Large Animals

Many of Jess Arndt’s stories open mid-conversation. Characters are in the middle of their lives, grappling with dying relationships, medical questions, traffic, dream beasts called Walri. They’re working to keep themselves in line, while inside each is scrambling to understand the cryptic motivations that drive them into precarious situations.

The stories in Arndt’s Large Animals are surprising and funny and darkly tragic—each narrator possessing a singular voice. However, there’s also a trans sensibility woven into every line, and for the first time in my reading lifetime, I saw reflected in complicated, beautiful imagery and voice, the innermost thoughts I’d believed particular to my trans experience. This book was a revelation requiring no translation, no substitution, no willful blindness. I might have cried once or twice.

Everything is real, but nothing is quite right.

Arndt’s language is at once familiar in its intimacy and disarming in its honesty. In “Contrails,” the narrator moves sweatily through the last few days before top surgery, simultaneously hoping that the procedure will change everything and worried that it will solve none of the problems that come with living in a trans body. This uncertainty pervades the story; the narrator cautiously imagines a new life “on the other side” and calls ex-girlfriends to tell them the news, only to find the phone interactions unsettling—partial deconstructions of past lives. Arndt’s deft interrogation of what it means to live at the mercy of an unwieldy body creates little room for hope. And whatever hope is left is heartbreakingly fragile.

While the narrator of “Contrails” pauses to contemplate a life in which shirts finally fit correctly, the narrator of “Moon Colonies” bounces around Atlantic City, waking up to waves glowing “like Uranium, a deep sweat coming up off the seafloor.” This story is all color and movement, grit and longing. The characters own the landscape as though they have always been there. Their pasts are complex and intertwined, and they operate as a single organism until the night everything changes. “Moon Colonies” is as much a celebration of youth as it is of sound and light. Arndt’s language is muscular and unexpected, echoing the way those years post-college, pre-adulthood can feel: “There was a haze over the boardwalk. I couldn’t tell if it was the beat or the breeze up, sucking aloft those clouds of sand. I felt clammy pressed in between the two of them. A line of sweat slurred along my chest binder.”

There are beautiful memoirs of transition out there, tales of hardship and fear, authenticity and growth. Hormones, coming out, surgeries—sometimes prescriptive, sometimes rose-colored, sometimes tragic. It’s all important, all worth exploring. However, fiction is where my heart beats the loudest, where I find my most comfort, my worst fears. It’s that liminal space between incomprehensible dream and hard reality, where truth can sometimes reside.

I, too, occupy a liminal, nonbinary space that defies definition and solace. I live in a gender I barely know how to interpret, much less explain to others.

This book was a revelation requiring no translation, no substitution, no willful blindness. I might have cried once or twice.

I found that Arndt’s stories spoke to my experiences not only on a personal level but also on a literary level. Everything is real, but nothing is quite right. Things are happening, but they’re also stuck in amber. The stories in Large Animals are both grounded and fantastic. The characters are fully realized in that space, in part because they refuse to meet (or have) easy expectations. Characters are mislabeled, misinterpreted, punched, and left. Characters are loved, given second chances, and tolerated. But nothing is easy and nothing is even.

So, we meet many of these characters already in a defensive crouch, isolating and waiting for more information. Isolation, both self-imposed and accidental, runs a current through the book. In the collection’s title story, fantastically huge walrus-creatures seem to be locked in a wrestling match with a narrator who has moved deep into the desert to struggle with worthiness, invisibility, and loss. The walrus is both irresistible and frightening. The narrator’s desire to connect with people nearby is the same. It is impossible to understand whether the narrator is able to differentiate reality from dreams as they fall farther and farther away from civilization.

At the Texas Book Festival last November, I had the opportunity to moderate a discussion between Arndt and Eileen Myles. They explored the bonds that writers form—with each other, with animals, with words. Their conversation veered from their first meeting to the writing process. I had so many questions about the bonds that show up in Arndt’s collection. The ones that are forged are tenuous and limited. In “Together,” a newly unemployed bartender and wife share a parasite that keep them connected after the bartender has been compelled to strike out alone through cities both strange and familiar. This unexpected search for autonomy is surprising. The narrator’s natural inclinations are to keep close: “I knew that things should not be separated—that pairs, no matter where you found them, should stay intact.” Once home, their world has changed both inside and outside: “the parasite wasn’t all. In our Greenpoint yard, hard pink asparagus-like weeds were erupting everywhere, pushing skyward with a level of tenacity I no longer recognized.”

This story, like a few of the others, rewards close attention because it wanders away right under your nose while you’re reading it, much the way the narrator wanders the cities where the parasite may or may not have been contracted. The humor, however, is hidden away behind corners that are worth exploring.

Jess Arndt’s Large Animals is a slim collection of stories that are difficult to forget. They explore the power of cultural expectations to mold lives, as well as the finely balanced resistance it takes to become an authentic physical representation of the love, desire, and intellect that resides inside every one of us.

Dream Beasts: