Seventh horse tales

Surreal stories deal with skeletons, hunters, travelers, strange neighbors, the aged, a masked ball, and mysterious ruins

Stacey Levine's My Horse, her first collection of short tales, reads with such precisely turned sentences that it seems to have been written with a scalpel. The stories of My Horse range from otherworldly, opaque portraits to claustrophobic domestic studies. In the title story, the narrator has a small pet horse, whose loose skin gradually develops scabby rings and sores. With painful psycho-logic the story recounts the narrator's various and changing attitudes toward the pet, as the physical deterioration of the animal is reflected in the owner's shift from love to abuse. In "The Hump," a woman finds a small growth on her body, which, while she waits for a doctor's appointment, quickly grows into a large hump that affects her entire system and her perceptions of reality. In "Cakes," the narrator buys several cakes with the intention of eating them to become very "Full." But the sudden appearance of a dog and cat at the window so terribly upsets her that she cannot eat the cakes; as the animals remain at her window for days, she postpones her enjoyment, becoming in the end "quite ill." In story after story Levine returns to the impermeability of experience, of not knowing even our own bodies with any certainty. A blackened tooth or a Siamese twin become haunting metaphors for the unreasonable, unfathomable burden of existence that she conveys in wickedly enthralling prose.

HER PRINCE CHARMING? Sister Tabitha was an efficient nurse, but when it came to matters of the heart she was less sure of herself. So when she fell in love, she had no idea how to deal with her feelings. Was that why the Dutch surgeon Marius van Beek called her Cinderella? If only Marius would ride up on a white horse and ask for her hand in marriage. But people lived happily ever after only in fairy tales, didn't they?