Review of Kathryn Miller, “Wide Open Spaces,” from The Best of Brevity, edited by Zoë Bossiere and Dinty W. Moore, 29-30 .  Brookline, MA: Rose Metal Press, 2020.

Kathryn Miller’s “Wide Open Spaces” from The Best of Brevity possesses little of the beauty we typically associate with such a phrase.  I think of the West, the Chicks, (formerly the Dixie Chicks), and empty highways, not scars and bullets.  Miller’s short essay recounts her visit to police station to view the photographs of a woman who committed suicide.  Ordinarily, this would be an odd thing to view, or perhaps if we did we would be inclined to sympathy or sorrow for the person.  That is difficult though, for the person in the photographs committed suicide only after shooting the narrator, a child at the time, and several other victims for no discernible reason. 

The narrator provides graphic details of the physical scars she received from the shooting.  There is little overt emotion in the essay.  No sense of what the ramifications of the shooting were.  Presumably, this young child would have needed a good bit of time in the hospital; her parents would have worried and grieved mightily, and no doubt there was a lot of trauma for all involved.  There is passing mention of a seemingly miraculous survival, but no detail.  There is little to no description on why the woman shot all these people or why the narrator wants to see the photos of the suicide, though one can surmise.  All this makes me feel that this essay is like a negative photo; it is marked by what is absent.  The narrator notices the absence now in the eyes of the dead woman; they are absent of the rage that once filled them when she shot the narrator.  Undoubtedly, there could be a book written about this shooting, if one doesn’t already exist.  I was not surprised to read in the contributors’ bios that this was the author’s first publication.  I can’t imagine that anyone who had experienced this could write about anything else; that it is done with such concision does not surprise the reader.  It’s the kind of experience, it seems, that one would have to sidle up to carefully, and very slowly; a direct approach would be too much all at once.