Widow Fantasies by Hollay Ghadery

A Short Fiction Review by Ian Colford

Flash fiction is a uniquely challenging art form. Like poetry, it demands a highly disciplined command of craft along with a talent for identifying exactly the right word at precisely the right moment. But as a category of fiction, it also requires the author to know her characters at such an intimate level that she can convincingly distill their lives, loves, desires and dreams into a sentence or two.

In Widow Fantasies, Hollay Ghadery accomplishes the near impossible with apparent ease, assembling more than 30 captivating mini-dramas that evoke a dizzying array of moods and situations while keeping the reader gripped from the first page to the last. Many of the stories involve family tensions, male-female relationships that have lost their glow because of betrayals large and small, deliberate and unintended, and couples working at cross purposes.

In “Jaws,” the female narrator has kicked her philandering husband out of the house, though the last straw is not his infidelity but his undisguised contempt for his wife’s pet goldfish. In “Ragnar” Sophie regrets her decision to move in with Jim because he’s responding to her naive request that he take an interest in the subject she’s studying with childish mockery that borders on scorn. And in “Like Your Shit Don’t Stink” Petra’s affection for her husband Orme is seriously compromised, not simply by the stench he leaves behind after every bowel movement but also by the fact that he obviously couldn’t care less.

Other stories deftly evoke significant moments in a character’s life, such as “Here Kitty,” in which the scent of a sleeping 4-year-old brings into the mother’s mind a vivid and heartrending memory of the cat she loved and had to have euthanized. Or “Purple Bears,” in which a mother tries to comfort her young son who, though bullied and tormented at school, still wishes no harm on anyone. Or the title story, the surreal “Widow Fantasies,” in which Leyla finds herself in a nightmare state of limbo: assaulted by a confusing rush of emotion and sensation as it becomes clear that an accident has taken place on the farm and her husband’s fate is unknown.

Some of Ghadery’s female characters are trapped in unfulfilling or difficult relationships, but they refuse to be defeated by circumstance and are looking for ways to assert themselves. Her male characters run the gamut, from prince charming to drunken lout. And her children sometimes find themselves betwixt and between: trying to preserve their innocence while navigating a bewildering and inhospitable adult world.

The stories in Widow Fantasies, as we would expect, are told with elegant economy and the book, at less than 90 pages, invites repeated readings.

In summary, Widow Fantasies is a triumph of empathetic storytelling: entertaining, amusing, bold, surprising. It announces Hollay Ghadery as a writer to watch.

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About the Author

Hollay Ghadery is a multi-genre writer living in Kawartha Lakes, Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have been published in various literary journals and magazines. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released in Spring 2021. Rebellion Box, her debut collection of poetry, was released in 2023.

About the Reviewer

Ian Colford was born, raised and educated in Halifax. His reviews and stories have appeared in many print and online publications. He is the author of two collections of short fiction and two novels and is the recipient of the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award for Evidence.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Gordon Hill Press (Sept. 1 2024)

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 92 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1774221144

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1774221143