Mary Miller's Less Shiny is the first release from Magic Helicopter Press, and a fine way to start.  It's also an excellent selection of Miller's short-shorts in its own right, as well as a good appetizer for her upcoming collection Big World, coming next month from Hobart's Short Flight/Long Drive Mini-Books division.

The characters in these eleven stories are often hyper-aware of the distance between themselves and others, and of the possible consequences for violating those boundaries.  For instance, in "April and Bennie," each of the title characters is away of the lines that separate their lives, while still wanting to cross over: "April wanted to sleep with Bennie but she was engaged to one of his friends so she figured this would be the next best thing, to let him hurt her."

At first, the pain she's seeking seems a minor one, as she only wants him to pierce her nose. But then, Bennie--who "was always repairing things that didn't belong to him"--begins to fail her:

He told her to be still. His knees touched hers and then his thighs as he worked the earring in. It went smoothly past the first layer of cartilage--a small pop--but then it stopped. It didn't hurt and then it did. There was no blood and then there was plenty of it.

She told him to finish. He said, I don't want to hurt you. She heard, you're not mine to fuck up.  She wanted to tell him that nothing was his to fuck up, that he owned nothing.

In this way, Miller's characters spiral toward each other, only to too often find that the opposing person wasn't the accident they were destined to have, that they still have to go further, to find the next tragedy waiting beyond. So few of Miller's characters get the resolution they seek--these stories seem like mere blips along the path of their downward trajectories, or else polaroids taken only seconds before they hit bottom--but there is always a sense that the characters will, sooner or later, arrive, although they might also find that those destinations are stranger, sadder, angrier places than the places they'd just left.

Miller expertly provides her characters with both a need for connection or salvation--"I was looking for a way out"--and then, often only seconds later, the means to throw these same connections away: "Once I found it I would find my way back in." Even more so, they often disparage the very need that brought them and others to the place described in these pages, as the narrator of "People in the City" bitterly suggests to her ex-boyfriend:

[He] liked to call me up and tell me how easily he could date, if he wanted to, if he wasn't still jung up on me. Anyone can date, I tell him. Retarded people, one-legged people, midgets, they're all dating.

One of the great difficulties in putting together a flash collection is to find a way to provide the pace necessary for the reader to settle into a new story every two or three pages, while simultaneously avoiding the diminishing impacts that plague so many similar collections. Less Shiny is perfectly ordered to avoid any such complaints, its endings hitting in fresh, new ways from story to story, beginning with the shockingly violent ending of "Duck," then continuing through a myriad of heartbreaks and disappointments toward the very last paragraph of the book, one which I'll not repeat her for fear of spoiling it, but which is the absolute right way to end a collection.

Mary Miller's Less Shiny is a near-perfect chapbook, full of prose that's as cutting as it is funny, and I can't recommend it enough. As is seemingly becoming the norm in the chapbook world, there are only 75 copies of Miller's Less Shiny to be had, and I've got #29. I ordered mine a month ago, so you better get yours soon.