I Watched You from the Ocean Floor
Struggling with tragedy, fear, and uncertainty, the characters of Erin Cecilia Thomas’s entrancing, woman-centered short story collection I Watched You from the Ocean Floor find hope through human connection and resilience.
Easing through a range of perspectives, the stories take place in small, penetrating worlds. In one story, an “upscale organic grocery store” employee becomes jealous of an ethereal cashier; undertones of quirky humor lighten the narrator’s increasing obsession and self-admitted crisis of conscience. In “A Rapture Coming,” a nurturing woman and her geophysicist partner lose their home to the “dragon’s breath” of climate change-related fires. And in “I May,” a woman whose parents were killed in a car accident is troubled by her first pregnancy. Despite fears of leaving her own child orphaned and traumatized, she visits a baby boutique; as she contemplates racks of tiny outfits, she is awed by the sight of a “magnificently pregnant” woman, serene and “glowing like a lightning bug.”
In “So You May Sleep Again,” a widow embroiders an intricate likeness of her deceased husband to assuage her grief. Also compelling is “Washington Avenue,” which follows an arc of anguish and emergence as a young Italian woman comes to Boston to attend an acclaimed music school. She rents a room in a welcoming “gabled Victorian,” filled with the lively energies of other students. But after the arrival of COVID-19, the tenants begin to leave and one of the landlords is hospitalized with the virus. Details of constrictive face masks and contagious fears heighten the woman’s isolation; she later finds release and renewed expression by playing her violin, practicing with “racing passion” until music again echoes through the house.
With supple complexity, the stories of I Watched You from the Ocean Floor explore unique intensities of emotion and healing.
Reviewed by
Meg Nola
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