Of Predators And Prey

It’s hard to say how long a story should be.

   Or how short.

   Jessica Treat says the very short-short story is “in vogue now,†some just 100 words long, which makes sense, what with minuscule novels punched out for Twitter, and for cellphones, too.

   But Treat still writes for people who get a little hit from turning pages and smelling paper. Her latest book, a collection of short and short-short stories, is “Meat Eaters & Plant Eaters,†tales of  predators, I think, predators and prey.

  Treat, who is a professor of English at Northwestern Connecticut Community College, lives in a white clapboard house on a long straight country road in Sheffield. She is an ambitious woman with a son she is proud of, a job she likes and a will to write about people in peril. Some of her stories in this book run a dozen pages. Some just three, and one is done in just four paragraphs. These last are so precise, so refined, so spare they read almost like poems, a notion she does not like.

      “I always tell a story,†she says, a tad aggrieved, “and I’m interested in character and situation and mood.â€

   But yes, a short story has more in common with a poem than it has with a novel which can be “baggy,†she says, peopled by extraneous characters and lapped with ideas that lead nowhere in particular, which is fine in a roomy place. But not in the confined and pointed worlds Treat lays out for us.

   In one, a woman discovers “a strange cup under the table. . . . how did it get there?†she wants to know. She places it on a shelf to focus on the kind of mystery she can keep an eye on.

   Treat’s people are dogged by mysteries of all kinds: How do things vanish? What changes people, makes them suddenly dangerous? Faithless? Inscrutable? And, of course, what is real and what is not?   

   This can be chilling. In “Hans & His Daughter,†a fable as lean and scary as a woodcut, Hans searches for his disappeared wife, encountering, finally, unfathomable loss.

   And in “Meeting M,†Treat writes about the follies and delusions of a writing life with, as in many of her stories, a telescopic zoom of a finish.

   Some of her tales are funny, as in “More Than Winter or Spring†in which two children discover what happens when you curse God. But most of these stories are discomfitting, screwy, unnerving, which made me read several, several times over.

   As it turns out short stories relate to poems in just that way, Treat told me.

They can be read aloud and they can be read more than once.

   Most certainly. p

   “Meat Eaters & Plant Eaters,†just published this month, is available online at Amazon.com and is sold at Oblong Books in Millerton, NY, The Bookloft in Great Barrington, MA, and other places.