“What does Aleppo mean?” asks a President. “It means to give milk to travelers as they pass through the region,” says a President.
Milk. And mice. And mothers. That’s what these stories are about (and not about).
Also, Mums, it is impossible to tell if you really love a mouse or if you only love the word ‘mouse’ for some exhausting reason.
The stories of Sabrina Orah Mark’s Wild Milk feel like a code, or a jigsaw puzzle without a map. There isn’t a legend or key or guide. It’s something obscure that’s meant to be put together, bit by bit, piece by piece. Unfocusing your eyes a little bit to see the magic three dimensional reveal.
Every day, for the past ten years, my mother calls me from the dentist.
Then again, what I think of as clues, could actually be distractions. Misnomers. Red herrings (laying red eggs).
What am I missing by focusing on the milk and mice and moms? I tried to pay attention to moss and hard-boiled eggs, but they didn’t render themselves as frequently as these other items. Same with the sycamore trees. And I wondered if I should have been paying attention to love. Or to safety. Or to family (spellcheck suggests that sentence to infer I should be paying attention to my family - which, yes, is probably true).
Maybe, rather, this: the complexity of families. There are nervous families and stick figure families. Families where each member changes in size throughout the day or where someone smells like Florida. Or family as a means of safety (as mentioned above) or escape (as not).
Like most stories of obsession this one doesn’t end with scandal or murder or permanent ruin. One day, in the middle of the semester, I just packed up my bags and took the bus to my mother’s.
The most memorable story for me is “The Roster” - it’s a departure from these themes above and not a departure. A professor teaches at Shadow College. They have students like Emily (she spoke as if a dash was permanently caught in her throat), Samuel (who could not go on) Gertrude (She spoke in imperatives and as she spoke she drew tiny boxes in her notebook) and Franz, who confided to the class that he woke up that morning in the classroom and had no idea how he got there.
These characters might be a bit obvious (with Walter and Bruno being a bit more obscure) but the purpose is clear: all writers live in the shadows of who came before them, and as much as you try, Samuel Beckett will never be your friend.
Go on.
He slowly peeled a hard-boiled egg, and as he peeled I knew somewhere deep in my heart he wrote of attics, and fathers, and birds.
Stories like this can’t be written by ChatGPT. But we could explore what the cut-up method might look like:
Ma calls. “Do you need milk?” She is shouting. She thinks I am always in need of milk. // She sounds like her mouth is slowly filling up with mice. // The Rabbi is morose. “A Mouse Rabbi?” we ask. “No,” we say. “A morose Rabbi.” // The Stepmother peels a hard-boiled egg, eats it very quietly, and thinks about the mouse, and Florida, and smelling like Florida. // No one’s favorite color is moss, least of all my mother’s. // “We have come for your father’s beautiful heart,” says Kraus. He is drinking 2% milk straight out of the container. // Under his left eye appears to be a small patch of moss where a flower could grow if only he believed in himself a little more. // The milk, like a ghost, is turning.
I ran into a friend on the street the other day. Maybe not friend. A connection, a contact, an ally.
We talked briefly, caught up a bit, made the loose plans to meet again, as both had appointments or other obligations to get to. This isn’t a unique situation. It’s tempting to give meaning to this experience, but it might just be a shallow coincidence, a roll of the dice, a broken clock twice a day.
When two people are talking, there are infinite missed opportunities evading them. But perhaps that’s too grandiose. The meaning can be made because it’s the one that actually happens. And the connection really is there.
I lie beside Mother Mother’s quietly dying soft, brown body, and fall asleep and dream I am walking up and down the aisles of a supermarket. In my cart is an orange. It costs seven thousand dollars, and when I open my purse all I have is an ocean.
There’s a bit of alchemy in fiction and literature and a bit of misdirection. They say to make the reader do a bit of the work. Wild Milk keeps you working.