"The Girl in the Flammable Skirt," Bender's debut, is an unearthly collection of tales that alternate between strangely erotic daydreams and the twisted terror of nightmares. Sex and deformity mingle as Bender experiments with fantasies involving the ugly, the distorted and the physically mutilated.
In "The Rememberer," a woman grapples with the devolution of her lover. Their relationship dissolves as she watches him change from a man to an ape to a lizard that she tosses back in the sea, the primordial soup. Mary, a young housewife in "What you Left in the Ditch," is frustrated by her desire for sexual fulfillment from a husband made repulsive and impotent by the ravages of war.
Ineffectual men seem a constant in Bender's imaginative stories. Her women - many of whom possess extraordinary powers - minister to invalid fathers and lazy live-ins. They make their bodies available to the lonely and the old, yet romantic and personal fulfillment remain ever elusive.
Unlike classic fairy tales, Bender's tall tales lack moral backbone and neatly rendered happy-ever-after endings. Instead, her taut prose brings together symbolic meaning and melancholy idealism. The end of each story reveals, at least partially, the neurosis behind the fantasy, a psychological closure, without sacrificing Bender's dark and deeply original candor. In "Quiet Please," a librarian seduces her patrons; but her suffering comes through in the description of a fairy on a ceiling mural, "clearly dancing against her will, dragged along with the circle, her mouth wide open and screaming."
(Alma Limprecht)
- "The Girl in the Flammable Skirt"
copyright 1998 New City Communications, Inc.