Aimee Bender’s stories, whether short or novel-length, are filled to the brim with raw emotion. She shows truths through the lens of the truly odd and extraordinary circumstances her characters find themselves in. The Girl in the Flammable Skirt certainly houses some of Bender’s most otherworldly work, and I found myself once again drawn to her ability to create worlds of magical realism, where the familiar and unfamiliar coexist. My favorite story in this collection, “Loser,” perfectly captures Bender’s strengths in creating the mechanics of her magical worlds.
“Loser” tells the story of an orphan boy who lost his parents to the water during a storm. This boy can almost supernaturally find lost objects. The realism in this magical realism story comes into play early on, as Bender describes the everyday life of a boy with this otherworldly gift.
The neighbors discovered his talent accidentally—he was over at Jenny Sugar’s house…when Jenny’s mother misplaced her hairbrush, and was walking around, complaining about this. The young man’s nose twitched and he turned slightly toward the kitchen and pointed to the drawer where the knives were kept. His date burst into laughter. Now that would be quite a silly place to put the brush, she said, among all that silverware! and she opened the drawer to make her point, to wave with a knife or brush her hair with a spoon, but when she did, boom, there was the hairbrush, matted with gray curls, sitting astride the fork pile.
Bender 136.
The boy’s ability is first described here as an almost physical response to the lost object, which sets up a surface-level perception of how his talent works. The second purpose of this passage is to show that even the boy’s date makes fun of him until she realizes he was right. Even when her mother is grateful for his help, Jenny continues to be suspicious, and the rest of the town is divided into believers and skeptics. The combination of power and ridicule here creates an interesting contrast, clearly showing the price of being different or othered. Even though the power of magically finding lost objects does not exist in our real world, the feeling of being an outcast certainly does.
When one of the townspeople’s son is kidnapped and held for ransom, the boy is called to find him, and we get a deeper, more detailed description of how his gift works.
The young man tried to feel the scent of the boy. He asked for a photograph and stared at it—but the young man had only found objects before, and lost objects at that. He’d never found anything, or anybody, stolen…He turned to his right; to his left; north; south…He couldn’t quite feel him. He felt the air…He felt the tug of the tree in the front yard which had been uprooted from Virginia to be replanted here, and he felt the tug of his own watch which was from his uncle…the young man focused in on the blue shirt; he turned off his distractions and the blue shirt, like a connecting radio station, came calling from the northwest.
Bender 139–40
Here, we see a more specific description of the boy’s finding talent, its mechanics and how it works. Because he had “only found objects before” and had never tried his talent on living humans, he is forced to listen to the rest of his surroundings. He feels the displaced air and a tree that doesn’t belong, both of which speak volumes to the boy’s talent and how far it can reach. Even displaced air and a replanted tree count as “lost objects,” while Mrs. Allen’s son does not. Because of these set rules for the boy’s magical finding power, he ends up searching for not the lost boy himself, but the lost boy’s shirt, and finds him this way. Focusing on details like this not only adds a well-thought-out magical system, but it also uses the pre-established rules of this system to allow the boy to use problem-solving skills to fix the issue.
But Bender doesn’t stop at believable magical mechanics and the problem-solving that surrounds them. She also adds her signature layer of raw emotion. After bringing Mrs. Allen’s son back to her, the boy goes home and does something very human.
Crossing his hands in front of himself, he held on to his shoulders. Concentrate hard, he thought. Where are you? Everything felt blank and quiet. He couldn’t feel a tug. He squeezed his eyes shut and let the questions bubble up. Where did you go? Come find me. I’m over here. Come find me. If he listened hard enough, he thought he could hear the waves hitting.
Bender 141.
As the boy struggles with trying to find his lost parents, he knows that he cannot focus on himself, a human who is lost; he cannot focus on his parents, who are both humans and lost. Yet, he hears the water hitting against the shore, the place where he lost his parents. Here, the story comes full circle, centering back on the boy and the loss of his parents, tying the title of the story neatly into the ending.
Bender’s style is unique in her ability to make sense out of nonsensical ideas and to bring to light the raw emotion woven like a thread through her narratives. “Loser” is a prime example of how the sensible mechanics of her odd, magical realism world can easily lead to relatable and human emotions in both her characters and her readers. She amazes me every time.
Rachel Sandell 