The title of Molly Olguín’s short story collection derives from Revelation 20:13, a book from the Christian Bible describing visions of the world’s end. In the apocalyptic moment described in that passage, the sea, death, and hell all produce “their dead,” who are “judged every one according to their works.” Olguín performs a similar exposure here, disentangling from her characters the myriad deaths that form their lives. The sea gives up the dead, but her characters never do; and, instead of judgment, Olguín offers empathetic witness in prose of trenchant clarity.
In one of the book’s many highlights, “Seven Deaths” encompasses all the deaths of the Contreras family, from a brother’s near-fatal accident to the father’s forced change of surname for all its members, to some actual ends of life. Nevertheless, the story is mostly about Esther/Albert, who is raised as Esther for part of her childhood and is then reassigned as Albert, though he never escapes his family’s negative comparisons between him and a girl. The story is also about domestic violence—how the cruel machismo of Roque, the family patriarch, precipitates all the losses of the title and taints relationships between all family members.
“Seven Deaths” starts the anthology strong, illustrating Olguín’s deft characterization through story structure. Selfish Roque ruins the happiness of everyone in his family and either does not know or does not care. The story enumerates his misinterpretations of his family, particularly his dismissal of Albert as girlish, sentimental, and oversensitive. For their part, the Contreras brothers struggle against Roque, resorting to the violence that they learned from him. The story ends in a hospital, with the family facing their injured patriarch. Everyone, raw with emotion, struggles to hold themselves together. The brothers seem to realize that this sensitive state—analogous to Albert’s temperament—gives them clarity that their father’s recklessness cannot. Instead of appeasing Roque and reconciling with him, they choose to do neither. Olguín’s story sympathetically explores why all the characters in the Contreras family think, feel, and act as they do, but it narratively vindicates the brothers, particularly Albert, by ending with the opposite of unthinking aggression: thoughtful, insightful lack of response.
Family relationships also define the characters in “Devils Also Believe,” although in different ways. In this story, a lonely girl, whose father is fighting in World War I and whose mother is dying of the flu, envies her Italian Catholic housemate Lucia and her mother Mrs. Amadori. The girl’s grief drives both her hostility toward the Amadoris and the world and her heartbreaking self-hatred as represented in her acceptance of the Amadoris’ nasty nickname: “the devil.”
Olguín describes the devil’s life as follows:
Death was no stranger to her house. Her grandmother had succumbed to a fistula when the devil was four years old, her grandfather to heartbreak shortly after, Mrs. Reilly who used to board with them had been struck dead by a trolley one year ago. Her father was away fighting Germans, and she knew he could be killed at any time. Most grievous of all, or so she told herself, three months ago the devil’s tabby cat had choked on a chicken bone that Lucia had dropped on the floor and expired. Her twelve years had hardened her. (p. 25)
Olguín here performs a balancing act. With the phrase “or so she told herself,” she invites a smile at the childish perspective in which the death of a cat is a greater loss than that of a father’s absence. At the same time, the conclusion that the devil’s “twelve years had hardened her” makes us consider the reliability of this ironic, slightly removed narrator. The devil is mean and angry but not hard; instead, her losses have wounded her. She emanates a yearning for love, intimacy, and protection that no one recognizes except Lucia, who responds in a twisted way. In Olguín’s stories, death scrapes people raw to reveal their secrets.
The humor of another story, “The Princess Wants for Company,” is also macabre and at a distance, like that of the narrator’s in “Devils.” It sparkles, skimming us through the story, which follows Latina Rafiela, who works as a nanny for the White Cobbs while crushing on Mrs. Cobb and looking after el pescado (as she entertainingly calls the Cobbs’ baby). Also there are dragons. The story seems to be set in the late 1940s or 1950s, when interracial relationships, particularly lesbian ones, were even more taboo, and Rafiela, who knows her lesbian pulp fiction, observes, “Tragedy is the world’s punishment for sin” (p. 46). This comment does not bode well for any of the characters, and, inevitably, a climactic and gory death occurs. The viscous and tender ending, however, compels a rereading in order to appreciate the draconic hunger of Rafiela’s desires and the danger of trying to sever oneself from them.
“The Undertaker’s Dogs,” on the other hand, plays largely as comedy. In this story, Isobel’s boyfriend’s dog’s puppies keep dying. This enrages Isobel, who thinks that Miles, her boyfriend and an undertaker, should be responsible for his dog and the puppies. She finds both the dog’s pregnancy and the puppies’ vulnerability threatening, and we can superficially read her disgust as a rejection of maternal, care-giving femininity, even as she pushes Miles to adhere to a dominant, protective masculinity. Isobel’s ick, however, includes Miles’s work with dead bodies, so her problem seems to be less one of gender and more one of mortality’s messiness.
Olguín’s usual preoccupations appear here in amusingly exaggerated form: all the puppies are dying, and Isobel is grossed out by everything, and, just to add to the absurdity, they’re refrigerating the puppy corpses in Tupperware. The wit skews mordant (“He picked the puppy up off the floor with his hand inside the bag, just as he would lift a shit from the sidewalk” [p. 59]). Olguín, who usually prefers drier, less obvious humor, indulges a playful sensibility in this story which marries effectively with the graphic descriptions of pregnancy and puppies. I found this the funniest story in the bunch, snorting aloud several times (as opposed to on just a few occassions in “The Princess Wants for Company”). I’d love to see more of Olguín’s experiments in a similar stylized and comic vein.
The laughs in “The Undertaker’s Dogs” pull their power from their poignant juxtaposition with Olguín’s apt, economical descriptions of Isobel’s perspective. When Miles first meets Isobel crying in the bathroom at a party, “their only options were to step into an uncomfortable intimacy, or never speak with each other again.” When they opt for the former, “they fit together immediately. Her misery fit into the hollows of his reassurance like a key fitting into a lock” (both quotes from p. 63). In these two lines, we understand Isabel’s deep loneliness, which is complicated by her naive, absolutist view of connection. She jumps into a relationship with Miles because he’s an available diversion. In this way, Isobel’s desperation and immaturity are rendered with enough wit to make them funny and enough care to make them recognizable.
In “Clara Aguilera’s Holy Lungs,” former Catholic Natalie must also hold a balanced view of another human being. When her younger sister, Clara, dies in a tsunami, but her corpse washes up onto shore incorruptible, Natalie holds zealously, jealously, to memories of her as a messy, imperfect teenager even as reports circulate of Clara’s posthumous holiness. “God owed her, she decided, and here was what he paid,” Natalie thinks (p. 77), using Clara’s marvelous corpse as a connection to Clara’s unremarkable humanity. Natalie turns away from Clara’s sanctification by the Catholic Church and achieves a mundane, grounded transcendence in doing so.
Olguín demonstrates nuanced characterization both of religious people and skeptics in this story. Clara’s miracle does not motivate Natalie to return to Catholicism but instead to continue in skepticism. One of Natalie’s fellow watchers over Clara’s body, Father Gonzalez, has a rather utilitarian interpretation of Clara’s effect: “‘I think fishermen have seen strange hauls this year,’ he said. ‘And it is a good thing—a holy thing, Natalie—that your sister brings them comfort’” (p. 80). Both the devout calm experienced by Catholics in the presence of Clara’s holy image and Natalie’s frozen horror are conveyed in direct, reportorial style which is absent of judgment. Religion and skepticism are each represented as practical, understandable coping mechanisms for the unfathomable mysteries of death.
“Captain America’s Missing Fingers” (p. 93) offers a different form of coping strategy. Another story of a young girl in wartime with a father off fighting—one of the Gulf Wars here—this time the protagonist, Eva, covets her older brother Danny’s crate of Captain America comic books. Her Latine relatives discourage her interest: “‘It’s all war stories, Eva. It’s not for girls,’ Tío Berto explained” (p. 95). By reading superhero comics and projecting herself into the character of the Scarlet Witch, however, Eva tries to construct a self in a world where masculinity and war seem valorized and femininity and civilian life seem denigrated. Like the protagonist in “Devils…,” Eva shoulders the unavoidable alteration of her immediate family and deals with the added complication of gender ambivalence.
While the protagonist of “Devils…” hates herself, Eva’s imagination, and her ultimately supportive connection with Danny, sustain her. Eva’s family, who love each other but do not always understand each other, provide a realistically messy alternative to the book’s many fractured families. We have no doubt that Eva will figure things out—all on her own terms and surrounded by loved ones.
I’m a sucker for quietly hopeful stories of queer joy. The titular story in this anthology, “The Sea Gives Up the Dead,” is, though, somewhat darker. Indeed, as one of the collection’s most challenging stories, “The Sea…” should be the last in the book rather than the penultimate. It returns to the World War I era with another grieving female character, this one being Selma. Aboard a ship to France to see her son Eddie’s grave, Selma meets a mysterious woman who knows about Selma’s ambivalence toward Eddie, and the story becomes one of Eddie’s coming out. With each moment that the woman resurrects for Selma, the story’s point of view opens from its hermetic enclosure in Selma’s grief to a messy braid of both Selma’s and Eddie’s desires and losses.
“You didn’t go to him,” the woman said. “You could have gone to your son, you could have told him it would be all right.”
“But it wouldn’t have been,” Selma burst out. . . . She didn’t want to lose him. She’d known she would have to lose him. . . .
“That was the first time Eddie ever thought about dying,” the woman said, green eyes hard. “He thought about jumping in front of a train, just so he’d never see you look at him like that again.” (p. 128)
At first a mouthpiece for Eddie, the woman then becomes Eddie. The story builds to a harrowing end that, in my reading, grants Eddie dignity as a queer character while also giving Selma her heart’s desire, even though she recognizes it as illusory. While following and remaining sympathetic to Selma, “The Sea…” embodies and amplifies Eddie’s struggle so that Selma knows the price of her wish fulfillment. Whether characters reject miracles, like Natalie in “Clara Aguilera’s Holy Lungs,” or accept them like Selma, the return of the dead always changes those who receive them. Olguín’s prose understands all reactions and condemns none.
Throughout The Sea Gives Up the Dead, Olguín observes that human beings have difficulty dealing with death directly. For many of her characters, ignorance about what death is like, absence created by a dead person, and worry about how death will change a survivor’s life combine with overwhelming potency: Death (or the prospect of it) forms a gravity well that distorts their entire being. Many of the protagonists in this collection respond with conversion (turning their grief into anger or fear), displacement (blaming someone else for their grief), and distraction (focusing on something else besides the source of their grief). Even though Olguín in this way charts similar trajectories for her protagonists, she individualizes the characters’ stories by diversifying their ages, genders, races, socioeconomic classes, and sexualities as well as the people upon whom they displace and subjects with which they distract themselves. Her characters’ different circumstances, as communicated through sharp, judiciously chosen detail, yield different manifestations of the distortions caused by death.
These are character studies, then, variations on a theme, and they reinforce the universality of death and our inept coping mechanisms even as they celebrate the vivid, various textures of the struggling protagonists’ lives. I use the word “celebrate” deliberately, since The Sea Gives Up the Dead revels in our mortal lives, even as the limits of our mortality terrify many of the characters. In particular, Olguín writes about love’s survival and transmutation in the face of death. In “My Husband and Me,” for instance, the protagonist’s anguish over her vanished youth prompts her protective tenderness toward a technologically advanced sex doll which resembles her young self, and which her husband buys. In “Small Monuments,” Maria has to figure out what to do with a diamond made from her ex-fiancee’s corpse. In “Esther and the Voice,” Esther inadvertently gives a sentient computer her dead wife’s personality. And in “Foam on the Waves,” Aurelia sacrifices her life on land and finds a sea witch who can cause dead tongues to speak.
Love does not end with death in this book; it persists and transmutes. Even when the characters act selfishly, Olguín does not condemn them. She merely describes the actions and their effects on others in a clear, unsparing way that allows us to understand why all characters do and feel as they do. Each of these stories is a sealed terrarium, seeded with death to create microcosms of humanity, particularly Latine and/or queer humanity, at its most vulnerable and understandable. Olguín’s wry, lucid, and compassionate prose illuminates the ways death changes us—and challenges us to laugh at the complicated succession of losses that we call life.