We’ve Been Warned by Liz Ziemska

Highwire Act & Other Tales of Survival
JoeAnn Hart
Black Lawrence Press
175 pages

If there’s one thing that distinguishes humans from animals, it’s not emotions or family feeling, not forethought, or tools, or play, but the predilection for turning existential anxiety into art.

Every era has its own set of sleep-robbing fears, and in the realm of short fiction, several classic examples come to mind: The Lottery by Shirley Jackson focuses on group think, the insular claustrophobia of small-town America, and the horrors of McCarthyism. “The Husband Stitch” from the stellar Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, published right on the cusp of the ‘me too’ movement, questions the extent to which women’s bodies and conduct are under their control.

In Highwire Act & Other Tales of Survival by Hudson Prize winner JoeAnn Hart, we have eighteen charming and devastating stories about the greatest horror of our time: global extinction and annihilation due to climate change. Hart’s keen eye and nimble voice explores eco-terror/climate anxiety through a myriad of grounded, deeply human permutations. Some stories are more successfully executed than others, but overall, the collections sings.

In “Reef of Plagues,” the first story, and my personal favorite, a chorus of unnamed islanders interact with a tourist who has come to show the reef to his children, but the reef is dead, and the white man has been taught never to take no for an answer.

“Better luck milking a fish, we tell them and they give us the rough side of their tongues. It was not so long ago we were adjusting their masks, leading them to where sapphire light once shown through branched cathedrals…”

Now the locals take water samples for scientists trying to save the coral, scrape slime from lifeless coral, “take the reef’s temperature as we would a dear child’s.”

“These tourists are nothing but trouble, slapping and grinding through the water in their power cruisers, searching for a place to snorkel. Better luck milking a fish, we tell them, and they give us the rough side of their tongues.”

“The pink man believes the problem is that we cannot hear him so he inches closer, one eye keen on his depth finder. Electronics are not magic; it insults the gods to navigate a vessel like that in shallow water…His red hair is almost plucked clean, so with his sunburnt skin he looks like a tufted bloodworm.”

Science, a keen ear for dialog, tragedy, humor. What a wonderful combination.

In the second, titular story, “High Wire Act,” the survivors of some sort of apocalypse live under a plexiglass dome, where weather reports are issued daily from a loudspeaker by a benevolent AI program that sounds a lot like a cult leader, “sky as blue as my right eye.”

The female narrator, a survivor constantly struggling to find meaning in her existence, takes advantage of a good day to do laundry. The dome leaks, untreated water cannot touch her skin. Constantly she reminds herself to be mindful. Mind control is the key to survival. Let the mind stray, and the lure of the abyss, in the form of a hologram floor, through which all debris must fall down to the blighted surface of the earth, is too strong.

In the end, she helps a neighbor die as gymnasts call “Funambilits” perform tricks in preparation of a hologram “master” who will playing his singing bowls extra loud to cover the sound of the fallen body reaching the ground.

In the third story, “It Won’t Be Long Now,” the mother of a daughter “allergic to the world,” who lost her husband at sea after he was forced to fish further from the land due to warming water temperatures, nearly dies trying to save a seal entangled in fishing line that has wound up on her lawn. Against her better judgment, she tries to feed the seal a tuna fish & mayo sandwich, touch him, but the creature bites her hand down to the bone.

Here are all our human foibles on display: we know the problem, we’ve been warned, but we somehow can’t get our shit together.

Some of the others are a bit too on the nose, like “Infant Kettery,” in which a drunk man sits vigil beside a dying cow—they’re both suffering from thirst, water for the cow, vodka for the man. He used to be a scientist, but something pushed him off the rails.

“The world is mad at the drunk for not being able to change the behavior that is killing him, yet the world is unable to change the behavior that is killing itself.”

There is a woman dying alone of COVID story that has too much in common with Flaubert’s parrot.

A man who can’t save his marriage, or his struggling company, finds solace in saving a seagull ensnared in plastic six-pack binding.

The final story, “When You are Done Being Happy,” an incantatory tale of grief and loss, a riff on the kind of story that tells you that if the world gives you lemons, go make lemonade, is another showstopper.

After allusions to a childhood suicide attempt and careless parents, failed marriage and kids who have grown up and moved away, the story urges: “when you are done being happy, you must ask yourself the big questions – Why are you here? What is the purpose of life? Do this while you bake checkerboard cake…”

Then, “When you are done being happy, pull out the box of stationary… your son brought back from Florence his Junior year abroad, right before everyone started using email and stopped writing letters. You make a list on this obsolete sheet:

There is no hope of joy except in human relations.

There is no hope of joy except in human relations.

There is no hope of joy except in human relations.

I wish the story had ended here, but now you must “go feed the checkerboard cake to the ducks,,” and I ask the author, should ducks be eating refined flour and sugar? Or is this another instance of the human animal sacrificing wildlife for the sake of a romantic gesture?

Never mind. The collection is good. Very good. Important. Because it brings home the notion that the ultimate highwire act is living in the face of ecological disaster. Too easy to give up, to take the exit route down through the hologram floor. Much harder to keep our spirits up, to move forward through our days, to focus on loving one another, to do better, to perform the smallest acts of kindness. To keep searching for a reason to go on.

Brava, JoeAnn Hart.

Liz Ziemska is a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Interfictions: 2, Strange Horizons, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Pushcart Prize XLI, and has been nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award. She is the author of Mandelbrot the Magnificent and lives in Los Angeles.