Valleyesque: Stories by Fernando A. Flores
MCD x FSG Originals. 2022. 210 pages.
Reviewed by Colleen Mayo
Two lines from Fernando A. Flores’ 2022 short story collection Valleyesque zapped me and left my brain ringing for days:
“…perhaps living in a society where realism is the reigning literary form renders that society powerless against its own absurdity. Strange stories had helped me give meaning to painful moments of survival, and strange stories were the only things I could continue feeding into the machine.”
These lines come from the collection’s sixth story “Nostradamus Baby”. The protagonist is a successful novelist who makes extra money by meeting with amateur writers to talk about their terrible book ideas. When he’s not listening to retired, casually racist babyboomers discuss their spy thrillers, his wife Denorah and he worry about paying rent, try not to think about children locked in cages at the Texas-Mexico border, and do their best to cultivate a life of happiness by ceremoniously constructing a baby out of their own earwax. Told through a crystalline voice, “Nostradamus Baby” positions a bounty of absurdities next to each other so that, by the story’s end, crafting an earwax child feels almost normal.
“Nostradamus Baby” is one of the more straight-walking pieces in Flores’ 14-story collection, which otherwise twists and slips and collides across a wormhole landscape of muralists trapped inside their own creations, possums taking over governments before writing tell-all bestsellers, and feather-faced angels who vomit iridescent pools of trash into alleyways. The whole collection rides you, windows down and hair flying, into new dimensions. And though Flores’s psychedelic prose—imagistic, keenly threaded with Tejano references and iconography—had me at first drawing connections to famous Chicanx lawyer and writer Oscar Zeta Acosta’s 1972 book The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, Flores’ style is way less macho than Acosta’s. Flores is also, both in his premises and on the line-level, wonderfully mischievous. Like Jorge Luis Borges’ iconic, genre-busting 1962 collection Ficciones, Valleyesque is down to get just as silly as it does political, intellectual, or overcome by existential dread.
In “Nocturne from a World Concave”, Frédéric Chopin (yes, the 19th Century Polish composer and pianist) wakes up in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico after playing a gig across the border in the US the night before. Chopin, who is also grieving his recently dead mother, remembers that the Mexican government confiscated his piano and embarks on a gonzo mission to reclaim it. The following scene occurs after he finds the piano:
“Chopin didn’t notice, but he had started playing its keys—in them were the trees swaying, painted like the trees out west—in them was the pact we’ve made with the animals and people living in mirrors that are doomed to imitate us, don’t forget….don’t forget the person you’ve fed, fork, knife, don’t forget whose steak you burned, oven and fire, don’t forget whom you’re denying white blood cells, blood—don’t forget what you’re doing to me, lungs, what you’re doing to me, dark sky with your big turd clouds…”
The artistry of this full passage is thrilling. Flores repeats the phrase “don’t forget” nearly two dozen times and ends with the sky opening through “frozen lake dreams” to greet a “giant bird of the apocalypse” before the bird is shot down. Reading it feels like being dunked into a sea of dread, awe, and total discombobulation.
Here’s the thing—and I write this as a white, Texan writer from Austin who deals a whole lot in what is commonly labeled “literary realism”—it doesn’t take that long for Flores’ weirdness to start feeling not just perfectly sensical but also good. Cathartic. Absolutely political. Like “Nostradamus Baby” asserts: strange stories give meaning to the illogical pain of life. Flores’ worlds create frequencies of understanding that aren’t always accessible in realist fiction, particularly about an area as regularly unseen, misunderstood, and mistreated as the Texas-Mexico border. Feminist Chicanx scholar Gloria Anzaldúa famously likens the borderlands of the Rio Grande Valley to a bleeding wound, “the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture”. Flores’ constant fluctuation between real and surreal realms, between silly and morbid incidents, between mundane and gothic images creates its own third space and becomes a distinctive dismantling, reinscribing, and celebration of the RGV. Making your way through his writing is like getting lost in a series of funhouse mirrors, each one primed to reflect its own unique blend of truth-telling and chaos back to you.
My favorite story in the collection is “Ropa Usada” in which Cassie, a Tejana graduate student burdened by student debt, travels from the city where she’s attending school to a used-clothing warehouse on the border with the plan of finding pieces she can sell on the internet. Cassie’s mission turns Odyssean as the clothing warehouse becomes a hellscape where steam rises from garments “as if the ghosts trapped in the clothes were sweating”. Not only is there no AC through the labyrinth of denim and mountains of sportswear, but Cassie must navigate around the other shoppers, including a heinous group of bullies called the “City Girls” who demand Cassie give them money and chant “For shame. For shame” around her like a Greek chorus before making her powder their donut. It’s an odd, funny, and frightful scene that perfectly captures a border-specific tenor of Capitalism and racism in Texas.
Valleyesque couldn’t be better named. It’s less interested in making a straight study of place than in slipping the reader into a mindset, a punk-rock manifesto both artfully composed and unnervingly chaotic. Each story will mess with you differently, will take you into a different extension of Flores’ mind—I haven’t even mentioned “The Oswald Variations”, a choose your-own-adventure reimagination of Lee Harvey Oswald’s life that undoes itself into a string of firework explosions—and so, for now, just go into the funhouse. Go see what the mirrors show you.
Colleen Mayo‘s writing appears in The Sun, Crazyhorse, Ninth Letter, Salt Hill Journal, The Rumpus, Hobart, The Chattahoochee Review, The Baltimore Review, and elsewhere. Her work has received special mention for the 2019 Pushcart Prize, the Jerome Stern Series Spotlight Award for nonfiction, and an AWP Intro Journals Award for fiction. She holds an MFA in fiction from Florida State University and is a Ph.D student and Voertman-Ardoin fellow at the University of North Texas in Denton, TX, where she also serves as Managing Editor of American Literary Review. She’s currently at work on a novel set in her hometown of Austin, TX.