More Than Magic: Vinh Nguyen Reviews Rebecca Hirsch Garcia’s The Girl Who Cried Diamonds
The Girl Who Cried Diamonds & Other Stories. Rebecca Hirsch Garcia. ECW Press. $24.95 CDN, 208 pp., ISBN 9781770417274
Rebecca Hirsch Garcia likes unlikely pairings. In her stories, Garcia brings together characters that, at first, seem to be at odds or to exist in separate worlds. In the vessel of the short story, however, they encounter one another and struggle over the meaning of self and other, of the strange relationships that grow and fester. The results of this literary alchemy are often hypnotic: a man in an unhappy marriage strikes up a connection via an online film forum with an avatar that claims to be a sixteen-year-old from Siberia; a young woman walking home at night decides to help a stranger in need, which sparks a long, catastrophic obsession; an outcast and the popular girl in a high school share an understanding of their new visibility, of what marks their bodies. It is what occurs when these odd and ordinary people interact that truly constitutes the fantastic in The Girl Who Cried Diamonds.
The fantastic, of course, is also on full display in the magic realist qualities of many of the stories. The title story, about a girl who cries diamonds, bleeds rubies, pisses gold, and shits onyx is a fabulist rendering of greed. The reality that humans will traffic other humans for profit, that they will impose suffering onto others for gain (a reality that persists widely in our day and age) is made more glaringly absurd and incredible by the surreal elements of the story. In the O. Henry Prize-winning opening story “A Golden Light,” grief manifests physically, shutting down the body’s perceptive capacities, and hope arrives as the most simple and mundane of all magic. A haunting tintinnabulation in “The Singing Keys,” leads to a gift, a secret, and ultimately disillusionment. These are stories that draw out human experience of the fantastic in its various shapes.
The closing story, “Woman Into Cloud,” the longest in the collection, is also its best. Beginning with the premise of a woman shapeshifting into a cloud, the story—a very short novella—is an exploration of a failed marriage, which becomes a commentary on motherhood, which then becomes a meditation on freedom. It takes on big themes, moving through love, sacrifice, devotion, gender, family, and solitude with searching complexity. The piece shows Garcia’s wonderful ability to use the fabulist or speculative in ways beyond a device or hook, but rather to capture some deeper core of the “real” and its relationship to all that’s not.
Garcia’s writing is compact and propulsive. Describing sinking doubt in “Girl on the Metro,” Garcia writes, “her sweet voice drowned on its way to his ears, lost in the cold sharp whistle of the wind. She thought of running after him but instead she stood where he had left her, listening to his hurried steps, watching as he walked away from her, a drunk girl in his arms.” Or rendering obsession in “Maps of the Unknown,” Garcia writes, “She wanted to bite his toes, knuckles, nip at the soft skin on his upper arms, suck out his eyeballs and feel them circling in her mouth, cradled by her tongue, caged in by her teeth.” Or evoking the last hour of sunlight everyday as “when everything was bathed in golden light and the warmth of the fading sun made the colours of the sky glow ember-bright” in “A Golden Light.”
Garcia’s imagination is firmly grounded in the spaces between people. The Girl Who Cried Diamonds provides insightful glimpses into these mysterious, unending spaces.
Vinh Nguyen is an educator and writer. His writing appears in Brick, The Malahat Review, PRISM international, and Grain. He edits nonfiction for The New Quarterly. His memoir The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse is forthcoming in 2025.