Caitlin Stobie and Kharys Ateh Laue, The Smell of Blood and Other Stories (Karavan Press, 2024)

‘This is just to say’, wrote William Carlos Williams in a poem with the same title, ‘I have eaten  the plums  that were in  the icebox’. Though saved for breakfast by another, they were ‘so sweet  and so cold’. These lines seem ripe for association with a collection of short stories drawn from what the blurb describes as a ‘years-long conversation’ between two writers, one of whom might be better known as a poet. Leaving notes for one another, and making new ones together, Caitlin Stobie and Kharys Ateh Laue elicit the complexity of girlhood and the generational burdens that come thereafter. Unprefaced by the formality or flippancy of Williams’s speaker, in their first story, ‘Plums’, one woman is child, lover, ghost and mother, attuned to the fruit that ‘swelled, day by day, and grew plump’. In these opening pages, dream and reality hold close quarters in scenes that flit between city and country and the fruit’s abundance is vivified by language of the same nature. The narrator’s desire for remembered and present women is fulfilled by the ‘nottouching’, a compound both to express and to measure the significant depths of gendered expectation and transgression. Setting the tone for the stories to come, it’s precisely the paradox of ‘nottouching’ that allows the two authors to represent their female post-apartheid South Africa through narrators who stand askew to their own stories. In this frank and violent atmosphere, all do so without any request, ...