Planet Grim

Alex Behr has a wide-ranging resume which has served her well over the years, providing a cornucopia of material to feed her writing. During the 1990s, she contributed to underground zines while performing in bands. She moved up the West Coast from San Francisco to Portland, Oregon in 2003, and published all the while as she did stints in comedy.

Alex Behr has a wide-ranging resume which has served her well over the years, providing a cornucopia of material to feed her writing. During the 1990s, she contributed to underground zines while performing in bands. She moved up the West Coast from San Francisco to Portland, Oregon in 2003, and published all the while as she did stints in comedy.

Her stories solicited a range of emotions from me, some of which were cross breeds of feelings I didn’t know I had. A case in point: a story titled “Observations of Punk Behavior,” which lists six points to note. Observation number three describes a hardcore punk who hangs out by the railroad tracks. He asks his buddies, “you want to see something really punk?” before stepping in front of a speeding train and making a splatter. You might laugh, you might shudder, but you have to admit, that’s really punk. Later on, friends went out to the death site and collected pieces of his body which they kept in jars. A story like that is just strange enough to hold the possibility of being true.

One of my favorites in the collection is “A Reasonable Person,” which tells the story of a neurotic jury member named Mary. Mary is a bit of mess, but not so much that you can’t believe Mary wouldn’t exist. Behr has the capacity to bring her back from the edge before you can say she is just too strange to be real. Poor Mary’s husband has gone away on a six-month mission, perhaps never to come back. The forecast seems dim. She is left with a son who became a born again and dislikes her as only a judgmental fundamentalist can. He leaves as soon as he is able, abandoning his mother to ruminate over her fears and phobias, of which she has many.

This is why I love Mary—she performs her jury duty, witnessing the crime scene photos of a murdered woman and ruminates: “It’s hard to buy an iron-patch as big as the blood stains, esp on the night gown.” I find her practicality endearing.

As the case is presented, she wonders, “who took the cat . . . who took the Last Supper painting? Did the chrome mirror in the bedroom end up at Goodwill?” If you have ever served on a jury, you may have found your own mind traversing similar territory. Mary makes me feel not so alone. I think.

I speculate about Mary’s family, if her tics and pings drove her family into religion and out of the house. The jury is out on Mary and her story might leave readers deadlocked. Decide for yourself about Mary, but in the end, she declares herself a “reasonable person.” My courtroom puns maybe not so reasonable.

A funeral sets the tone for “The Garden.” A coworker of the narrator (who works as a nurse) has died, a man nicknamed “Spud.” Spud earned his moniker by flinging a forkful of mashed potatoes at his sister across the dinner table. Unfortunately, the fork went with the potatoes and jabbed her in the cheek. Thus “Spud” was born. The narrator remarks:

I couldn’t remember most funerals, but Spud’s stuck with me. Since I was a nurse I went to quite a few. The healing industry did that to you—wore you out emotionally and physically. I could be next. I was I overweight. I also smoked from time to time.

With a growing sense of mortality, the nurse’s husband asks her to look in on his mother who is few steps away from dementia. Her name is Adele, a German-American who is having an imaginary war with her neighbor, Mr. Martinez. Adele believes Mr. Martinez is stealing from her garden and bringing snails over to destroy the rest. The nurse visits Adele with her stepdaughter, Margaret, who is battling meth addiction.

I fell back into my nursing persona: the detached voice and the soothing gestures. It made me lonely but what could I do? Adele, a war refugee back in 1942, had come to California by way of Berlin and Amsterdam. This was not an excuse for her paranoia, but it gave her depth. All of her high school friends had died in the camps.

It is a simple war between Mr. Martinez and Adele, one expressed in looks and not words—an artillery of unspoken accusations. The video camera Adele had her family install facing her garden reveals nothing but squirrels. I enjoyed how this silent battle unravels with Mr. Martinez planting pinwheels in every yard except Adele’s.

Nothing lasts forever, and in its own way, this story serves as an example of the transitory nature exemplified by Buddhist philosophy. Later in the story, a fire comes roaring down the hills and the nurse and her husband take measures to save their home. They fail, the nurse flees with the stepdaughter while the husband stays behind to fight. He perishes in the battle. House and husband are gone.

The narrator and stepdaughter move in with Adele and come to know Mr. Martinez, who helps absorb her grief. He relates his own horror stories of Vietnam, of a cousin who was burned badly by mortar fire, so badly that Mr. Martinez suffocated him in the hospital with a pillow: “the softest way to go.”

The story ends with the nurse burying the videos of the unmolested garden in the backyard. You sense a whole new life about to begin of the ending of one which seemed to contain so many. As in the short works of Kate Chopin, Behr compresses a novel into a few short pages without leaving you feeling overstuffed. It’s low carb fiction.

As I read Planet Grim, I wasn’t sure what to expect next. There are various styles, subject matters, and ranges of emotions. It’s a collection that explores new worlds with each episode. I read straight through, wondering if Behr might run out of steam or ideas. She doesn’t. This is a writer to keep an eye on. Maybe both eyes.