Winner of the Spring 2013 Black River Chapbook Competition
Fantastical and disquieting, yet utterly familiar and human in their strangeness, the six short tales in Blake Kimzey’s Families Among Us introduce us to the work of a wildly imaginative and masterfully nuanced new writer. In the tradition of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, but also of Roald Dahl and Aimee Bender, Kimzey taps into the dark and darkly beautiful plights of six families pitched against mysterious and uncontrollable conditions. We encounter characters at the painful point of transformation: from sea to land, from human body to animal body, from compassion to rejection. When confronted with the surreal, the unknowable, the impossibly strange, we could choose to run. Or we could make the difficult choice, the one that leads us to weirder and better things. Kimzey’s stories ask us to do just that, and in doing so, to be a little more human.
FROM A FAMILY AMONG US
Four of them, a family, crawled naked from the sea clutching plastic suitcases. Like a brass section in an orchestra they drew breath into their lungs for the first time in days, months, years, decades. They were ageless, the mother and father, boy and girl. Slowly, the gills on their necks flattened and disappeared into skin, leaving only faint watermarks that suggested long forgotten scars or birthmarks. It hurt at first, their lungs rising and falling, rising and falling.
The decision to leave the sea was permanent, a unanimous vote to abandon the fuselage that had been their home, for how many years they could not count. On shore, among the smooth rocks and wet driftwood, they dressed. They stood on uncertain legs. Out of the water their arms seemed to move too fast, cutting through the air without resistance. For the first time the children heard waves crashing, birds overhead, and felt the warmth of the sun on their bare skin. A multitude of smells swirled about the children, and they smiled and dripped dry for the first time in memory.
