The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I originally read the short story The Girl in The Flammable Skirt in my first creative writing class. It was a strange story, but after we unpacked the symbolism it became something beautiful. Years later, I've gotten around to reading the other stories, and unfortunately I didn't find any of them as poignant as the title piece. Like Drunken Mimi and Legacy, some of them where just a little too odd to make sense of.
I enjoyed Fugue and the way Bender wove the stories together, along with the symbolism in that piece. The Girl In The Flammable Skirt holds up after all these years.

View all my reviews Besides this anthology, I'm currently also reading Upside Down: Inverted Tropes in Storytelling, and I'm finding it delightful. As the name implies, the purpose of this collection is to showcase stories where the author takes a well-known trope, and flips it around. Some of these are obvious, and some of them are not. For example, The Refridgerator in the Girlfriend by Adam-Troy Castro seems to be a nod to a comic book trope that involves violence against women to further the male protagonist journey. It's not uncommon for fans to refer to their favorite female characters as being 'fridged' when they are depowered, unjustly killed off, or put in ridiculous scenarios (ex. Powergirl is depowered, magically impregnated, made vulnerable to unprocessed natural materials... like sharp sticks). Despite the long history of dead women shoved in fridges, this made me think more of the Sexy Lamp Test. To quote the immortal words of Kelly Sue DeConnick, "If you can take out a female character and replace her with a sexy lamp, you're a fucking hack." When the protagonist girlfriend in The Refridgerator in the Girlfriend has a refridgerator installed in her body (apparently a normal and safe thing in this story's universe), she does come close to being more of a thing than a person to her lover. Delilah S. Dawson seemed to pick menstruation as her trope, and my Goodreads comment on the story reads something like, "Loving The First Blood of Poppy Dupree. A wonderful mix of Neil Gaiman's American Gods, and 'Are you there God? It's me, Margaret.'" I'm definitely going to come back and read that again. There's enough to unpack there for a whole blog post.