How Some People Like Their Eggs

How Some People Like Their Eggs, Sean Lovelace
Rose Metal Press, 2009, 52 pages, $12.00

Cher orders her eggs coddled. Snoopy indulges in uncomfortable underwater sex. Marilyn Monroe sates her tastebuds with the cotton from an asthma inhaler. In his first chapbook of short short fiction, Sean Lovelace weaves the desires of pop-culture icons into an essentially sad, everyday world that anticipates death at every moment. The ten shorts of this collection open with a meteorite that strikes a woman in the thigh; whether it is divine providence or simply chance is a question that reverberates throughout the chapbook.

In the strongest story, “A Sigh Is Just a Sigh,” a husband and wife argue over whether anyone actually utters the immortal “Play it again, Sam” in Casablanca. The answer (no) is not important. As if in their own private movie, commandeering full editorial control, Lovelace’s characters revise their lives at will. Ingrid Bergman seduces the husband in four separate lines of dialogue, like different takes improvised for a DVD gag reel. Another man works through many responses to his friend’s leukemia, until he settles on silence.

But Lovelace presents all of these alternate dimensions as if all the choices were possible, the roads less traveled as clear as the ones taken. The final story, “Endings,” offers multiple conclusions for some of its victims: “On the way home they either stop by Starbucks, run out of gas, or explode.” Cappuccino and combustion carry the same weight. Like a choose-your-own-adventure game, the ending is inevitable, yet which ending ultimately comes to pass doesn’t really matter.

These characters see what they want, imagining fictions such as a Hollywood fog sweeping through the mise-en-scène. A surgeon who “wasn’t well” starts a conversation during operation about loving bocce; it seems too absurd to have happened, yet it’s how he remembers it. The whole is greater than its parts: some stories feel disjointed (”Molasses”) or, in the case of “Charlie Brown’s Diary: Excerpts,” too precocious to be truly clever. But even Charlie Brown is aware he’s a mere cartoon somehow existing in our world. Lovelace writes about daily, mundane things-from Wal-Marts and traffic accidents to how eggs are cooked-then asks, is that what real life’s about?

-reviewed by Joshua Garstka