Allison Devers     Blazing Polyester The young female characters prevalent in Aimee Bender's collection of short stories entitled The Girl in the Flammable Skirt are being punished, or just feel they are. What else is to be said of the girl in "Legacy" who is sent to live with the hunchbacked uncle for the term of her pregnancy, falls in love with him partially because of his deformity -- but later discovers that he had purposefully implanted it? Or there's "Marzipan" in which Lisa tells, "One week after his father died, my father woke up with a hole in his stomach." Later, Lisa watches her mother rebirth her recently deceased grandmother. A woman is traumatized when her husband returns from war without lips in "What You Left In The Ditch." Then there is Mimi, a lovely mermaid with chlorinated green hair, who attends high school with, "long skirts that swept the floor and one large boot covering her tail and she used a crutch, pretending like her second leg, which of course didn't exist, was hurt." Mimi yearns for the ocean, and without any explanation has matriculated into the public education system. Not all of the main characters in Bender's stories are young women, and most are either experiencing some major overhauls in their own lives or are learning from others' experiences. In "The Rememberer," one of Bender's most moving stories, Annie tells the reader that "my lover is experiencing reverse evolution ... one day he was my lover and the next he was some kind of ape. It's been a month and now he's a sea turtle." This occurs after her lover has complained that they "think too much." Through the loss of her lover, she realizes that her own life had been defined by their relationship. She begins to recognize this after she asks him (as a salamander), "Do you remember me? Do you remember?" What is so striking about many of the stories in The Girl in the Flammable Skirt is that they attempt to cope with many defining situations young people experience without letting the characters share their traumatic tell-alls and sob stories. Bender does this by blowing up the issues, taking pieces of familiar situations, turning them on their heads -- making myths. Using strange premises, she addresses: those children who take the blame for their parents struggling relationships, the painful experience of not quite fitting into any groups in high school, the ability to define oneself by a relationship, and the masochistic tendencies many girls take refuge in after puberty. "The Healer" contains two mythological characters; as the story starts, "There were two mutant girls in the town: one had a hand made of fire and the other had a hand made of ice. Everyone else's hands were normal." The girl with the hand of fire always has the desire to burn: she burns up bits of her mattress, she lights the smokers' cigarettes at school, she cuts off her hand to help the desire go away. The ice girl's water has a healing power that the town discovers. Soon, they keep her at the hospital, where she helps the patients. Unfortunately, she doesn't really experience emotion; she tells the narrator, "I just feel ice." The fire and ice girl can be seen as two opposite ends of their high school's social scene, the misguided -- those who don't know why life hurts so much -- and the goody-goody -- who are inclined to do all the "right" things but can't see the individual importance of an action. Despite all of the lovely images and strange occurrences which make these stories breathe, there are unnecessary images that appear suddenly -- for instance, The Gap appears briefly and sticks out like a sore thumb. Some stories seem unresolved by extremely sudden, plain endings, leaving one searching for a revelation which may not have happened. Short story collections aren't the most popular reading choice these days, but many stories in The Girl in the Flammable Skirt are tied together in ways that lead to a cohesive feeling about the book, as a novel would. The last story executes this well, as the narrator reads about a girl in the paper, who went up in flames. She wonders, "With the amazing turns of her hips, and the warmth of the music inside her, did she believe, for even one glorious second, that her passion had arrived?"

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