A new bride is abandoned by her husband at a gas station. She walks in her white dress from the bathroom to the road, and she thinks she can see the taillights in the distance.
Behind her, an old woman smokes. “First time?” she says.
The old woman takes her to a field, where the other abandoned brides mourn.
In Mouthful of Birds, Samantha Schweblin’s short-story collection that’s newly translated from Spanish to English, reality may be a place that can be revisited, although it’s possible everything there will have changed by the time these characters figure out how to get back.
In these stories, a butterfly may be a sign that hundreds and hundreds of butterflies are about to burst out of school doors. The images that don’t seem quote-unquote real, though, nudge us toward more difficult images that do: A dog in a trunk on a dark night, six pairs of tweezers in a bright room, a troubled daughter with a mouthful of birds. PLEASE READ
Mouthful of Birds by Samantha Schweblin, from Riverhead Books
