When it happens, as it sometimes does, that people confront stark and fundamental realizations about themselves, they do so within a distinct setting—an atmosphere, a location, a defined habitat. We are possessed and prodded by the places of our lives. The stories of C. D. Collins, Siobhan Fallon, and Anne Germanacos are all deeply rooted in their settings, which are, respectively, the small towns of Kentucky; the sites in and around an Army base; and the Greek islands.

C. D. Collins writes gritty, raw stories. She spares us nothing as she tosses the grains of sand on the table. In the title story, for example, former college friends and one-time lesbian lovers—Blue, who lives in Hazard, Kentucky, and Ruby, who lives in Vance, Kentucky—keep their connection intact, although it is not without its troubles. Afraid to expose her relationship with Ruby to public scrutiny—and probable condemnation—Blue marries a man and has children, while Ruby goes on to have a string of mistresses. When they meet years later in the garden of “Blue Land”—the name for Blue’s “arbor with glow-lites and a bee hive with real honey-bees and a fountain connected to a garden hose,” Blue tells Ruby what has been clear throughout the story: “…not everybody’s strong enough to be queer.”

Collins’s characters draw on the land for identity, for their lives are lived in tandem with crops and seasons. In the story “Will Coulter” Collins give us a man with a wild past who settles down and marries in the winter when the land hibernates, only to find that come spring, he is incapable of the intimacy his wife craves. He turns into the five o’clock fixture in town as he stands by the pond with his dog, tossing seed to the geese, a reminder of our link to the natural world.

The particulars of land-identity spring from Collins’s knack for the well-chosen detail. A woman’s failing teeth are described as “lonely stalagmites” and another character can “walk across a busted pop bottle without getting cut.” We meet a harsh grandfather who holds people “responsible for their lot, as though being poor, ill or ugly were choices people made.” Collins offers up characters who, because of where they live and the way they live, are on the margins, but, as gradually becomes clear in the collection, everyone lives life on the margins.

Collins’s strength lies in her ability to imagine utterly sympathetic characters in grim situations. Nowhere is this more evident than in “Sin Vergüenza,” a story that begins with the line, “A cokehead and a junkie are two different things” (a version of this story was published in Salamander, vol. 13, no. 1). In the story, the protagonist’s true location is her coke-riddled mind; her “Friday night dates with the snowman” are the reason she works like a dog all week, following the money because the money leads to the high. She is deeply wounded, and her refuge is in drugs: “Coke is something that I can predict. Something that no one can take away from me. Something that is mine,” she says. By the end of the story, we are rooting for the protagonist in her attempt to change; that we do so is evidence of Collins’s gift, her ability to expose the complex person behind the habit.

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While for some Americans, the war in Iraq has been part of the daily news since 2003, for others—those in the Armed forces and their families—it has been a way of life. Grief and guilt, anger and resistance, pride and patriotism—all are laid bare in Siobhan Fallon’s You Know When the Men Are Gone. Of particular note is her focus on the women and children left behind.

For the most part, Fallon’s eight stories, connected by reappearing characters, take place at Fort Hood in Texas. With a few strokes, we’re dropped into the intimacy of the military family experience, the support and petty irritations of the families who live on the base when the soldiers go off to war, and the unexpected, sometimes unwelcome, bursts of generosity in the face of illness and death.

The collection opens with a story originally titled “Waiting,” published in this magazine in 2009, and retitled “You Know When the Men Are Gone.” The “you” is critical. Fallon gently reminds us that the sacrifices soldiers make affect everyone, no matter how far removed we may feel from the battle. The wives and children who are waiting for the men to return “get used to hearing through the walls”: the walls between neighbors and the metaphorical walls between fellow citizens. So when Meg Brady, the protagonist of the title story, meets her new neighbor, a woman with two children, a Klimt-like patchwork coat, and an alarmingly loud dog, she must make a choice between reporting the disturbance or living with it. She decides to live with the barking because she has been told that the dog is the deployed soldier’s beloved pet, and she will not be responsible for changing his household while he’s away. By the time the deployed men arrive home, however, nothing is as it was.

“Inside the Break” introduces striking and fresh emotional tension to our understanding of military life as wives watching their husbands leave take careful note of a supply bus that “held a threat that had never occurred to any of them when they thought of faraway insurgents and bombs and helicopters crashing.” There are fifteen women on the bus, and the wives suddenly fear the possibility of their husbands’ infidelity. After not hearing from her husband for a longer than usual time, one woman hacks into his email, finds a suspicious message, and confronts him. He denies everything. Months later, presented with the opportunity to learn the truth, she doesn’t want to know.

Perhaps one of the most sobering stories in Fallon’s collection is “Leave.” When Nick, an interrogation specialist, suspects his wife is cheating on him, he uses his mid-tour leave to stalk his family from the basement of his own home. Nick brings the skills of warfare home with him: “He staged this as carefully as any other surveillance mission he had created and briefed to soldiers before.” His target is his own wife, and as the story develops, our guts twist along with Nick’s, waiting to see what the outcome will be.

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Anne Germanacos’s In the Time of the Girls is a seductive farrago of stories in which realism collides with Greek myth. Germanacos is a master of the short paragraph form, each paragraph or passage bearing its own title. The stories, which consist of one miniature after another, build from seemingly disparate elements. Although her elliptically described incidents follow no linear pattern, there is a logic to their content. Consider “abstinence,” the final section of the story “Until We Go to Sleep”:

After a period of abstinence, I find that the swim of words and the winds of eros are located side by side.

 

I fall into that particular sea, the breath and buck of it. The rapid climax of wave upon wave.

Germanacos speaks of more than physical intimacy here: the story is about a myriad of things, including love, aging, death, memory, family ties, and responsibility. Her associative mind and heart bear witness to the deeper parts of our existence.

The collection shimmers with detail-laden images and distilled power. In “Anthropology,” for example, she writes, “There are mistakes so ill-timed they can ruin a life. Still, bodies will have their say.” The title preceding these lines—“female:”—brings them into sharp focus. And then we are ready to be led to the place Germanacos wants to show us. The narrator of “Anthropology” begins as an observer identifying behaviors and traditions on an island; delves into the life of the island (“Then one day I let myself be possessed by a man”); marries and divorces the man; and marries writing. At the end of this episodic journey we are left with this: “With words as my dowry, I stand before you.”

It’s a short leap from “Anthropology” to the next story in Germanacos’s collection, “Her Dowry,” with its triumphant section titled “conversion.” The childless narrator would like to say this to the man in her life: “You built a church because I failed to bear you a daughter. Consider this story her dowry.” The term “dowry” is transformed; it is no longer based on social convention. Rather, it is something based on faith and emotion, and it is given not to a specific daughter in a family, but to the daughters of the world.

The connections Germanacos creates in these stories is arguably her greatest gift. We are intimates, guests at the party after the party, where the real conversation takes place. The studied directness of each miniature unveils for the reader the angst and joys inherent in an examined life. After traveling the globe of the mind with Germanacos, one feels an abiding commitment to the role of geography and gender in the journey to self-understanding. Perhaps Collins and Fallon would echo Germanacos when she says, “It can take years to reach the place where desire spirals to fullness: the many departures finally become an overwhelming sense of having arrived.”