You’d be amazed at how much mileage a story can get from a plant behaving like an animal, or vice versa. One of David Lynch’s early short films, The Grandmother, was about a kindly old woman who grows from seeds planted in the earth. Is it disquieting? Yes. And it’s no surprise that one of the most unsettling stories in Tomás Downey’s new collection Diving Board (translated by Sarah Moses) is about a horse that’s also a plant.
The story “Horce” comes early in the collection, and its title isn’t a typo. Instead, it refers to a package that the story’s narrator buys from a mysterious man in a park after the narrator’s relationship with a woman named Anita has ended. The narrator plants his purchase and, soon enough, something has sprouted.
“When I woke the next day, I saw the tip of a snout poking out of the soil. I stood there watching the nostrils contract until common sense suggested I declare what I saw impossible, walk past it, and continue to the kitchen as though nothing had happened.”
There’s something kinetic in this juxtaposition of a lovelorn narrator and the surreal horse that’s growing in his home. “Sometimes I’d climb onto the horse’s back and lie down,” the narrator recalls, not long after he’s offered a primer in taking care of a seed-grown horse. This is not a fable where something miraculous changes the narrator’s life, however; instead, the horse becomes the subject of his complex feelings, eventually (spoilers) crumbling into dust as the weather turns colder. It’s in the narrator’s vacillating relationship to this uncanny equine companion that we get a sense of why his romantic relationship might have ended: the mood swings, the confusion, the inability to move forward. “Horce” is a deeply strange story, in other words, but it’s deeply strange with a purpose.
The idea of a human’s relationship with animals acting as a synecdoche for larger aspects of their life is a recurring theme here. “The Place Where Birds Die” opens with a heck of an opening sentence: “We didn’t bury the first one deep enough.” The location’s relationship to the deaths of local birds foreshadows larger threats to the family at the story’s heart; meanwhile, in “Sensitive Skin,” an unnerved cat is one of the ways in which the apparition of a lost love haunts protagonist Inés.
Some of the afflictions Downey’s characters face in these stories are emotional, while others are uncanny in their origins. That juxtaposition makes for an even more powerful sense of alienation; in other words, what happens when the source of your existential dread turns out to be as familiar as the back of your hand? These stories turn on recognizable bonds shifting gears into something else — and pushing these characters towards unwanted epiphanies.
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Diving Board
by Tomás Downey; translated by Sarah Moses
Invisible Publishing; 192 p.