No Matter Which Way We Turned by Brian Evenson (2019)
One of my favorite authors tells a breath of a story about a girl without a face.
Welcome.
I hope those of you with pores and skin are staying hydrated. The summertime is the worst season; with every year getting worse and longer, it causes your humble letterer much more extreme bouts of chronic pains, cataplectic attacks, and drop in mood and appetite. I read voraciously when I am bed-bound half of every year during the summer and winter months, when flare-ups are at the most consistent. Without the ability to move for nearly a week at a time due to all sorts of pains, every heatwave knocks me back down - but never without books in my hands.
Brian Evenson is one of my favorite authors. His ability to walk right through me and leave me properly chilled with the sun beating down and cooking everything outside. Reading his books since my tween years, I have never travelled without my copy of Last Days (2009)1, my favorite of his work, and one I wish to write on as soon as I read it through - again. This will be the third newsletter of this week’s batch (Monday to Monday) your humble typist has tied to house centipedes and let them loose into basements. However there is a rare point of good news for you, readers: the story being discussed is not a book, nor is it a novella, short story, or short-short story, not something you have to even bite nor chew nor swallow, barely a mere moment of reading. Just a very light shiver of fingertips dragging across the skin to bring a few goosebumps at the chill.
Thank you as always, Mr. Evenson.
No Matter Which Way We Turned is the first of twenty-two stories published in Evenson’s newer collection Song for the Unraveling of the World (2019, 1YP2) about a faceless girl. Simple concept to pitch. But the little details are what Evenson lets settle like bad seafood in the network of twisting guts after you already finished the meal - even though it did taste a little different, that time.
Take maybe three minutes, maximum, to read this before you continue.
Now we let it sink, settle, and curdle.
A party, gathering, get-together, or collective3 at a lodge have to decide what to do when a young girl within the group has become faceless. Her mother is begging the narrator and everybody else at this event to somehow ‘fix’ or ‘help’ the situation - but these guys don’t know how to really do that! An immediate panic sets in the further into the first couple sentences both the narrator and reader experience with the realization that something has been done very wrong…but after all:
“Her mother was screaming, blaming us, but what could we do about it? We were not to blame. There was nothing we could have done.”
The lodge members hold her “gently and not so gently” to try to keep her still, to try sorting “front” and “back” (if there was a front or back in the situation), and just when we think a girl losing her face rather suddenly is strange, Evenson hits us with that next paragraph:
“It was Verl Kramm who got the idea of calling out to the sky, calling out after the lights as they receded, to tell them to come and take her. You’ve taken half of her, he shouted. You’ve taken the same half of her twice. Now goddam have the decency to take the rest of her.”
This implies UFOs are the central tipper of this domino effect - or it could imply any other kind of cosmic horror-sort of creature, deity/entity, machine4 - and leaves us scrambling to pick up all of the brand new questions we have for Evenson: who are these people? Why are they gathering at this lodge? Is it because the girl wanted to be - or was chosen by the group to be - taken by the lights? How long has this been happening - or is this first contact? Why did the UFO just…leave her there?
The girl - girls? - has extreme difficulty trying to live after the accident and it’s very openly noted on her obvious struggles by the rest of the group.
“She was a whole girl made of two half girls, but wrongly made, of two of the same halves.”
The word ‘made’ is a very interesting choice. Wrongly made, as if there was a blueprint or a constant that the lodge members had been planning on - or were hoping for. Without much time after the accident, the decision to get rid of her is essentially agreed upon5. The lodge is boarded up save for a hole cut into the roof - Verl suggested it to be made in case the UFO came back for her - and for a very short amount of time it was even guarded. Eventually, the inside of the lodge went silent, and everyone walked away from both the lodge and the faceless girl[s] they sequestered inside.
The final parting paragraph talks about dreams had by our narrator, about the other halves up inside of the spaceship. Well. Her and whatever other poor little girl is fused forever together.
“Late at night, I dreamed of her, not the doubled half of the girl we had, but the doubled half we didn’t. I saw her, miles above us, in air rarefied and thin, not breathable by common means at all, floating within their vessel. There she was, a girl who, no matter where you turned, always faced you. A girl who bared her teeth and stared, stared.”
A really interesting addition to the already stomach-churning dread radiating through the reader is made by Evenson and the editor - Morgan Beatty - of the People Holding… digital magazine publication this was contributed to back in 2016: a photo. People Holding… hosts many contributions to each of their issues and always sends those authors - if the work is fiction - a photo of someone [or many people] holding something, for their story. Evenson’s picture for No Matter Which Way We Turned adds another light, which is why I left it far below as a secondary reminder, to those who sat in the dark to read it and reeled from the carrier-centipede bravely carrying my surprise newsletter.
Scrabbling in the darkness,
Han
A slimmer book that, before the two plagues, I had to buy another copy due to how unsalvageable it was made after a hurricane dumped water into my sophomore dorm room down in Savannah, GA for nearly two weeks. It took two more weeks to return mortified to find only my room had a giant hole in the roof and ceiling caved in due to water pressure, damage, and humidity, but then struggle - eventually, threaten legal action, after black mold started to crawl out - to have it repaired while losing a lot of my own personal belongings and schoolwork in the entire process.
A time measuring device I have used since February of 2019 - ‘years of plague’. Now it is 2022, 4YP (3YP if you have a working immune system, or didn’t immediately take the virus seriously), and after several months of the WHO spinning the ‘Will We Won’t We’ wheel, we now have two plagues affecting the globe.
To those who haven’t read an Evenson story, it’s immediately clear this is about a cult - Evenson loves those. Last Days is all about a guy infiltrating one - more on that in another newsletter. Song doesn’t have a weak note in its purposefully sharp off-key concerto. This is the soundless tip of the bucket over Carrie White at her first - and last - prom night. Buy the collection.
It’s definitely just a UFO. Featuring a pair of guys in their UFO fucking up a in front of their boss and having to warp speed the hell out of that situation.
Even her mother after fighting everyone and going through an unmeasurable amount of grief and frustration believes that the best thing for her half-child is to abandon her.