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The Longest Way to Eat a Melon
The debut short story collection from writer, artist, and editor Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross.
Equal parts melody and malaise, The Longest Way to Eat a Melon charts the activities of a cast of speakers who all grapple in their own ways with what it takes to conjure a self in the midst of discordance. A brain argues with a non-brain about how to remain productive from a place of exhaustion; two supernaturally inclined twins named Han are separated at birth; and an emerging artist paralyzed by possibility considers how best to transform a melon into a breakthrough work of art. Incorporating elements of fable, surrealism, satire, and art and cultural criticism, these stories have a playful peculiarity to them, an interweaving of self-deprecation and curiosity, of woe and hope, of absurdity and humanity. Reader, you will want to savor every bite.
Equal parts melody and malaise, The Longest Way to Eat a Melon charts the activities of a cast of speakers who all grapple in their own ways with what it takes to conjure a self in the midst of discordance. A brain argues with a non-brain about how to remain productive from a place of exhaustion; two supernaturally inclined twins named Han are separated at birth; and an emerging artist paralyzed by possibility considers how best to transform a melon into a breakthrough work of art. Incorporating elements of fable, surrealism, satire, and art and cultural criticism, these stories have a playful peculiarity to them, an interweaving of self-deprecation and curiosity, of woe and hope, of absurdity and humanity. Reader, you will want to savor every bite.
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
252 pages, Paperback
First published June 10, 2025
16 people are currently reading
682 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
July 21, 2025
Now THIS is how you write short stories! The stories in this collection are appealingly absurd while speaking to deeper truths. I especially loved the ones that took the form of a list. The writer’s voice is so distinct and fun. This is one of my favourite collections of 2025 and I would love to read more from this author.
December 10, 2024
surreal and enthralling.
Read
July 28, 2025This book is special and clever and very wonderful and oh also Vancouver based authors stay winning.
October 5, 2025
“Things Q slathers on her bad leg, by order of application: pureed ginseng, cilantro, pomelo, cloves, diaper cream, crushed walnuts, sugarcane, melted refrigerator ice, bathwater, gutter water, spring water, bottled water, grated ginger, soy milk, cow milk, cum, coconut oil, trampled birch bark, rock-sugar syrup, honey, black tea, green tea, molasses, compost, soft tofu, jojoba oil, coffee grounds, winter melon, bitter melon, watermelon, other kinds of melon, orange peel, trampled hawthorn berries, laundry soap, rose perfume, sesame oil, chrysanthemum flowers, pulverized fresh breath mints, frankincense, beeswax, daisy petals, baby lotion, cigarette ash, dried mackerel, dust, mashed banana, mangosteen…”
“She’d once tried to call it “gloominess” or “melancholia,” but felt these failed to properly account for the emotional frenzy of her days; “in emotional distress” on the other hand seemed too clinical and dismissive, leaving out some vital social dimension. “Delirious” did nothing but place her in a fever state, “despondent” made it sound like she was hopeless or a coward, and “hysterical,” with its etymological roots in a female nervous disorder “of the womb,” was straight-out rejected by her feminism. When she finally settled on “crisis of faith” then, she did so not merely because she’d once believed but no longer believed in God, but because it most closely approximated the emphatic disillusionment she felt—with herself, and with the world. She felt immediately glad when she settled on what to call it.”
“She introduced herself as A Woman Suffering from a Crisis of Faith. ”
“like the world was not a world, but an enormous, gaseous sphere—vaporous and impersonal, bigger than feelings—or at least, bigger than one person’s idea of feelings—bigger than God and yet divinely accidental, huge and bright and not at all saturnine. She was, in that moment, not a woman, not a woman suffering at all, but just another mortal being lying randomly upon a sphere. Turning, turning, just another average human occurrence. Here I am, right side up, she thought dully. Now here I am, upside-down.”
“Having many times been accused of having a split personality, he observed, on the one hand, dust and darkness and devastation, while on the other saw only mountain making and valley making and miracles.”
“Somewhere a teenager attempted to take their own life based on a very common misunderstanding of Nietzsche.”
“He asked her what she would do with a million dollars.
“I never wanted to be ri—” she started, but her imagination betrayed her: already, on her tongue, the goodness of a ripe peach in winter, and the soft spray of one of those showerheads designed to reproduce the feeling of rain.”
“Again!” the Director shouted. “From the top!”
“No one on the planet who really has that kind of higher-up-enough view to say, This way for sure. Not even the Director knows!”
“A BRIEF HISTORY OF FEELING
Ecstasy
500 billion years ago—The dark touches itself in the dark and experiences something like ecstasy. Except that ecstasy isn’t a feeling yet—the sensation is just kind of sharp and warm. Afterward, the dark feels happy and breathless. Afterward, the dark feels lonely.
Hunger
4.6 billion years ago—A depressive speck of dust eats everything in the refrigerator until it is planet sized and still wanting more. It wants and wants and vibrates around the universe, eating up everything in its path, plus more. The less filling things are the only things left now, the only things safe now: those empty shards, those empty half-moons, stars.”
Curiosity
3.7 billion years ago—A bolt of lightning strikes a rock and cracks it clean open, like an axe into a durian, like a tender karate chop into a walnut. Inside, there is something stringy and green, something that needs to be pried from its shell in order to be properly examined. Luckily, this activity makes for challenging and deeply satisfying work. Luckily, this activity goes on for eternity.
Attraction
2 billion years ago—Two organisms kiss, and need no oxygen, none at all.
Jubilation
400 million years ago—What is jubilation but the possibility of loving everything and at the same time?
Injustice
250 million years ago—A thousand baby ferns poke out of the dirt and battle for sunlight and the right to grow. They are told they are all equal and exactly the same and that no one has an unfair advantage over the other, even though it’s obvious that some of them have extralong arms, and some have louder personalities, or more loving parents.
Forsakenness
120 million years ago—The very first and most beautiful flower in the world lies wilting at one hundred thousand meters above sea level, having been plucked by an invisible force and thrown into the snow. The feeling: futility, and the first expression of waste.
Persistence
50 million years ago—The manufacture of a popular tourist beach. I can’t quite picture it, can you, each singular, exotic, spotted shell, the smooth of it, the sheer grit of it, its top side, its underside, just turning and turning and turning and turning and turning itself, in this gentlest of epochs, in this slowest of factories, into a most luxurious brand of sand.
Spontaneity
14 million years ago—A barnacle kisses a donkey and takes her from behind.
Generosity
4.59 million years ago—Two organisms, still kissing, stumble in their reverie upon a stranger smoking out in the cold. The stranger wears a fleece coat and leans drunkenly into the wind; the stranger is the first stranger they’ve ever seen. They approach him with trepidation and small offerings of pine cones. They offer him coffee, even though their home is very small.
Love
3 million and 1 years ago—A woman holds her newborn in the dark, and feels enormous love for the thing she herself made, but cannot, at that moment, see.
Rage
200,000 years ago—A man picks up a rock and throws it through the window of the world.
Speechlessness
140,000 years ago—The arch moves the knee moves the hip moves the cheek moves the heart moves the lung moves the throat moves the tongue and makes the lips quiver, buh buh puh muh fuh duh duh duh duh. The worst part about narration is the worst part about speech. Ay ee ai oh yu. Back turned to the curtain, who even knows what I mean? And still, refusing to sing. The worst part about voicing is the heavy gesture. The moodiness of the hollow.
Wonder
10,000 years ago—A mother calls her daughter calls her uncle calls her cousin and everyone gathers around a metal bowl. She fills it with warm water and they kneel down next to it, everybody closing their eyes. One of them sings into it. Another runs their finger around the rim. Another one sends wreaths of daisies floating. Until a kind of miracle occurs, and the first one to recognize it calls it out.
Angst
6,309 years ago—A boy refuses, like the donkey, to be made to go. “He’s going through a period of intense individualization,” they say, of the boy who no longer speaks and only looks forlornly across the sand. “He’s going through a period of necessary rebellion.” The boy strokes the hair of the donkey, the only one who understands him, and questions the moon and the almost-moon and the stars. The people assemble a giant clock on the hillside, and wait for the cloud to pass.
Rejection
5,000 years ago—The familiar dark rubs itself against the peak of a pyramid, edging toward that old friend, ecstasy. In the final seconds before orgasm, the dark pauses in enjoyment, but the pyramid remains sullen and distant and silent.
Vanity
2,500 years ago—A civilization pines over poetry and fine pottery, and this is the expression of the original lust. We collapse hillsides and wage small wars with language. We trade old poems for shinier, more class-confirming ones. We trade perfectly good pots for ones that illustrate a greater mastery of fire.
Skepticism
2,000 and some years ago—I’m told the heavens crack open and an impossible grace runs all over the plate. It’s messy and ideological, gets all over stuff. It makes the masses both more tender and more violent. It attempts to qualify the end.
Melodrama
1,300 years ago, exactly—A princess in a castle surrounded by servants and rooms, agrees to meet her eligible bachelors. When the day finally arrives, however, the princess is in a mood. She refuses to bathe. She orders platters of grapes to her room. She glares with vengeance at the sea—and this mood is a thing she cannot, or else refuses to, explain.
Senselessness
800 years ago—The newborn, once so loved by its mother, is now a man. One day the loved man is conscripted to go to war, and the whole way there he thinks, What a senseless thing, how horrific, that I should go and take another man’s head, and that if I don’t, that man’ll have mine! He goes, but keeps his eyes closed the whole time. He takes blind jabs at enemies, holding the sword in his left hand. He walks backward toward the firing line. He refuses to partake in a violence that is anything less than random because randomness is the only thing keeping him from cruelty.
Ignorance
470 years ago—The stranger is outside the house again, this time cursing wildly about the coming end. We do not invite him in. Instead, we call him a heretic, a lunatic, a fruit loop. We close the blinds. We turn on the TV. He makes a grand mess of the lawn with his pacing, all his mindless chatter about worlds and spheres.
Alienation
250 years ago—A great sadness presses itself against the belly of the city. It burps black smoke and fog, making it difficult to see your neighbors. A mother goes to work before sunrise and returns at three; a father goes to work at three and returns just after sunrise. Rabid dogs all over the street. The bread there goes stale within the hour.
Liberation
50 years ago—The good people assemble, en masse, by the pond. They raise words on sticks and stomp their feet. They call out those in high towers of power. Everybody makes love and defends their right to make it. A man kisses a man and takes him from behind.
Humiliation
35 years ago—In a bathroom stall, the sudden impossibility of owning anything, music so loud you no longer recognize your body, no longer know the right way to be aroused. Years and minutes spent in the stench of perspiration, in the violation that moves glitter around on your cheeks, glitter whose only purpose is to render sadly illuminated those tough balls of want, your psychic disintegration—touch, like a burrowing tapeworm; toilet like an open clam.
Anxiety
25 years ago—We hold hands on the porch at midnight and make a wish for the new millennium. For money, health, vacations, family, success, mindfulness, luck, sex, affection, grace, tenderness, compatibility, ambition, time, beauty, faith, gratitude, memory, fallibility, courage, clarity, good fortune, mobility, strength, confidence, motivation, respect, humility, creativity, inspiration, grounding, focus, safety, spaciousness—and speed, oh, speed because we may not live tomorrow and we are running out of time.
Confusion
18 years ago—I walk into the room and feel at once too young and too old. I take a seat at the bar and grunt like an old man, swing my legs from the stool like a young one. Someone behind me calls me baby, and I think, either I really am somebody’s baby again or else I must be somebody’s whore. I don’t know anymore which one I am, or which version of myself I prefer to be.
Optimism
A year ago—Imagine, the angle of the light, just right. You have enough money. Your heart is bursting. You throw all your old work into the dumpster and start anew beside a bowl of ripe mango because suddenly you have too many good ideas. You run into the yard and mow the lawn. You mow your neighbor’s lawn too because you are kind. You write letters to your friends proposing epic performances and activations. You pick all the clothes up off the floor.
Pessimism
Last week—We’re told, we narrowly avoid death. Being blown up on the subway. Drowning in the Mediterranean Sea. We have no rights. We are not safe. We have no bodies, no intellectual or emotional future. We collect empty cans from the ditch. We are con artists and poultry workers. We are gamblers and custodians. We are undertakers and squatters and refugees. Truth is a word we’ve heard used, but don’t use. Scarcity is a word we use.
Regret
Just yesterday—I watch as a long-legged spider wobbles into a paper cup and stays there a while, before wobbling away. I crush it with a rolled-up magazine on its way to the window, and scrape its thin body into the trash can.”
“Poetry at the warming hour. Impatience at three. Four forty-five and tepid in the possibility of everything being solved, resolved. Mortality setting in, mortality setting in. Seconds adding up to minutes adding up to hours adding up to days. Ten degrees Celsius in the balm of a decade’s mildest winter, in which everything arrives already thawed. Downstairs landlady knocking about the failing bathroom pipes, water collecting in the ceiling of her shower stall. Ten, fifteen, twenty degrees and a snapshot of breath rising in a cool room. Draw the curtains to preserve the best conditions for balm making: warm and dim, the electric baseboard heater blowing upward on the lowest setting. Twenty-three degrees now and the very best temperature for balm making. About the drip that never fails. Nine o’clock and looking for love; nine fifteen and already retreating, wounded. The loss of feeling your mind and body slipping before your time. Mottled aromas condensing in sticky patches on the walls.”
“There may be fifty ways to leave your lover, but this airplane has only two,” she says, walking backward down the aisle and extending both arms.
You leave by telephone. You leave by choir. You leave by serial monogamy and serial desire. You leave by polyphony. You leave by romantic attainment. You leave by gothic religiosity. You leave by classical pronouncement.
Three drinks spilled on a velveteen cushion.
Two exits by inflatable slide at each wing.
One unbearably lonesome and artless flight—
Fifty times you leave your lover until your lover’s out of sight.”
“The trip opens and closes without transformation.”
“Something biblical about the seasons. Everyone you’ve ever met who has claimed to be an artist but never made a single goddamn thing.”
“The body is our general medium for having a world”
“you stare at something for long enough in the dark and pretty soon the thing begins to lose its shape”
“She’d once tried to call it “gloominess” or “melancholia,” but felt these failed to properly account for the emotional frenzy of her days; “in emotional distress” on the other hand seemed too clinical and dismissive, leaving out some vital social dimension. “Delirious” did nothing but place her in a fever state, “despondent” made it sound like she was hopeless or a coward, and “hysterical,” with its etymological roots in a female nervous disorder “of the womb,” was straight-out rejected by her feminism. When she finally settled on “crisis of faith” then, she did so not merely because she’d once believed but no longer believed in God, but because it most closely approximated the emphatic disillusionment she felt—with herself, and with the world. She felt immediately glad when she settled on what to call it.”
“She introduced herself as A Woman Suffering from a Crisis of Faith. ”
“like the world was not a world, but an enormous, gaseous sphere—vaporous and impersonal, bigger than feelings—or at least, bigger than one person’s idea of feelings—bigger than God and yet divinely accidental, huge and bright and not at all saturnine. She was, in that moment, not a woman, not a woman suffering at all, but just another mortal being lying randomly upon a sphere. Turning, turning, just another average human occurrence. Here I am, right side up, she thought dully. Now here I am, upside-down.”
“Having many times been accused of having a split personality, he observed, on the one hand, dust and darkness and devastation, while on the other saw only mountain making and valley making and miracles.”
“Somewhere a teenager attempted to take their own life based on a very common misunderstanding of Nietzsche.”
“He asked her what she would do with a million dollars.
“I never wanted to be ri—” she started, but her imagination betrayed her: already, on her tongue, the goodness of a ripe peach in winter, and the soft spray of one of those showerheads designed to reproduce the feeling of rain.”
“Again!” the Director shouted. “From the top!”
“No one on the planet who really has that kind of higher-up-enough view to say, This way for sure. Not even the Director knows!”
“A BRIEF HISTORY OF FEELING
Ecstasy
500 billion years ago—The dark touches itself in the dark and experiences something like ecstasy. Except that ecstasy isn’t a feeling yet—the sensation is just kind of sharp and warm. Afterward, the dark feels happy and breathless. Afterward, the dark feels lonely.
Hunger
4.6 billion years ago—A depressive speck of dust eats everything in the refrigerator until it is planet sized and still wanting more. It wants and wants and vibrates around the universe, eating up everything in its path, plus more. The less filling things are the only things left now, the only things safe now: those empty shards, those empty half-moons, stars.”
Curiosity
3.7 billion years ago—A bolt of lightning strikes a rock and cracks it clean open, like an axe into a durian, like a tender karate chop into a walnut. Inside, there is something stringy and green, something that needs to be pried from its shell in order to be properly examined. Luckily, this activity makes for challenging and deeply satisfying work. Luckily, this activity goes on for eternity.
Attraction
2 billion years ago—Two organisms kiss, and need no oxygen, none at all.
Jubilation
400 million years ago—What is jubilation but the possibility of loving everything and at the same time?
Injustice
250 million years ago—A thousand baby ferns poke out of the dirt and battle for sunlight and the right to grow. They are told they are all equal and exactly the same and that no one has an unfair advantage over the other, even though it’s obvious that some of them have extralong arms, and some have louder personalities, or more loving parents.
Forsakenness
120 million years ago—The very first and most beautiful flower in the world lies wilting at one hundred thousand meters above sea level, having been plucked by an invisible force and thrown into the snow. The feeling: futility, and the first expression of waste.
Persistence
50 million years ago—The manufacture of a popular tourist beach. I can’t quite picture it, can you, each singular, exotic, spotted shell, the smooth of it, the sheer grit of it, its top side, its underside, just turning and turning and turning and turning and turning itself, in this gentlest of epochs, in this slowest of factories, into a most luxurious brand of sand.
Spontaneity
14 million years ago—A barnacle kisses a donkey and takes her from behind.
Generosity
4.59 million years ago—Two organisms, still kissing, stumble in their reverie upon a stranger smoking out in the cold. The stranger wears a fleece coat and leans drunkenly into the wind; the stranger is the first stranger they’ve ever seen. They approach him with trepidation and small offerings of pine cones. They offer him coffee, even though their home is very small.
Love
3 million and 1 years ago—A woman holds her newborn in the dark, and feels enormous love for the thing she herself made, but cannot, at that moment, see.
Rage
200,000 years ago—A man picks up a rock and throws it through the window of the world.
Speechlessness
140,000 years ago—The arch moves the knee moves the hip moves the cheek moves the heart moves the lung moves the throat moves the tongue and makes the lips quiver, buh buh puh muh fuh duh duh duh duh. The worst part about narration is the worst part about speech. Ay ee ai oh yu. Back turned to the curtain, who even knows what I mean? And still, refusing to sing. The worst part about voicing is the heavy gesture. The moodiness of the hollow.
Wonder
10,000 years ago—A mother calls her daughter calls her uncle calls her cousin and everyone gathers around a metal bowl. She fills it with warm water and they kneel down next to it, everybody closing their eyes. One of them sings into it. Another runs their finger around the rim. Another one sends wreaths of daisies floating. Until a kind of miracle occurs, and the first one to recognize it calls it out.
Angst
6,309 years ago—A boy refuses, like the donkey, to be made to go. “He’s going through a period of intense individualization,” they say, of the boy who no longer speaks and only looks forlornly across the sand. “He’s going through a period of necessary rebellion.” The boy strokes the hair of the donkey, the only one who understands him, and questions the moon and the almost-moon and the stars. The people assemble a giant clock on the hillside, and wait for the cloud to pass.
Rejection
5,000 years ago—The familiar dark rubs itself against the peak of a pyramid, edging toward that old friend, ecstasy. In the final seconds before orgasm, the dark pauses in enjoyment, but the pyramid remains sullen and distant and silent.
Vanity
2,500 years ago—A civilization pines over poetry and fine pottery, and this is the expression of the original lust. We collapse hillsides and wage small wars with language. We trade old poems for shinier, more class-confirming ones. We trade perfectly good pots for ones that illustrate a greater mastery of fire.
Skepticism
2,000 and some years ago—I’m told the heavens crack open and an impossible grace runs all over the plate. It’s messy and ideological, gets all over stuff. It makes the masses both more tender and more violent. It attempts to qualify the end.
Melodrama
1,300 years ago, exactly—A princess in a castle surrounded by servants and rooms, agrees to meet her eligible bachelors. When the day finally arrives, however, the princess is in a mood. She refuses to bathe. She orders platters of grapes to her room. She glares with vengeance at the sea—and this mood is a thing she cannot, or else refuses to, explain.
Senselessness
800 years ago—The newborn, once so loved by its mother, is now a man. One day the loved man is conscripted to go to war, and the whole way there he thinks, What a senseless thing, how horrific, that I should go and take another man’s head, and that if I don’t, that man’ll have mine! He goes, but keeps his eyes closed the whole time. He takes blind jabs at enemies, holding the sword in his left hand. He walks backward toward the firing line. He refuses to partake in a violence that is anything less than random because randomness is the only thing keeping him from cruelty.
Ignorance
470 years ago—The stranger is outside the house again, this time cursing wildly about the coming end. We do not invite him in. Instead, we call him a heretic, a lunatic, a fruit loop. We close the blinds. We turn on the TV. He makes a grand mess of the lawn with his pacing, all his mindless chatter about worlds and spheres.
Alienation
250 years ago—A great sadness presses itself against the belly of the city. It burps black smoke and fog, making it difficult to see your neighbors. A mother goes to work before sunrise and returns at three; a father goes to work at three and returns just after sunrise. Rabid dogs all over the street. The bread there goes stale within the hour.
Liberation
50 years ago—The good people assemble, en masse, by the pond. They raise words on sticks and stomp their feet. They call out those in high towers of power. Everybody makes love and defends their right to make it. A man kisses a man and takes him from behind.
Humiliation
35 years ago—In a bathroom stall, the sudden impossibility of owning anything, music so loud you no longer recognize your body, no longer know the right way to be aroused. Years and minutes spent in the stench of perspiration, in the violation that moves glitter around on your cheeks, glitter whose only purpose is to render sadly illuminated those tough balls of want, your psychic disintegration—touch, like a burrowing tapeworm; toilet like an open clam.
Anxiety
25 years ago—We hold hands on the porch at midnight and make a wish for the new millennium. For money, health, vacations, family, success, mindfulness, luck, sex, affection, grace, tenderness, compatibility, ambition, time, beauty, faith, gratitude, memory, fallibility, courage, clarity, good fortune, mobility, strength, confidence, motivation, respect, humility, creativity, inspiration, grounding, focus, safety, spaciousness—and speed, oh, speed because we may not live tomorrow and we are running out of time.
Confusion
18 years ago—I walk into the room and feel at once too young and too old. I take a seat at the bar and grunt like an old man, swing my legs from the stool like a young one. Someone behind me calls me baby, and I think, either I really am somebody’s baby again or else I must be somebody’s whore. I don’t know anymore which one I am, or which version of myself I prefer to be.
Optimism
A year ago—Imagine, the angle of the light, just right. You have enough money. Your heart is bursting. You throw all your old work into the dumpster and start anew beside a bowl of ripe mango because suddenly you have too many good ideas. You run into the yard and mow the lawn. You mow your neighbor’s lawn too because you are kind. You write letters to your friends proposing epic performances and activations. You pick all the clothes up off the floor.
Pessimism
Last week—We’re told, we narrowly avoid death. Being blown up on the subway. Drowning in the Mediterranean Sea. We have no rights. We are not safe. We have no bodies, no intellectual or emotional future. We collect empty cans from the ditch. We are con artists and poultry workers. We are gamblers and custodians. We are undertakers and squatters and refugees. Truth is a word we’ve heard used, but don’t use. Scarcity is a word we use.
Regret
Just yesterday—I watch as a long-legged spider wobbles into a paper cup and stays there a while, before wobbling away. I crush it with a rolled-up magazine on its way to the window, and scrape its thin body into the trash can.”
“Poetry at the warming hour. Impatience at three. Four forty-five and tepid in the possibility of everything being solved, resolved. Mortality setting in, mortality setting in. Seconds adding up to minutes adding up to hours adding up to days. Ten degrees Celsius in the balm of a decade’s mildest winter, in which everything arrives already thawed. Downstairs landlady knocking about the failing bathroom pipes, water collecting in the ceiling of her shower stall. Ten, fifteen, twenty degrees and a snapshot of breath rising in a cool room. Draw the curtains to preserve the best conditions for balm making: warm and dim, the electric baseboard heater blowing upward on the lowest setting. Twenty-three degrees now and the very best temperature for balm making. About the drip that never fails. Nine o’clock and looking for love; nine fifteen and already retreating, wounded. The loss of feeling your mind and body slipping before your time. Mottled aromas condensing in sticky patches on the walls.”
“There may be fifty ways to leave your lover, but this airplane has only two,” she says, walking backward down the aisle and extending both arms.
You leave by telephone. You leave by choir. You leave by serial monogamy and serial desire. You leave by polyphony. You leave by romantic attainment. You leave by gothic religiosity. You leave by classical pronouncement.
Three drinks spilled on a velveteen cushion.
Two exits by inflatable slide at each wing.
One unbearably lonesome and artless flight—
Fifty times you leave your lover until your lover’s out of sight.”
“The trip opens and closes without transformation.”
“Something biblical about the seasons. Everyone you’ve ever met who has claimed to be an artist but never made a single goddamn thing.”
“The body is our general medium for having a world”
“you stare at something for long enough in the dark and pretty soon the thing begins to lose its shape”
August 19, 2025
3.25
so many thoughts but also brain empty???? favorites are A Woman Suffering (why was this relatable), Twelve Forecasts (love reading horoscopes lmao), and The Longest Way to Eat a Melon
reiterating something i read in a review: this is the type of book that needs to be approached without expectations of a linear plot/narrative (in ANY of the stories). reading each story felt like being at a museum and trying to understand the art. some of these felt more like they should’ve been poems instead?
might have to sit with these for some time or just go back when my brain is ready.
so many thoughts but also brain empty???? favorites are A Woman Suffering (why was this relatable), Twelve Forecasts (love reading horoscopes lmao), and The Longest Way to Eat a Melon
reiterating something i read in a review: this is the type of book that needs to be approached without expectations of a linear plot/narrative (in ANY of the stories). reading each story felt like being at a museum and trying to understand the art. some of these felt more like they should’ve been poems instead?
might have to sit with these for some time or just go back when my brain is ready.
September 24, 2025
5 stars for uniqueness, probably my most unique read of the year. I appreciated the very subtle cultural criticism, subtle enough not to make it cringy. I loved the use bold titles/headers/intros. While some things felt like they made no sense, I let it slide because I feel like this collection is an experiment on writing.
October 10, 2025
These stories scream that they were published in a zine. And personally I think they could have just stayed there.
None of these stories stuck with me and could barely hold my attention. I found it overall kind of bland.
The Longest Way to Eat a Melon and The Breath of Han and Han were the best to me, and I could have happily just read them
None of these stories stuck with me and could barely hold my attention. I found it overall kind of bland.
The Longest Way to Eat a Melon and The Breath of Han and Han were the best to me, and I could have happily just read them
August 10, 2025
3.5. A very ecliptic collection that I had a hard time connecting with. If I had to narrow it down it could collectively be about living and the creative process.
October 14, 2025
Not sure where I heard about this one; a quick short story collection. Unfortunately only one of them really clicked with me, the rest a little foggy.
August 2, 2025
Unsettling and fantastical. A charming dream logic operates throughout. These stories had a gothic dark "Grimm's fairy tales" for the post capitalist future feeling
August 21, 2025
I know for a fact I am not smart enough for these short stories
June 28, 2025
“The cats begin coming through her window. And she feeds them – of course she does – to please nature, to please all animals, to please the mystics, to please the menace, to please the gods. Two at first, then six, then ten, their tawny stripes blending with the dappled light through the waving blinds. Q is friendly with them, even if it is true that she does not know what they get up to in the night. She is learning about and cultivating this kind of acceptance. Violences, valences. They purr and are energetic, even if their company is not the same as friendship, not the same as romantic love. They do have a certain terrible unknowability about them. Q entertains this even while, deep down, she feels fear.”
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