The Low Drone
Sally Thomas’s debut short story collection deals with the many faces of grief, yet places them all solidly where they belong: in the midst of life.
Review by Drea Jenkins
Good stories can do many things. Sometimes they can evoke varied emotional responses in the reader, with tragedies and miracles, perhaps ending in a robust catharsis. Sometimes they contain surprises or new, edgy storytelling techniques. Sally Thomas’s The Blackbird and Other Stories does none of that. Instead, Thomas delivers excellent, predictable stories of ordinary tragedies with compelling characters and heartbreaking lessons in grief.
The Blackbird and Other Stories is a collection of eight short stories and a novella. They are modern stories of loss and grief, with varying attempts at hope and wonderment. When we start each story, we do not begin with an event of loss but are placed into the ongoing grief of the person or people. Thomas follows women of different ages and views the grief of women and men from the perspective of women. We see all ages of women in the spotlight, from a little girl whose father is gone to an elderly woman journaling to an ex-boyfriend who may have been the father of her son.
The first story, “The Blackbird,” centers on Emlyn, a driven young girl attending an Irish step dance class. As the adults in Emlyn’s life send her mother medals of Saint Peregrine, the patron saint of cancer, and Saint Joseph, the patron of families and holy death, we realize her mother is dying of cancer. While her mother declines, gardening less and less, and her father forgets about dinner and food, Emlyn keeps dancing. She is grieving, though she doesn’t know it in so many words. She cannot sleep, she is upset when she sees other girls with their mothers at dance, and her relationships with her father and church are complicated. Through dance though, we watch Emlyn grow. She practices her solo, “The Blackbird,” for the showcase and learns about performance, how thinking too much can derail her and cause her to trip and fall. At night, when she cannot sleep, she climbs out her window and sits on the roof of the porch. In the final moments of the story, Emlyn dances there, and when she trips and falls (landing on the roof still) she considers how alone she is, the eerie night seeming to whisper around her.
Here, the reader has a different understanding of the event than the narrator does. Emlyn is dancing and feels alone, but my attention was focused on the looming fact that where she is dancing is unsafe. As she fell, I held my breath, thinking she’d fall off the roof and break her arm. As such, the final moments of darkness are scary to Emlyn, but I was relieved. While she is alone and scared, the fact of her own life and future are not something to be mourned. I was sad for Emlyn, sad that she was experiencing loss, but I was also confronted with the luck of a young person who gets away with taking a risk. Really, I remembered that there is beauty and joy in a life, even if that life has hardships.
We may grieve our entire lives—we probably will, in fact—but that doesn’t mean that we need to regret the grief itself.
Half of the collection are stories like Emyln’s, but the rest follow a single family: Caroline, her husband Cash, and their two children, John and Amelia. Years before our first story, John disappeared while in law school. Everyone except for Caroline assumes it was a suicide. Caroline sees hope in every sound, in the extra ramen in his apartment, and wrestles with how happy he seemed only weeks before. Now, years later, Cash is woken up by a rustling sound in the early morning. Caroline wrestles with her irrational hope that it could be John. The two argue, then Cash finally tells her he loves her and embraces her while she cries as the story ends.
We watch Caroline grieving, through the rest of her life—another story follows Caroline in her house after Cash has died. As she cleans the unused rooms, dusting a tissue box, Caroline reflects on the emptiness of her home and the limits of mortality. She is waiting out an actual storm while she is cleaning, one that could tear down her house and change or end her life. Still grieving John’s death, she remembers the specific way he made tea when he was home and copies him, a ritual we can safely assume she has been performing for a long time. She knows her ritual is silly—she almost burns the kettle at the end of the story and the narration is cheeky: “the black would scrub off… Nobody would ever have to know.” Caroline’s response to her grief has evolved; what used to be strong, volatile, and defensive is now dulled. The grief is there, but in this story she is subdued and self-aware.
After this, we see the last of Caroline’s healthiest days. She returns to the family beach house, surgery scheduled for the following week. In an epic third story, she does seem to truly “let go.” She eats what she wants, goes on a silly date with a fellow retiree, and relaxes near the water. She still thinks about her loss, remembering what her family would do together and watching another family across the lake have a normal beach trip, but we spend much more of the story watching Caroline do less mundane yet still normal things. For the first time, she is freeing herself from her torment by acting on her impulses.
Through Caroline, I experienced one of Sally Thomas’s greatest strengths: portraying older women with compassion. In this story, I saw Caroline not as a possessive and shrill mother, but as a grieving woman who did not know how to have a personality after she lost her children, either to death or adulthood. Here, at the beach house, she began to find herself again, just in time to hopefully find peace in her own death right around the corner.
I admit I am someone that isn’t worried much about compassion. I don’t think of myself as someone who has trouble empathizing with people, but I do struggle with patience. Caroline was a lesson to me, that sometimes when I want a person to “get over it,” I should pause. Caroline’s grief took time. We may grieve our entire lives—we probably will, in fact—but that doesn’t mean that we need to regret the grief itself.
Throughout the book, I found myself worn from the feeling of grief that Thomas portrays. It’s a low drone, a constant buzz, an uncomfortable knot in the stomach that threatens to come up when we are reminded of our loss. The stories slowly unravel the truth about grief. First, Thomas shows us that feeling. Then, she shows us some of the hope and healing—from God, from time, from the beauty of nature. Finally Thomas, ever the realist, has to remind us that it still isn’t simple. We will heal, in time, through God, but we will most certainly not finish tomorrow, and we probably won’t finish in our lifetime. We will keep living, though, dancing “The Blackbird,” cleaning the now-empty house we raised our children in, wondering what it was all for, and in the end we will have lives well spent.
Drea Jenkins is a software developer in Lebanon, NH. She graduated from Dartmouth College in 2020 and spends her free time reading, writing, and coding.
The Blackbird and Other Stories was published by Wiseblood Books on August 27, 2024. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy from the publisher here.
