Escaping from the destination: "Engelond" by Taisia Kitaiskaia (Best American Short Stories 2024)

There are a lot of wisecracks out there about how there really aren't that many story types. The one I know best goes something like this: There are only two stories: a man goes on a journey and a stranger comes to town. Wycliff Aber Hill wrote about the 37 possible movie plots, which sounds a lot like Georges Polti's 36 dramatic situations. I suppose all of these lists have some truth, if you're willing to put up with a fair amount of essentializing. Whatever list you come up with, I'd guess that "escape from a threatening place in which the main character is trapped" and its near opposite, "journey to a place that offers hope for something the main character is suffering from" would both make it. 

In the first one, perhaps a young couple experiencing problems in their marriage checks into a resort that promises to fix all marital problems. There is an eccentric head counselor, and at first, she seems able to help the couple. But little by little, the couple starts to see all kinds of weird things about the resort, and they realize that it's a death cult or something like that. They try to run, but are prevented from escaping, etc. In the second type of story, there is an post-apocalyptic world, and mother and her young child are on the road trying desperately to reach a rumored safe haven, chased by mutant vampires the whole time. If those two exact stories don't exist, there are twenty that are pretty close to each.

The pilgrimage that is an escape, or the escape that is a pilgrimage

A pilgrimage, or a journey to a holy place that brings healing or enlightenment, is sort of the opposite of an escape plot. One's got the goal far away and presumably at journey's end. The other has the goal just on the other side of the door or wall or compound, or pretty much any place that isn't where the main character already is. But "Engelond" by Taisia Kitaiskaia is both a pilgrimage and an escape plot.

The escape plot side is a lot more noticeable, of course. There are plenty of on-the-surface clichés of escape movies going on. There's the rich and polite but also evil English landlords who made their money off the blood of others; there's the missing groundskeeper; there's the weird children, one of whom looks like a fairy and talks of witches, the other who seems perhaps inbred and simple. There are whispers everywhere of threats on the ground, and the main character, Marfa, is seemingly hallucinating in her cabin. And the end has sort of a "Fall of the House of Usher" feel in which the evil old Grandcourt family comes crashing down for good. 

But if we slightly reverse the order of the story from the one given to us, we can see that she went to the cabin originally as a type of pilgrimage. Marfa was grieving over the loss of her Russian émigré parents, whose love for her was so fulfilling she never felt the need to start a family of her own. She is as plain a government bureaucrat as there could be, and she has realized that her work relationships, which she had found satisfying previously, are all replaceable, as is she to them. She doesn't put it in these words, but she's lost. She asks the night sky where she should go for a vacation, and the night sky tells her to go to a ranch in her home state of Texas, a sort of glamping experience where she will sit in her child-labor-made robe from Target and eat good things and maybe see a bit of nature. 

Maybe asking the night sky where to go on vacation is already a warning sign, but if that isn't, Marfa's reaction to the ants that bite her at night in her cabin is. She imagines herself as the Queene of the Ants, and her back is the Engelond of her imagination, the one her father turned her on to with his fascination with Middle English. This is where the pilgrimage slyly sneaks into the escape story, working at cross-ends to it the whole time. Marfa needs to get out of the cursed ranch, but she also is there because the universe has guided her to the place that holds healing for her. 

The pilgrimage sneaks in when Marfa imagines that the area on her back the ants are invading is the Engelond of yore which her father waxed romantic about. She thinks of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, a story of a pilgrimage taken by a group of travelers. In the prologue, we are told why Canterbury is such a popular destination:

                            And specially, from every shires ende

                            Of Engelond, to Canterbury they wende,

                            The hooly blisful martir for to seke,

                            That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

Or, to put it in more modern English, everyone in England goes to Canterbury because they think the martyr whose shrine is there, Thomas Becket, will help them in their need. 

I am already calling it that my blogging pal, Karen Carlson, is going to love geeking out on Chaucer when she gets to this story. She'll probably find traces of it all over the place. For me, I'm content merely noting that for Marfa, the impulse to go to the ranch started with a hope for help, but will change to a need to escape to save herself. 

I'm plotting my own pilgrimage-escape mashup. When, uh, Zephyrus eek with his, yo, sweete breeth...

About the ants

Karen has told me that my approach to magical realism takes all the fun out of it, but I do tend to look at the magical parts in a very non-magical way. I think of them much like the song-and-dance routines in a musical, or the cut-to-confessional-camera in a fake documentary like The Office or Modern Family. For that matter, it's also kind of like a soliloquy in a play. Unless the music is diegetic, it's not really going on. It's just a way of capturing what's going on in the character's head. There's not really a camera that the characters have stashed away in their home that they go running to. It's supposed to be a window into all the things they're thinking to themselves, rather than just giving us a voiced-over interior monologue. When Curly is singing to Laurey about a surrey with a fringe on top, we shouldn't think that they live in an alternate universe where people really do sing and dance their feelings. We should think that the narrative is stopping to give us a musical window into what the characters are thinking. They both are in love with each other and too durned stubborn to say it. Curly is unexpectedly romantic about both Laurey and his natural surroundings. Laurey is unexpectedly emotionally vulnerable. 

When Marfa imagines that the ants have made her their queene (with an e because they speak Middle English), we don't necessarily have to think that the ranch is a portal to another dimension where animals speak or that Marfa has gone crazy. By stretching part of nature beyond its limits, the story is merely emphasizing some emotional aspect. In Marfa's case, the ants accept her, perhaps, because she is small like them. 

It's her identification with the littleness of ants that saves her from the witch-cows of the ranch. I won't go into the slow breakdown of order, how one person after another succumbs to madness, bewitched by the cows. Marfa is running to escape, and she is surrounded by the herd of cows, including a few steers with death machines of horns. They sort of inspect her, weighing her heart in the balance. It looks like they are going to find her wanting, until she thinks of the ants and presents herself as small:

Maybe they would pity her insignificant body. She was a lowly government worker, composed of microwaved burrito bowls and grief. She wasn't like Bob the caretaker, torturing the cows for thirty years, or even Jerry, driving wildly and desperately around the property, knowing too much and unable to change things. She wasn't like the Grandcourts, hardening into sapphire and marble, taking and taking from the cows and this land and the lands across the sea.

That's all it takes. They kind of kiss her to accept her, and then she runs for it. Like the friar from Canterbury Tales, they "herde her confessioun" and their "absolucioun" was "pleasaunt." ("Herde" her confession, oh man. I crack myself up.)  She assumes the witch-cows have lured the whole family and their butler to the field and killed them. 

If I've made this complex little story seem too simple, almost fable-like, I'd say that just as it is both a journey to and an escape from, it is also both very complicated and extremely simple. The bits about the family being exploitative are very on-the-nose. So is her use of a made-by-exploitation robe from Target. It's a world where the vicious thrive and the rest of us seem to just be trying to eke out a living on their property. For Marfa, salvation is in neither being one of them--something she once aspired to until the Middle English-speaking snake cured her of it--nor in frittering away one's life knowing how evil they are and doing nothing about it. If one is small, one can still make something of that smallness by being tough. 

Marfa's denouement finds her reappreciating her life in her small and simple home. I've been comparing the story to escape plots and pilgrimage plots, but she thinks of it as a murder mystery, one like she used to enjoy watching with her father. She decides to continue on as the Queene of Ants. She imagines that ants the world over all have the same purpose. What purpose is that? To survive, I suppose.