by Liz Barnett
Mid-American Review fiction staff chose “The Buffalo” by Schuyler Mitchell for publication in Volume XLIII, Number II.
“The Buffalo” is a story of a person whose father is a buffalo…or at least, that’s what our narrator leads us to believe. The narrator’s father has remarried a woman and our narrator wonders why the woman would do that. The relationship between the new wife and narrator leads to interesting tension as we watch from the narrator’s POV of passiveness.
The fiction staff enjoyed the internal conflict of the character being a passive observer of this relationship between the buffalo father and his new wife. The narrator wonders if she should tell Maryann, her father’s new wife, about him being a buffalo, but in the end has to reason that well…Maryann was the one who chose to marry a buffalo, while our narrator never got a choice of him being her father.
The buffalo is loud and violent and while we do not see outright acts of abuse, we see the effects on our narrator as she wonders about if she’ll also become a buffalo someday. We enjoyed this view of the generational cycle and the way the story handled abuse in general with its metaphor. While it was a lighter view of abuse, it still showed the guilt and domestic dynamics in a whole way.
The narrative voice will also leave the readers with a lingering sense of loneliness and worry for our narrator and her possible (inevitable) transformation into a buffalo someday. Readers will not want to miss this story.