Mouthful of Birds by Samanta Schweblin

When Sara turned back to us, the bird wasn't there anymore. Her mouth, nose, chin, and both hands were smeared with blood. She smiled sheepishly. Her gigantic mouth arched and opened, and her red teeth made me jump to my feet. I ran to the bathroom, locked the door, and vomited into the toilet.

In "The Digger," a story from Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin's collection Mouthful of Birds, a man rents a vacation house that comes with a digger, a man whose job seems entirely devoted to digging and maintaining a hole in the yard. In a moment when his digger has taken a break, the man accidentally caves in part of the hole, but his attempts to fix it seem to be more inappropriate than the fact that he caved it in--"It's your hole," the digger says menacingly, "you can't dig." That's the whole story. The next story, "Irman," describes a couple who stop at a late night diner to find that the proprietor, a large woman, has died and lays on the kitchen floor, while her--husband? coworker?--Irman struggles to keep the diner going, not able even to reach the ingredients on the high shelves. The couple berate Irman, force him to cook for them, and steal from the diner. These two stories, I think, have something to say about the indignity of labor, the way that people are exploited for the most trivial of needs, or perhaps no needs--simply to enforce a hierarchy of those who pay and those who work.

The digging comes back again in a story called "Underground," in which a traveler hears a story about a town whose children had become obsessed with a large pit. When the children disappear, the townspeople find that he hole has been filled in--become a mound--and they tear up the town's floors in search of their children, who have disappeared into the earth. Perhaps here the digging is a metaphor for death--the mound like a grave, like disturbed earth--or perhaps it is a symbol of the strange and terrifying world in which we are forced to send our children. 

I liked all three of these stories to various degrees: "Irman" is the best of them, with its strange unfolding of menace and neglect. The others work, though they are a little one-note; others in Schweblin's collection I thought failed to really present more than a premise. That includes the title story, about a young girl who eats birds, and stories like "The Merman," about a narrator who falls in love with a Merman. I thought these stories struggled to move past the significance of the premise, and when they tried to become slightly more complex, like the story "Onigiris," that takes in multiple points-of-views of customers and masseuses at a strange spa--more labor--became almost inscrutable. I'm thinking of Mariana Enriquez's The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, another collection of surreal/horror stories from Latin America. I think horror, if that's what these stories, is a genre particularly at risk of not doing enough with its premises, especially in the short story, and I found Mouthful of Birds fairly disappointing compared to Schweblin's novels, which have the space to develop and mutate in more effective ways.