Ling Ma

What happens when fantasy tears through the screen of the everyday to wake us up? Could that waking be our end?

In Bliss Montage, Ling Ma brings us eight wildly different tales of people making their way through the madness and reality of our collective delusions: love and loneliness, connection and possession, friendship, motherhood, the idea of home. From a woman who lives in a house with all of her ex-boyfriends, to a toxic friendship built around a drug that makes you invisible, to an ancient ritual that might heal you of anything if you bury yourself alive, these and other scenarios reveal that the outlandish and the everyday are shockingly, deceptively, heartbreakingly similar.

These and other scenarios investigate the ways that the outlandish and the ordinary are shockingly, deceptively, heartbreakingly alike.

Stories

Bliss Montage

linlin

Sabrina D. 

Her flamethrower gaze annihilated all women’s magazine adages about loving yourself, all body-positivity Oprah episodes; it could reverse all waves of feminism. 

jam 🍯

If your body had been broken beyond repair, I would have paid them to pluck out those bones for me—me before all others: friends, family. It had been raining that day too. Whatever I felt, whatever this feeling was inside of me, there is no place for it. There is no place for it to go, and I would have to carry it around inside of me for a long time, so long that it would fossilize and become a part of me.

The Husband is a resting place. He is a chair. Sometimes I drape myself over him and I get the physical comfort of not being alone. I can feel it anytime I want; mostly Saturday nights, mostly Sunday mornings. But the times I need it most are the early evenings when I feel like I am dissolving.

abi a

 He was doglike, by which I mean he inhabited himself without selfconsciousness. He didn't second-guess himself or what he wanted. And he liked being petted on the head before sleep, as if I were his owner. Or that was how he made me his owner.

In the rearview mirror, I study my daughter. When I first learned I was having a daughter, the family was so disappointed. In China, a boy is always better, if you're going to have one child. But me, I was secretly happy. A boy, at best, can adore his mother, but a girl can understand her. When the doctor told me it was a girl, I thought, Now I will be understood. That was my happiest moment. The idea of a daughter.

Sasha Maiboroda

(…) How do I know, Adam once asked before he struck me, if what you feel is real? And not something you felt for everyone else that came before? And everyone that will come after? 

Even the heartiest flower can wilt from overattention is a Chinese folk saying, probably.

The Pyrenean ibex, the Tasmans tiger, the passenger pigeon, the Mexican grizzly bear, the Baiji white dolphin, found only in the Yangtze River. 

“This is the most depressing screen saver," I told him. The computer could've been from the nineties. "They all look like they know they're the last of their kind." 

"I’d want to know if I was the last one. Then I could stop the searching for a mate, and just, you know, resign myself". He laughed.

bella

“At night, they crawl into my lap, full of easily disclosed secrets, light as folding chairs.”

Bliss Montage quotes

Join the club