By Jane Wageman
Photo Caption: “Drone view of similar houses, driveways, and yards in the Utah suburbs.” by Blake Wheeler, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons.
Mid-American Review fiction staff selected “The Unbearable” by Brianna Barnes for publication in Volume XLIII, Number 1, forthcoming.
Life has become increasingly unbearable for Judy, the protagonist of Brianna Barnes’ story—but reading about her existential crisis is anything but.
Our staff loved the psychological complexity of Judy’s character, whose actions are often nonsensical—and yet make perfect sense within the framework of her own skewed logic.
Judy is on a first-name basis with the agents at Poison Control, which she regularly calls while drunk to inquire about the effects of consuming certain toxins. She trolls the website FriendlyNeighborhood.com, posting under the pseudonym Carl Rogers and trying to get a rise out of the neighbors whom she lives alongside but rarely speaks to. She acts with certainty—even as she continually questions her relation to the world around her.
The story begins in the aftermath of a forest fire, which has forced a bear into the surrounding suburbs. Judy, encountering her neighbors’ comments about this online, finds herself intentionally stoking their concerns about the animal. As she reacts to the bear-sightings, the story delves into her thoughts on consciousness and her place in an indifferent world. Walking through the trees’ charred remains in the opening scene, Judy notes: “The fact that. . . she was fully surrounded by a resplendent and unrepeatable beauty did not mean she was being loved by the forest or by nature or by some capital ‘G’ God; she was just as unloved as ever within a beauty which preceded her and did not need her, a wilderness, after all.”
“The Unbearable” has a lonely, haunting quality in such scenes—but they are set alongside moments of sharp, critical humor that left many of us laughing to ourselves as we read. Ironic and funny portrayals of suburbia are sprinkled throughout the story: the particular smells and patrons of an organic grocery store, conversations between neighbors about recycling protocols in an online forum, and a description of Judy’s home, Pleasant Meadows, as “a suburb with profound rural pretenses, hyperbolic nature street names, and paranoid inhabitants.”
As the story follows Judy’s growing sense of her own “nonsubjecthood,” it builds to an ending that feels both surprising and inevitable—one that you certainly won’t forget.