“Burner and Other Stories” by Katrina Denza

The epigraph of Katrina Denza’s new short story collection, Burner: And Other Stories, is a quote from Simone de Beauvoir: “The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power.” It’s a thought-provoking introduction to a collection populated by stories with themes of connection, romance, and family ties—and it draws the reader’s attention to the undercurrent of power that sizzles beneath the surface of intimate relationships.

In these stories, Denza sets out to disrupt—and perhaps even destroy—the reader’s notions of power and how it is organized, gendered, and technologized in the present cultural moment. Most of the narratives orbit closely around the perspective of women narrators, tracing the intimacies of their histories and thoughts. The reader is privy to these narrators’ privacies, complexities, senses of humor, and even their unlikeable moments. And these moments are strung with the ways the women have and do not have and pretend to have and urgently grip at power, including and especially in their most intimate relationships.

In the first story, “Burner,” the narrator uses a burner phone to send anonymous text messages to the new chef at the restaurant where she works. He responds to the messages, with a much different tone than he communicates in their in-person interactions, and who he is in public gets put in sharp relief against who he is in the privacy of the anonymous texting. The narrator, too, seems to feel freer with her own strange impulses when shrouded by anonymity, sending odd texts and images and then seeming to enjoy a sense of power when the pictures successfully get him talking:

I park and dig around in my bag for the burner phone. The picture I send the chef is of sunlight in the shape of a heart on the forest floor.

He responds immediately: you gotta stop sending me pics.

I send another. A close-up of frills on the backside of a shelf mushroom.

What’s this

Guess

Not guessing too tired

I send a shot of an abandoned crab leg in the sand.

This narrator is the first of many women in these stories who is trying something unexpected to reclaim a sense of power and agency.

Like the first narrator, other characters also use (with varying levels of self-awareness) technology to explore these notions of relational power. There are phones and burner phones and iPads and social media exchanges and characters who are hyper-conscious of their Internet presence and even a husband-hologram. An Internet connection is another kind of connection, after all, that intrudes upon all our intimacies in unexpected ways. And so the way that power is created and re-created through the forms of curated visibility enabled by modern technology is woven through the stories.

The only male narrator in the collection is Stephen; in “Here in the Jungle,” Stephen, a recently-divorced man attends an ayahuasca retreat in the jungle with his new, much younger, Instagram influencer girlfriend. She says she is eager to share plant medicine with him, but spends much of the trip talking to her audience through the phone and not including or mentioning Stephen:

In the beginning of the relationship, Riley posted a slew of pictures of him on social media. A couple of times she appeared in a video. On this trip, it’s like he doesn’t exist.

In the end, Stephen’s experience of being gradually invisibilized by his Internet-savvy younger girlfriend mirrors his experience of invisibilizing his wife toward the end of his marriage.

The last story in the collection, “In the Dark Woods” has a haunting and uncertain ending. Denza leaves the reader alone on the path she has trailblazed, and there the reader is forced to confront their own beliefs about power, their own sense of how their gendered experiences have structured their life and expectations, and their own level of hopefulness for the future. Is the future bringing a change in the winds of power? she seems to ask us. And: Will you be part of making that wind?

Katrina Denza

Katrina Denza’s stories have appeared in Nelle, Slippery Elm, and Jabberwock Review, among other places. Her work has received a scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.