SSM 2011: "Leopard Arms" by Leni Zumas (reviewed by Amber Sparks)

Earlier this year at AWP, I picked up a copy of Harp & Altar's wonderful print anthology. Included with many other terrific, cutting-edge pieces, there was this story by a writer I'd never heard of: Leni  Zumas. I fell absolutely and instantly in love with her voice and with her story, "Leopard Arms." I immediately went online and ordered her fiction collection, Farewell Navigator, which I cannot say enough gushing and glowing things about—but today I want to discuss "Leopard Arms," (which also appears in the collection) because I still think it's one of the strangest and funniest and yet most affecting stories I've read in a long time. I wish I'd written it.

The story is about the inhabitants of an apartment building in a slightly slantwise fictional Brooklyn (I'm thinking Williamsburg); it's an anemic, hipster haven where the over-35-or- not-so-attractive apartment dwellers have been told they have to vacate the neighborhood.  I've spent my adult life living in big-city apartment buildings, and I can tell that Zumas has done the same. She writes with absolute authenticity about the experience of being lonely, being sad, being tired, being hungry, being poor, being sick, being happy, and being loved or not loved among the renters. She writes of being reduced to a stock type and a few traits, a faceless, nameless neighbor in an apartment crowded with other anonymous souls.

Zumas's unusual POV is what makes the story work best, I think, because it's told not by one or any of the residents—but by the building they live in. Or rather, the gargoyle, the spirit, that perches atop the building and looks after its them. In this privileged, slightly amplified position, our gargoyle narrator can see and hear everything that goes on inside the Leopard Arms apartments.   And a sad state of affairs it is, too: a child, known only as "morsel," is alternately raised and neglected by her selfish, depressive parents; an old woman defies the authorities and stays hidden, refusing to vacate the apartment her husband died in; a woman the gargoyle has nicknamed "the watcher" obsesses over another neighbor, a vapid young screenwriter who spends his time watching porn on his computer; a shut-in becomes increasingly isolated as the story progresses.  Most of these people have no jobs, and they spend their days drinking, strung out, wanking, and generally wallowing in their own depressive loneliness and misery. Most of them, the gargoyle tells us, rarely leave the building, and "the ones who do don't get far; they return an hour later, bag of provisions on an arm, looking exhausted." The thin cheap walls that separate them from their neighbors have become metaphorical barriers as well as literal ones; they are utterly unable to relate to one another.

Our gargoyle's job--indeed, the job of every gargoyle, we are told--is not to protect humans, but to force them to face hard truths. But our gargoyle's sense of pity is finally roused by the lonely fragility of the morsel, of her parents' utter neglect and her need for companionship. And so our gargoyle casts off the teachings of its elders and vows to start interfering—indeed to rescue these sad humans, starting with the little girl. The little girl, our gargoyle implies, has learned enough hard truths.  "In America," our gargoyle tells us, "I have learned the meaning of last straw."

Zumas's writing is nothing short of brilliant—it's full of oddities, of strange twists and descriptions and lovely language punctuated with pop culture vulgarities. Her characters are fully, recognizably human, if endowed with more twitches and tics than most. The apartment-as-story device brilliantly frames each character's drama. Yet more than any other element, it is the odd POV in the "Leopard Arms" that makes this story so affecting and funny. The gargoyle sees everything, but in a strange and removed way—we are left to guess at and interpret much of the behavior that occurs. The gargoyle's initial toughness, its world-weariness, keeps us from becoming sentimental about these characters too soon—it is only through the gargoyle's stone eyes that a Hipstamatic photo of black-clad, sunglasses-wearing apartment-dwellers slowly softens and blurs, become a forgiving portrait of the weird and wonderful thing that is just people with other people.

Amber Sparks

Amber Sparks's work has appeared in various publications, including New York Tyrant, Unsaid, Wigleaf, The Collagist, Annalemma, and PANK. She is the fiction editor at Emprise Review, and blogs on literary fiction and other random things at Big Other and Vouched Books. She lives in Washington, DC with a husband and two beasts, but she can also be found on the tubes most days at www.ambernoellesparks.com.