Mouth, Puloma Ghosh's debut, is a collection of 11 sometimes surreal, sometimes horrifying, always startling short stories. Grappling with themes of female bodily autonomy, the connection between sexuality and death, and the haunting influence of grief, these stories will unsettle and fascinate in equal measure.
In "Desiccation," a teen girl develops a sexual fantasy about the only other Indian girl at her local ice rink, Pritha, whom she thinks is a vampire. Linked notions of grief and sexuality persist in "In the Winter," a flash piece about a woman's raw sexual encounters in college. Meanwhile, "Nip" is told from the perspective of a woman's favorite perfume, already aching from the loss of her lover's skin, and "Natalya" chillingly unspools the truth behind one woman's death through the perspective of her ex-lover's systematic autopsy of her corpse.
In these stories, Ghosh's visceral descriptions make the abstractions of desire and rage elusive, slippery as scent or blood between fingers. For example, as the lonely protagonist of "Leaving Things" performs a C-section on a wolf to deliver the boy-creature who will become her lover, she watches as "small limbs kick and tear out of the wolf's womb, teeth gnashing through her skin.... Dazed, with my mouth and nose full of coin-edged blood scent, I stuck my hands into the shredded flesh." Like K-Ming Chang's carnal prose, Ghosh's delights in even the grotesque sides of sex and rebirth.
But while her stories often include substantial violence, their climaxes focus more on transcendent, existential questions. At the end of "In the Winter," the narrator wonders, "Was I the creature, or was he?... we took the room and tipped it into another world where it was never supposed to be, left a double of it behind so nobody would know." This uncanny sense of some parallel, negative space, waiting to entrap someone or swallow them whole arises in "Lemon Boy," too. A girl who already feels alienated from her post-college life meets an enigmatic boy who awakens her awareness to black holes that follow him "like some kind of all-invasive flora" and constantly threaten to consume him. Like the story the Lemon Boy tells, Ghosh's stories awaken readers to the gaping presence of their own insatiable hungers. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor
Shelf Talker: A collection of creepy and surreal stories, Mouth introduces readers to Puloma Ghosh's unmatched ability to probe the visceral depths of female pain, desire, and grief.