Menace, by Monika Radojevic
Read it here in about 10 minutes.
Thinking about why I love it…
I love the way the narrator talks, and how they operate within the story. Right from the opening paragraph, the omniscient narrator tells us that something significant and strange has happened, but that no one has realised – it’s like the reader is being let in on a secret. The narrator sometimes talks directly to the reader, using asides (‘when it happens – which is imminently – she doesn’t notice it either’), and asking rhetorical questions (‘who has the energy to go poking about in mosquito-ridden waters, anyway?’), in a chatty way.
The narration is unusual because there are no proper characters in the story – as in, no one the story follows or centres on – and no one is named, apart from the first missing woman, they’re just referred to as ‘bored children’, ‘the mothers’, ‘An older man’, ‘the scientists’, ‘the new President’, etc. The narrator isn’t a person in the story, either, but rather a voice – perhaps they’re a part of nature, themselves.
I love the combination of straightforward description and poetic prose. For example, the first disappearance is described as sounding like ‘a muffled sort of bang, like the thud of a large sack of flour falling off a countertop’, and then ‘the low buzz – almost a moan?’ – here, it feels like the narrator is trying very hard to be clear in their description, so we the reader can understand it. I’ll happily admit, I normally despise inappropriate similes and metaphors, but this story is littered with poetic and inappropriate comparisons, e.g. ‘the lined face of a woman in her sixties is sprinkled into the trees like sugar’ – it’s inappropriate because why would sugar be sprinkled in trees? But I think it works here because everything in this story is strange, so it’s not out of place.
I love the ending. There’s a build-up, but no climax, and resolution – we know that something is going to happen to the president, and the entire world, after the reader finishes the story (‘How beautiful. How mesmerising. How deadly.’), but I’m rooting for the bees, because this story is a feminist allegory of unseen and forgotten women enacting their revenge.
I love the ending.
Mina Ma 