When We Don’t Have Twitter, We’ll Enjoy Books Again
Reading ‘Melancholic Parables’ as a parable of Twitter
In a couple weeks, Dale Stromberg will release his story collection, Melancholic Parables. These reality-bending flash fictions follow key moments in the linked and infinitely recurring lives of Bellatrix Sakakino. As I read these stories now, during this particular historical moment when Twitter is imploding, I see them as parables about our online lives: who we are when we’re tweeting, or who we think we are when we’re tweeting, and why we keep tweeting.
Your Bad Jokes Never Leave You
When Bellatrix dies, she goes to a place where she relives her favorite moment, “its every detail precisely captured. She was to exist inside it forever.” She’s 12, receiving a triple award at school, and she jokes to the audience: “I just want to thank all the little people.” As the moment plays over and over in her afterlife, she worries increasingly about the joke: “People must have been laughing at her, not with her.”
She comes back to life again, but she never forgets. Not just the bad joke; she never forgets anything. She is “reborn with all the memories of her previous life intact.” Thus, as a child, “being more mentally and emotionally mature than her classmates, she never made…
