On "Ask Jesus" by Vanessa Blakeslee (1906 words) ***

A Halloween costume ornament stands in for deeper questions about the life of the narrator and a marriage. Looking for the ornament itself is a means of finding the truth lurking behind a relationship. Read the story here at Atticus Review.

On "Princess of Pop" by Vanessa Blakeslee (3542 words) ***

This is essentially the tale of Brittany Spears retold in lyrical prose. Read the story here.

On "The Lung" by Vanessa Blakeslee (2638 words) ***

What is love? Is it trying to force someone to do something they don't want to do for their own good? Or is it sticking by that person, even when they do bad? That's the question Blakeslee poses in this short tale. Read the story here at Split Lip Magazine.

On "Welcome, Lost Dogs" by Vanessa Blakeslee (6740 words) ***

One of the longer stories from Blakeslee's Train Shots collection, this one focuses on a woman's search for her lost/stolen dogs. Like many stories about third-world environments, the locals aren't exactly trustworthy. Read the story here at Southern Review.

On "Clock-In" by Vanessa Blakeslee (964 words) ****

The lead story in Blakeslee's Train Shots collection is akin to Daniel Orozco's "Orientation," only in this case the introduction to work is not to an office but rather to a restaurant. And the person doing the introducting has the goods on everyone--an a bit of an agenda. Read the story here at Flash Fiction Online.

On "Train Shots" by Vanessa Blakeslee ***

Having only an electronic version of this one--a copy of the galleys given to me by the author for review--I've take a long while to read it through. I read on buses, on breaks, on street corners, in restaurants, on park benches, on sofas, in bed, anywhere I can manage. I don't read so much on computers--and certainly not much since taking on a family and moving to a new office that is not conducive to lunch-time reading at a computer screen. So I was not able to rip through Blakeslee's book with the kind of speed that a collection such as this would normally lend itself to: easy, fun reading.

Blakeslee's tales are of an expected variety--that is, there isn't a lot of experimentation here, and they didn't really leave me with much to ponder at the end of each one. But they accomplish what they do well.

After a fun lead-in short short about work relations, Blakeslee's collection settles in traditional faire. Most of the stories revolve around loss in some way--people searching for something, be it more to a relationship that is going bad or already has, a place to call home, or simply peace.

The strongest story in the collection, for me, is "Barbecue Rabbit," a tale about a mother and her mentally disturbed son. Reading about how this mother tries to cope is heartbrearking and horrifying.

"Uninvited Guests" focuses on a poor woman whose is forced to live under the surveillance of a religious landlord and to lie in order to continue a lifestyle to her liking. "Hospice of the Au Pair" focuses on a man whose wife dies and who has to deal also with the concurrent guilt of having a baby by another woman. "The Sponge Diver" focuses on the loss of a birth-control device amid the closing of a relationship. "Don't Forget the Beignets" is about a woman in over her head as her husband is carted away to prison for supposed financial misdeeds. And the title story at the end of the collection tells of a man dealing with the deaths he comes across (literally runs over) as a train engineer.

On "Clínica Tikal" by Vanessa Blakeslee (5921 words) ***

I'm not much into pure science fiction, but this Blakeslee's piece does such a good job of telling a story that I felt it worthy to share here. We start in Latin America, with a woman who visits a soothsayer regularly. This woman is told that she has a cyst that must be removed immediately if she is to ever have children. She is to go, not to the best doctors in Guatemala, and not to New York City. She is to go rather to a mysterious place that the soothsayer writes out for her on the card. The place, as we find out (as we in fact expect), turns out to be much more than a great medical establishment. Read the story here at Ascent.