BAD HANDWRITING: Stories
SARA MESA (tr. Katie Whittemore & Frances Riddle)
Open Letter Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.95 ebook, available now
August 2025: 40% discount on all Open Letter titles written or translated by female-identifying artists. (Discount is applied automatically at checkout on publisher's website and applies to all hardcover, paperback, and ebook editions.)
Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: From the author of the highly acclaimed Four by Four and Among the Hedges comes a collection of unsettling, captivating stories.
The eleven stories in this collection approach themes of childhood and adolescence, guilt and redemption, power and freedom. There are children who resist authority and experience the process of growing up with shock, and loneliness; alienated young girls whose rebellion lies under the surface—subterranean, furious and impotent; people who are tormented—or not—by regret and doubt, addicted to feelings of culpability; men who take advantage of women and adults who exercise power over children with a disturbing degree of control; kids abandoned by their parents; the suicide of the elderly and the young; lives that hide crimes—both real and imagined. Eschewing cosmopolitanism in favor of the micro-world of her characters, Mesa depicts a reality that is messy and disturbing, on even the smallest scale of an individual life, a single family.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Sara Mesa's collection does something exciting to me: It presents a woman's unexpurgated thoughts on her role, her world's extent, and why it is (not could or should be) that way. The women in question aren't always adults, or the PoV characters. They are always, though, the heart of the tale told.
Where men should know to go, they are clueless, or narcissistic, enough not to. All the stories together make a dark and compelling vision of our cruel world. Little hope is offered here that there is light at the end of the tunnel, even that of an oncoming freight train's headlight.
In accordance with the Prophecy, the use of the Bryce Method hereinafter applies.
The Screech Owl might refer to the bird, or the unkind and minatory older woman in charge of this forest picnic:
The snap of the pine needles breaking beneath her feet grew quieter as she drew near, strangled by the voice of the aunt, a voice from the depths of an earthen jar, deep, strong, stony. ... The aunt always knew exactly what had to be done and the proper steps to do it. ...allowing no one to disturb her ritual. She performed it deliberately, unhurried, as if time itself was obliged to mold to her pace.
Nothing good comes of wondering and wandering when your real purpose is escape. From so very much, it turns out; the screech owl least of all. Darkly suggestive of bitter secrets and unspoken unhappiness, redolent of the matriarchal control by guilt and shame, a very, very sad and betrayed start to the collection. 4*
Mármol finds us in the memories of a writer whose class is jolted by the suicide of the freckle-faced titular character at the sad age of fourteen. She recalls for us the way she felt before the event, the childish concerns and hatreds that consume all schoolkids in that passage of life; her older sister bonding with her over a particularly weird and awful teacher; the way she held her pencil, apparently so odd and unpleasant to others that they recall it decades later. Nothing much about the boy himself, unsurprisingly, since this isn't his story only one of the life that goes on after tragedy. The writer narrating the story is formed by the event and her observations set in stone because of it. Reads differently in the age of ever-increasing rate of youth suicide than it would've when written. 3.5*
Just a Few Millimeters limns some uneasy cultural attitudes towards disability as a young teacher copes awkwardly with a severely disabled teenaged boy with all his thoughts and feelings but who is trapped in his head. She is in his room to administer a school exam, as he communicates (like Hawking) via tiny eye movements.
Told in a headlong rush of listening in on her private thoughts, the story hurts in its voyeuristic honesty of prejudice, of Othering, of silent but vocalized rejection. The cruelty we all possess, express inside our heads, and so reject community, communication, simple communing with The Other. Hard subject, but when did that stop Mesa from tackling it? 4.5*
"Creamy Milk and Crunchy Chocolate" explores the shadow side of accepting responsibility for one's actions: Guilt. Not "I did this thing that hurt you, I'm sorry" guilt; the kind that, in its intensity, recenters the causer of harm, focuses all the attention on the committer of the harm thus re-robbing the harmed of centrality in their life. In other words, toxic narcissism wrapped in saintly clothes.
A man and woman come together in a guilt-issues therapy group. Their self-centeredness keeps on reinforcing their narcissism. They continue to cope, not by reaching for healing, rather with extravagant sex accompanied by religiosity and toxic outward focus to avoid the learning guilt, remorse, and regret can offer.
Subtle language point: The title of the story is in English in the original Spanish text. It carries an extra weight that way, that the quotes around it in translation approximates. 5 stars, a story that lives with me
Stonewords takes place in the past of "The Screech Owl" above. The origin story, so to speak, of the unhappiness and bitter resentment in that tale of horrors committed with "Love" in the mouth of a woman for whom it is only a word, devoid of any interiority.
A childhood, then adolescence, lived with a harpy whose grudges and jealousy masquerade as concern for her reputation (though not her feelings), leaves the narrator used to insults, belittlement, cruelty she labels "stonewords." She describes them in the same terms one would rain: as sliding down her arms, her legs, unsurprising and ordinary. The day comes to her, as it does to all of us, that all the exciting fumbling around has an end, a purpose, that does not follow rules.
Accidentally matured, she explains to her aunt the sight that brought this loss of innocence to her. The line she (which she?) never understood is finally crossed, and...offscreen, as it were...the full weight of all the stonewords lands on her (which her?). 4.25*
Nothing New foretells the death of the old, useless, addicted men who supported a system now in its rigor mortis and wrapping tightly around the few remaining pleasures of life: hatred, booze, and pointless cruelty, all horribly addictive.
The grandson recounting, sort of, the story of the old man's last hours on Earth, wasn't there wasn't even interested in it except as a story told to an anonymous audience. A bleak picture of an end that will come to so many. I hope it comes exactly this way to the old bastards in charge in 2025. 4*
White People portrays the unconsidered use of power associated with gender, as well as skin color. A young woman turns down an invitation to see her parents at Christmas so she can visit her sister, While she is there, her sister decides not to have an abortion or put her unborn baby up for adoption in spite of the pressure to do so after she is sent to prison for murder. Unmemorable, if nicely written. 3.5*
Papa is Made of Rubber tells us of three young brothers, one an infant, struggling to survive in an apartment that their parents have, for unknown reasons, abandoned. Mesa has writes about children in crisis, or simply in hard-to-fathom difficulty, and it is a strength of hers. It is a moving, unnerving piece of storytelling, but there's a missing heart of meaning. 4*
What is Going On with Us is the ugly aftermath of rape. It's told in Sara Mesa's most usual stream-of-consciousness prose.
Nothing graphic happens. I wish it had. I'd feel less...dirty...compromised...maybe revulsion for the act is cathartic. I've been this woman, and this is exactly what it felt like, still feels like, and can never be expunged from any part of you. 5*
Cattle Tyrants Short and sharp. Vivid vignette of being assaulted, being brutalized, just because They can. It's in the aftermath the tragedy unfolds. A bit like "The Screech Owl," it's more about what They will think than about what happened to you. 4*
Mustelids...those weird little critters that combine mammalian fur, reptilian sinuosity, and add a hefty dash of playful destructiveness...are her favorite animals. He's left trying to put that into the puzzle he has some pieces to, though not the ones he supposes he does. The corner piece is her published collection of violent, dark stories; then his picture's blown into new configurations as she explains how otters and incest coexist in her head, before "falling asleep" on his shoulder as they go back to their home city.
He will never know if she listened to any of the interesting facts he shared. He waits for her while she creates all kinds of embarrassing fuss and ruction looking for her left-behind otter plushie.
Clueless to the end. 4*
