The Gore of Emotion: On Whitney Collins' "Big Bad"

Whitney Collins | Big Bad | Sarabande Books | 2021 | 176 Pages

In her debut short story collection Big Bad, Whitney Collins showcases the emotion involved in making the most brutal of human decisions. The storylines that bring characters to these points are jarring and strange: Six-year-old Frankie picks which of her premature incubator siblings she wants to live and which she wants to die. Happy, go-lucky Daddy-o finds out his teenage daughter has considered the best form of suicide. Bianca discovers her forehead absorbed her twin brother while in their mother’s womb, names the bump Bjorn. We watch as their struggle to make a decision plays out in unexpected cacophony—the rhythm and comfort of bad habits, and the reverberation and stabilization of familiar items.

In an interview for 1455‘s Authors Series, Collins swears by the advice of her mentor, the author Leslie Daniels: “Your stories are going to be the most successful if you just put it all on the page.” On tackling emotion, Collins states, “I thought, ‘How do you do it and make it have some heft to it and not be flimsy?’ And I think the way that I found to do that was to be really blunt and to be really unapologetic and to be willing to balance the emotional with the gory. I’m not just talking about physical gore—there is some of that in the stories too—but just the really rawness. I think if you get to the rawness of an emotion in your writing, then it holds up a little bit better than just saying, ‘I was sad’ or ‘I was in love.’”

Instead of blanket statements of emotion, Collins carefully selects items to stand in for larger themes, as icons or emblems. Birds come to represent the unlucky twin of a set. The compartmentalization of dresser drawers becomes synonymous for love. A glass eye for honest longing. A shiny stone symbolizes the hardship and hardness a person carries, like a stopper for the gush of one’s truer, unguarded self. A picnic becomes a search for mercy. Collins provides a garage sale array of familiar items for the characters to take home and cherish, in hopes that one object or another will be the thing to save them. But can any of these things really save us? As Mrs. Billingsley asks of her daughters’ friend Rachel in the story “The Entertainer,” Collins asks of her own storylines: “Can you show them something, anything, they can use in life?”

In “Drawers,” the protagonist, Lawrence, hits a horse on the road while driving to his grandson’s circumcision. Throughout the drive, he thinks back to his mother’s death and his father’s grief, perhaps weighing on his mind more heavily since his own wife’s recent death. Collin begins the gore early in this description of the drive: 

On the roadside, a fence is being built. The workers, oily with sweat, set posts with shovels and hands instead of machines. Lawrence imagines a posthole, a man stumbling into it, a femur snapped in two. He imagines a tumbleweed of barbed wire, palms lacerated, flies swarming. He imagines flies, their larvae, multiplying by the billions, teeming dunes of white rice.

Then, this imagined scene reminds Lawrence of a real scene from his past: quail hunting with this father in Georgia, coming across a sliced-open pig that was left to rot. “‘Well,’ his father said plainly. ‘There’s nature for you.’” Lawrence comes to avoid nature like this at all costs—anything “ghastly and corporeal,” anything grotesque, accidental or harmful that could happen to a body. (This is the reason he avoids gas station bathrooms and brings a thermos on his trip, in case he needs to urinate. It also explains why Collins chose a circumcision as the destination event.) His late wife, Anne, seemed to keep the irrationality of his fears at bay, packing the red cooler and moist towelettes for road trips, keeping all intimate moments between them consistent, “as ordered as a recipe, a math formula.” In church as a child, he felt horrified by the explicit image of the crucifix, but “Anne had saved him from religion’s gore.” Before Anne, it was his father who provided order, and this is what he comes back to in the broken car with blood dripping from his nose: 

His suitcase is packed the way his father taught him to pack: in neat, necessary squares of shirts and briefs, handkerchiefs and pajamas. He thinks of this as he tries not to think of the horse, up and over the car. Again and again. The horse up and over the car. Three mammoth thumps. The first, on the windshield, the loudest. The second, on the rear of the car, invisible. The third, behind him, the end. The groan of pain and metal. Lawrence presses himself against the suitcase as the horse rewinds and replays. Up and over the car, squares of shirts and briefs. Up and over the car, handkerchiefs stacked like white envelopes. 

After his mother’s funeral, Lawrence and his father went home and organized every drawer in their house. “‘Order,’ his father said, as they worked, ‘is all we have now, Lawrence.’” The title of this story—“Drawers”—refers to the item in which Lawrence most believes. In the end, it is through hyper-organization and compartmentalization that he can escape the onslaught of death and disorder. He cannot, however, escape the horse.  

In the end, Lawrence climbs out of the car and regards the horse—“enormous, a sand dune in the road, almost as white as the sun.” He thinks about his wife, her deteriorating condition that left her ugly and out of control. “Lawrence spent his days putting things back in the drawers that Anne dumped out.” He remembers the boy he was before his mother died, someone capable of doing grotesque, accidental and harmful things to another body. Lastly, he remembers his father and his father’s bottom drawer, “the one Lawrence opened once and once only, the one with the lined bullets, and the stacked pistols, and the magazines of women sprawled and arched in utter disarray.” Suddenly, it’s revealed to us that Lawrence’s father had another side, as a person who might seek out dark things on purpose, a person who might visit the roadside spas that Lawrence’s coworker told him about—where the women give you more than a massage. And then, in Collins’ way of telling us that something in Lawrence finally gives, that this is Lawrence truly grieving, he runs down the road, down an exit, and up to one of those spas. He abandons the control of the drawers, the suitcase. He strips naked, like his father. He decides to take a look at the bodies inside. 

This ending, similar to others in the collection, arrives like a cloud of dust clearing on a dirt road. These endings reveal something that had been with us the whole time, just under the surface. As the dust settles for the protagonist, he finds himself suddenly on the cusp of something, his life about to change. Collins leads her characters to face a metaphorical precipice, with comfort items nowhere in sight. The view from the edge is new, splintered, and daunting. As readers, we look out into the abyss of possible outcomes. (What if Lawrence tended his wounds and waited for help? What if he checked the horse for a heartbeat?) We find it peculiar that the characters make the choices they do. But that’s what makes these stories so startling: none of us would’ve done these things, right? Collins illuminates the very moments in a person’s life when those close by would look away. Not because of the gore, but because looking would show us the things that make everyday life unbearable, and the desperation that confronts all of us when we choose something insufficient to cling to.