Literature / Verge: Stories

The original cover.

"And to everyone anywhere who lives in the in-between of things:
I get it."

— The end of the Acknowledgements

Verge: Stories is a collection of short fiction by American writer and teacher Lidia Yuknavitch (author of The Book of Joan). It was published in 2020 by Penguin Random House.

Self-described as "a fiercely empathetic group portrait of the marginalized and outcast in moments of crisis," Verge explores the perspectives of a variety of people on the edges of society—a young girl smuggling illegal organs for transplant, an Alaskan fisherman and his naïve lover, a planetarium janitor building a miniature city out of detritus. The stories, which are often disturbing and morally complex, are interconnected by motifs and themes including trauma, identity, bodies, and sudden change.

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The stories:

1. "The Pull"
2. "The Organ Runner"
3. "Street Walker"
4. "The Garden of Earthly Delights"
5. "A Woman Object (exploding)"
6. "Cosmos"
7. "Second Language"
8. "A Woman Signifying"
9. "The Eleventh Commandment"
10. "Drive Through"
11. "Cusp"
12. "A Woman Refusing"
13. "Shooting"
14. "A Woman Apologizing"
15. "Mechanics"
16. "Second Coming"
17. "Beatings"
18. "A Woman Going Out"
19. "How to Lose an I"
20. "Two Girls"

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Has nothing to do with the 2008 puzzle platformer Verge.

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Verge and its stories provide examples of:

• An Aesop: In "The Eleventh Commandment," a girl tells a story with the stated moral: "Thou shalt for the rest of time be stricken with disease […] when thou settest eyes upon the uncanny."
• Big Brother Attraction: The protagonist of "Cusp" idolizes her older brother and mentions that she sometimes thinks about him while masturbating.
• Body Motifs: The strangeness of body parts in unusual locations and situations is a motif in many of the stories.
  • "The Organ Runner" in particular. Anastasia suffers a field accident where her hand is severed, and she spends six months with it sewn to her ankle to heal before it can be reattached. After her recovery, she is sold to a crew of child smugglers carrying organs for illegal transplants, where she learns to compartmentalize her own body and see each individual part in terms of its value. She also has a toy stuffed monkey, and a cruel boy cuts its hand off and swallows it to mock her.
  • In "How to Lose an I," the protagonist's missing eye (and its replacement) become a metaphor for his damaged sense of self following a car accident and the loss of his partner.
• Butch Lesbian: The protagonist of "Mechanics" is a masculine lesbian named Eddie. She's a car mechanic and claims her father inadvertently taught her to be "the man of the house."
• Coming of Age Story:
  • "The Organ Runner" is about a young girl coming into her own under the worst possible circumstances—finding a vital role for herself, learning to value herself and other girls, and taking steps toward escaping her situation.
  • "Cusp" is a tragic story about a teen girl trying to reach sexual and emotional maturity in the context of a nearby prison. She eventually matures by facing the reality of the situation when her brother is incarcerated there.
• Dedication: The book is dedicated to Yuknavitch's husband.
  thank you for always finding me
  in the spaces between things.
• Epigraph: "Cusp" begins with a quote attributed to Dorothy Allison:
  There is nowhere a girl can go. The only runaway option is prostitution and that can kill you about as fast as a violent uncle or a crazy daddy.
• Human Popsicle: Downplayed. The protagonist of "Second Language" and her companions were smuggled into the US In an ice cream truck, and she repeatedly refers to them as "popsicles" because of this. There is a sense that the girls have been symbolically frozen in time, separated from their culture, language, and selves.
• Lipstick Lesbian: Eddie's client in "Mechanics" claims to be married to a man, but Eddie suspects it's a cover story due to her appearance and flirtation with Eddie.
  […] she's also all lash extensions, lip stud, push-up bra, and full sleeve of tats on her right arm—classic femme.
• Lit Fic: It's an intensely introspective, almost poetic collection with great care in its language.
• Messianic Archetype: The tall girl in "The Eleventh Commandment." She comes out of nowhere into the POV character's life and delivers a meaningful parable about Jesus and a Leper to him and the boys threatening to attack him, after which they part to let her by in a manner the narrator likens to Parting the Sea. In the parable, the leper is clearly analogous to her sickly friend, implying she is Jesus.
• No Ending: Lampshaded to make a point in "The Pull." The story stops before we learn the fate of the characters because, ultimately, their survival should not be reassuring when countless others like them are still in peril.
  This story has no ending.
  We put children into the ocean.
• No Name Given: The POV characters of "The Pull," "Street Walker," "Second Language," "The Eleventh Commandment," "Drive Through," "Cusp," "Shooting," "Second Coming," "Beatings," "Two Girls," and the "Woman" series (as well as myriad secondary characters in all the stories) are never named in the text.
• No Punctuation Period: Downplayed. Many (though not all) of the stories neglect to use quotation marks to delineate dialogue.
• One-Paragraph Chapter: The final story, "Two Girls," consists of just one page-long pseudo sentence.
• One-Word Title:
  • Sometimes known mononymously as Verge.
  • "Cosmos," "Cusp," "Shooting," "Mechanics," and "Beatings" also have them.
• Organ Theft: "The Organ Runner" is about a girl working as a black-market organ courier. In the end, she is called to assist with a nonconsensual transplant from a donor who only has one kidney left and has been imprisoned to facilitate its removal.
• Painting the Medium: On the contents, title, and acknowledgements pages, the headers are printed up against the right edge of the page, visually representing the "verge" conceit.
• The Power of Language: A theme in "Second Language" and "A Woman Signifying" especially—the importance of having language to describe one's experiences is stressed in both, and the women in both eventually resort to self-harm as an alternative form of expression when they are unable to speak their truths.
• Pun-Based Title: "How to Lose an I": The protagonist struggles both with the collapse of his identity and his loss of an eye in a car crash.
• Second-Person Narration: "Drive Through" is told to "you," intending to get you to imagine yourself in the driver's seat.
• Short Story: The stories in Verge range from two to twenty pages in length. Some of them were also published independently in magazines and other collections.
• Shout-Out:
  • In "The Eleventh Commandment," the tall girl claims to have been visited in a dream by Mary Shelley. She has to explain to the confused boys that Mary Shelley was the author of Frankenstein.
    She took a deep breath and said, Mary Shelley, shit-for-brains, wrote Frankenstein, the greatest book of all time. If any of you idiots knew how to fucking read, you'd know that.
  • The protagonist of "Cusp" gets into Shakespeare after her parents give her collected volumes of the tragedies and comedies, and she frequently compares her experiences to those of the characters in the plays.
    On the edge, like Ophelia, rewriting her ending.
• The Storyteller:
  • Anastasia becomes this once she assembles her own crew of organ-runner girls: She reads to them every night from her Jane Goodall book, impressing upon them the importance of treating other living creatures with respect.
  • Similarly, the protagonist of "Second Language" tells the one story she knows (about wolves and revenge) to the other prostituted girls she lives with every night.
• Symbolic Serene Submersion: "The Pull" is about the symbolism and significance of complete submersion. The POV character grew up in a war-torn country, where swimming and being below the water were her only escape from the horrors of everyday life, and many passages describe scenes of temporary sub-aquatic respite:
  There is a pull for some people when they are in big water. A pull no own talks about. The pull comes to people whose lives are too weighted. People whose lives break the story and travel to realms everyone else fears. The pull is cool and warm at the same time; it releases a body back to history; it is something like amniotic fluid, only stronger. Most people who feel the pull let themselves go down a little, sink underwater some. They let their arms and legs go limp, and they close their eyes and hold their breath with superhuman calm. The kind of calm that comes to those people who believe as children that they can breathe underwater.
• Talking Down the Suicidal: "A Woman Refusing" is told by a man who has done this many times for his (now ex-) wife, who likes going up onto ledges and threatening to jump. He details the last time he did so and resolves not to do it again.

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