The Best Short Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “Anna George” by Melissa Goodrich

The traditional short story’s primary building blocks depend heavily on logic. A character’s desire meets with a series of escalating obstacles until finally a climax is reached and that desire is fulfilled (or not) in a satisfying, plausible way. Melissa Goodrich’s “Anna George” (Passages North, Issue 36) flows far more associatively through its title character’s plight; rather than escalating to a climax, the story weaves together and then unravels.

Goodrich begins with a statement that immediately undoes the reader’s expectations of a traditional story. “Your parents go on a trip overseas and your mother comes back as an orange and your father doesn’t come back at all.” This is the stuff of the real world—parents, trip overseas, orange—but the latter isn’t fulfilling its typical function. The driving question isn’t “will the character get what she wants,” but instead, “Is her mother actually an orange? Where is her father? What is he? What is happening here?” The mystery resides, to a large extent, in the nature of the story itself.

Like in Marie Helene-Bertino’s Edna in Rain (where she normalizes the literal raining of human beings with conventional detailing), Goodrich humorously normalizes the orange-as-mother situation:

“At night, you and your orange watch TV together, and you rub the orange at its nub to comfort it, and you carry it in your hands to bed, and you spritz it with water, and lay it in a cooler, arranging an ice chip beneath its head, and your mother in this way sleeps.”

Months pass by in between Anna George and the mother/orange in summary—time passing being another form of normalization—and slowly the original questions of how this story works begins to feel settled. Her mother actually is and orange, we think, and when a ghost is introduced, one that “…tails you like forests follow rain…” it stands to reason that that ghost is her father, as we’ve known he’s been missing since that opening sentence.

But before the story—mystery on the verge of being revealed—can settle comfortably into the impending resolution, Goodrich dodges it by stating our suspicions bluntly. “The ghost has been there for a while now, since an orange came home from vacation instead of your mother: you can guess what it represents.” By stating the symbolism outright, she steals the power of the metaphor of her loss and also the impetus of Anna’s grief, and with it any satisfaction the reader might have had figuring it out.

Goodrich unmoors us, with the purpose of preparing for her next move: subverting the narrator. Now, halfway through the story, she introduces another character, one that has with no previous ties or connection to the story so far. The character is an “old man in a bar in New Orleans” who “writes down everything for the ghost to do and then the ghost does it in real life, following you around like hibiscus follows the sun,” and also dictates Anna George’s action. Instead of propelling forward, Goodrich’s story changes direction completely. It’s beginning to unravel.

As it does so, momentum builds. Anna George peels the orange and begins eating it. We’re told that one seed she finds inside is the mother and the other is just a seed. It’s an associative move that both mirrors the unraveling and also openly defies the logic set forth earlier in the story. The author is no longer the author. The orange is not longer the mother. Everything is shifting.

As Goodrich faces Anna’s grief more directly, the potential meaning behind the images become more elusive:

“They say grief takes seven forms, some foggy or antlered, some idle as stovetops on low heat, some like a letter you can’t read because your eyes have turned to stars, and everything you look at imprints with a tooth of light.”

This collage of disparate images serves to show that now even the logic of patterns has been left behind. Then she subverts the author once again: “The man writing this ghost story knows nothing about how it (the story) works.”

In the end, there is no more making sense of the grief. Goodrich builds each element of this story only to then tear it down, until we’re left with only the bare emotion of the devastating last line: “And here comes Anna George, hurtling towards that howl.”