![]() They think, “Surely we’re expected home in time for dinner. In “We’ll Go No More A-Roving,” for instance, two young girls are convinced a creepy abandoned church is diseased, haunted perhaps, and so they break in. “Gun Moll” opens with the narrator remembering a Halloween when they had dressed as Bonnie and Clyde, saying “ never fire up into my jaw, but I would have shot bang through your cheek, just so I could peer through the hole.” In some stories, characters place themselves in danger, perhaps in spite of themselves, in order to face their fears or to go against what they’re told. These destructive impulses are woven throughout the core of many stories. Players often go home with missing eyebrows or smelling of urine. The person who arrives first isn’t dead, and he gets to choose what happens to the dead ones, which, we are told, could be anything: shaving, licking, stripping, pouring washer fluid in their mouths. Ghost Box Evolution in Cadillac, Michigan is populated by surprisingly destructive characters, searching for what one narrator calls a “shared brokenness.” In “What Happened On Wednesdays (As Told by Someone Who Probably Wasn’t There),” teens play a twisted game of hide and seek. It’s subtle, quick, but it’s the kind of subtlety that Forrest often uses to her advantage. ![]() But in this one, he keeps singing till we’re caught,” and in that moment, it almost feels as if she wishes they were in the other story. The narrator says, “In other stories, the boy is too bold, and the ice, barely frozen, gives way. This is true in the title story, which explores a series of abandoned department stores-a Best Buy, a Sears, and a Borders-run like nations, ruled by the wittiest and meanest of kids the narrator says these ghost boxes are a necessity, but she thinks of her brother: “In a different year, a different decade, he would’ve built a tree house an ear for music, he might have joined a band.” This extreme perception, which transcends the bounds of the story itself, is also found in “Taps,” in which three college students walk out onto a frozen lake. However, despite their youth and naivety, the characters in Ghost Box Evolution in Cadillac, Michigan are perceptive and intelligent. Forrest is at her best when her characters are left alone by their elders to make their own decisions, to fail or succeed without guidance. Her stories are finely wrought, expertly crafted little things that speak volumes about what it’s like to be an adolescent in suburban America.Īdolescence is the heartbeat of this collection, as the children within attempt to come to grips with their fears, the dangers of the world, their independence. ![]() Forrest has built a world here in her debut collection, a world we recognize and wish we didn’t, a world we grew up in, one we hope our kids don’t grow up in. Rosie Forrest’s Ghost Box Evolution in Cadillac, Michigan, winner of the Rose Metal Press 9 th Annual Short Short Chapbook Contest, is as dark as its characters are vulnerable.
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