Before You She Was a Pit Bull

The first step to embracing failure as a way of life is to begin taking risks, and Elizabeth Ellen’s characters all feel like they got their start out of the womb. In the opening story of her first book, a woman goes on weekly excursions with a brute named Trucker, leaving the “someone waiting at home” while she indulges her bad-boy fantasies. Trouble is, she’s never able to get Trucker to be bad enough to take her to bed, and so the brute becomes the ultimate tease until they end up snowshoeing through a blizzard, losing their way among the snowdrifts.

In “What I’ve Been Told With Regard to the Pianist,” a teenage girl begrudgingly gives her heart to a sentimental pianist who’s her mother’s umpteenth boyfriend, only to watch as his bad habits emerge, namely drinking and slapping, and he’s eventually chased out of her life.

Michigan writer Ellen zeroes in on lowlifes and lowlucks, but what makes her writing so sharp is the appearance of delicate moments among imploding or exploding relationships. When the narrator and Trucker are hopelessly lost, they come up on a family of elk, frozen where they stand. They hunt around and eventually find a stick to chisel the ice from the animals’ heads, freeing them to move into the woods and out of the storm.

Future Tense has published a string of strong, short collections, finding new writers published on literary websites and collecting their work into short chapbooks like this one. Occasionally, Ellen lets the tone of her story fluctuate, and often the ending is clear from the beginning. But in just six stories, she leaves us wanting more.—Jonathan Messinger