"The Guide" is the story of a teenage girl, blinded by an accident at the age of 6, getting her first guide dog. "If I Loved You" reads like an open letter written to an inconsiderate fence-builder by his dying neighbor.
"Gaining Ground" is really nice, a not-very-plot-driven meditation on lost love, and on the place where emergency and the mundane - or, at least, the familiarly domestic - meet. It is a woman's reflection on the night the water in her house became electrified, shocking (but not really harming) her little daughter in the bathtub.
The piece allows Black to riff cleverly on the symbolic meaning of being "grounded." With the title, she makes a good pun that isn't cute, which is no small feat, and in this way she folds a kind of poetry into her prose. She does the same thing with "Pine," a story about loss and longing that opens with a nice image of a soft, uneven pinewood floor.
Black is in her true element when she's talking about art, writing, or language. In "Immortalizing John Parker," she captures a painter's discovery of her own need to paint with this explanation, neat in its fierce simplicity: "It was as though she had found a hidden primal drive in herself, something to align itself with hunger, thirst, sexual desire, the instinct to stay alive."
And in every story, she creates wonderful little images, sees symbols, double meanings, poetry everywhere. A woman in "Tableau Vivant" picks off her nail polish and the small piles of it are like "fancy-dress pencil shavings." Clara, of "Immortalizing," has several such moments: "A streetlight comes on. Clara waits to see how long it will take another to join it. A minute passes, two minutes. Nothing. They must have different levels of sensitivity, she thinks. They must believe different things about what darkness is."
