Barrelhouse Reviews: Small, Burning Things by Cathy Ulrich

Reviewed by Hayli May Cox

Okay Donkey Press / July 2023 / 180 pp

A book of flash, when as scintillating as this new release, compels attention and drops the reader deep into a brilliant new world. Cathy Ulrich’s second book, Small, Burning Things, is a satisfying collection of fifty flash pieces, each its own enticing, red-hot coal. It’s not surprising that Ulrich, an award-winning flash writer and founder of the flash fiction journal Milk Candy Review, possesses such skill. These stories are discrete entities which each showcase Ulrich’s adeptness at flash—how she beckons us in with her titles, her perfect first lines, and keeps us enthralled and enchanted by every word. However, they also build upon each other, sometimes returning and connecting in unexpected ways. Her characters, often women and girls, exist in worlds that are sometimes enchanting, and sometimes terrifying and strange. These girls breathe smoke, rain down from the sky, become ghosts and birds, love strangely and secretly, or even disappear. So often invisible in their own lives, they each demand to be seen. Ulrich’s stories are hard to look away from even as they scald the eyes. I am still a bit blinded.

Whether a piece leaves you haunted with questions or its characters address you directly, whether it is in second person or third-person plural, you, the reader, are constantly being engaged. Often, you are part of the story. You are kissing boys, marrying your scarecrow bride, using your robot arm, loving the swan girl, or loving the boy-clone. You are trading lives with the rich girl, holding your sister’s disappearing children, meeting your giraffe stepfather, pretending you don’t know about your husband’s affair, and worrying your mother when you disappear. In these stories, we are haunted by the ghost of girl-blood rinsed from asphalt. We meet ostriches and alligators, a cat “weeks-long dead getting pressed deeper and deeper into the pavement.” We witness frostbitten toes floating in jars and boys in rumbling trucks. One of these boys parks three blocks down from a girl’s trailer on the rez and tells her, as he looks up at the stars, “It’s different here…than in the real world.” Girls wear stained ivory dresses, braid hair and tie dandelion bracelets. Their bellies are full of birds, snakes, and fire. Bodies are missing pieces or growing new parts, while the surgeon with hands “like polished swords” has eyes that can see what’s missing inside you. And as you read, the line between your body and everything, everyone else becomes blurred.

Ulrich’s stories poke and prod at the world, creatively and intelligently, and refuse to flinch or turn away from what it offers up. Our struggles—climate disasters, racial and gender inequalities, individuals’ eroding freedom to live and love with dignity—are transformed and cast in a darkly magical glow. She often embraces the powers of repetition and metanarrative, sometimes across stories and sometimes in closer quarters. For example, in one run, each paragraph begins with the same six words: “This is one of those stories where someone drowns”; “This is one of those stories where the town never recovers from their loss, where the school shutters its doors after weeks of the surviving students wearing black armbands…”; “This is one of those stories with a haunting”; “This is one of those stories where our parents try to forget and can’t…” This technique emphasizes the enormity of grief caused by the story’s particular tragedy even as it reminds us of a terrible truth—that such stories are not so uncommon. There’s tension at the heart of this book, too: between women and the world, between girls and women, between the children and their guardians. Parents hold signs that say “protect our children” even as they send them off to school to dangle from monkey bars over the mouths of predators.

And, no, children are not all fear or innocence and love in Small, Burning Things. A mother herself, Ulrich understands. The children in her stories watch the world crumble around them as they “wait for someone to fall” into the mouths of beasts, both literal and metaphorical. As they stand in the face of grief and loss, “the parents,” they say, “are so afraid.” Ulrich’s (fictional) children refuse to be underestimated, ignored, or used. They persist in their own ways, despite the lurking dangers, despite the relentless seizure of their power and dignity and so much else. And sometimes, like the girls who declare “We are bored by our fortunes,” they dare to take agency over their own young lives.

Ulrich’s tiny stories ask us to witness, to consider what we see out (or in) the window, what we refuse to look at, and why. Her prose sparkles as she returns and repeats, shakes up each little world until, like in one of her stories, the book itself becomes “a prayer, a poem, a song.” We stand among these characters as Ulrich asks us to witness them as they are— “for a moment, shining,” and then blinking out.

Hayli May Cox is a PhD candidate studying creative writing and gender studies at The University of Missouri, though she's really a Michigander. You can find her things at haylicox.com.