In “How to Make Strawberry Jam,” an adolescent boy reconsiders his participation in the family’s pick-your-own-fruit tradition after he finds out about his father’s affair. In “Some of us say we are worried about Larry,” a retiree builds an amusement park in his suburban backyard, both concerning and intriguing the neighbors. In “Polly Pocket Takes a Holiday to Galveston,” a tiny plastic toy sees the bright side in being submerged in ocean waves. Laurie Marshall’s Proof of Life is a collection of brilliant, bite-sized stories, each with its own umami of sadness, nostalgia, longing, abandonment, and love. Marshall often sets the mood through objects: storage boxes “packed with paper envelopes full of photos— memories processed and printed, preserving people and places,” a high school girl’s name “painted in gold under the driver’s side window,” and “the half pound of turkey and a loaf of sourdough” that Marvin, the title character in “Marvin the Lesser” buys after therapy. Or it is nothing more than a fleeting expression: a woman’s “nose wrinkling in a way that her husband once found charming,” or “her face disappearing from view” in one of the collection’s standout stories, “Still thinking about that night at Carrie’s friend’s lake house.”
While Marshall has a gift for describing bittersweet goodbyes, she inserts joy into moments that might otherwise be anguished, like transforming a story of infidelity into math problems, in “Arithmetic for Real Life,” or providing a talking dog to a heartbroken man in “Suddenly, David remembers his ex is not the only bitch in his life.” The presentation of Marshall’s visual art, in the form of four collages interspersed throughout the collection, are a bit of flash, too: a scrap of text, a vintage photograph of a portion of a man’s smile, a river of rich blood from below a full skirt. The collages enhance the stories they complement, like the enormous strawberries in the backseat of a convertible or the anatomical heart held so casually in a woman’s hand.
Tiny as they may be, Marshall’s stories are so rich that they will stick to your teeth and leave their flavor on your tongue.
ELJ Editions (2023)