Not a Chance
Jessica Treat
(FC2)
FC2, or Fiction Collective 2, is a smaller press out of Florida State University that publishes about six titles a year. They’re selective in their choices, taking a risk on new names and material, but always supporting quality. Jessica Treat, with her short story collection Not a Chance, is among this year’s authors.
Not a Chance is a mesmerizing series of stories, each one told through an intimate, first-person voice. In the title story, the narrator describes a friend by saying, “She was the kind of person who would find a small speck of glass in her sausage, take it out, and then keep on eating.” It soon becomes clear the narrator isn’t talking about glass in a sausage or a fly on fried potatoes, but rather a shiftless man and the way her friend falls in love–following this man until she literally disappears, perhaps at his hands.
The narrator says, “Anyone else would’ve stopped eating. Only she would go on to finish the sausage. There’s something wrong about it. But she was like that. With him. Of course, at first it wasn’t noticeable. But eventually it was there: the fly, the speck of glass, the things about him that anyone else would’ve stopped at.”
The friend runs into this man, her lover, as he’s selling off her books in a used bookstore. She interrupts only long enough to take back her favorites. Later, she excuses his actions, to the narrator: “She smiled then, ‘Don’t be silly. They’re only books,’ and the way she said it reminded me of the fly I’d seen her flick aside at the restaurant.”
Characters move fluidly between the United States, Mexico, and Europe, always traveling with a confused mix of emotional and sexual history, making the outside world feel smaller, more accessible, and the internal, emotional landscape endless, though both are equally treacherous. People hide or disappear, jungles are dense, love is weak and untrustworthy.
In several of these stories the narrator is someone other than the central character. This breaks a basic guideline of fiction–that a story should generally be told through a point of view aligned with the person most affected by the story itself. Treat manages to successfully allow her stories to unfold as told by a person less central–“Ants” is entirely about the life history of the narrator’s boyfriend. These narrators, separate from the action, are sometimes puzzled, but always thoughtful and engaged. In this way they serve as an assertion that there is the possibility of gaining personal understanding, even in the midst of persistent, complex, and frustrated blind striving for connection.