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The package came with a note: “Hi Jonathan, here are some sad stories!” It’s the second such package we’ve received from Summers since TOC launched in 2005. The first was her audio project Cohabitation, a collection of stories on CD and in zine form that neatly measured the lives of fictional characters living in a Chicago apartment building.
Les Petite Tristes… follows in a similar vein. The design is more like a music CD, with the stories reprinted almost as liner notes. Summers reads four short shorts that overlap the characters of a small, sad circus. The production is a family affair: Summers’s husband, David Whitcomb, provided the soundtrack to each story, and her sister, Susie Kirkwood, designed the package.
In the second story, “Lula and Baby,” Lula, the smallest woman in the circus, sits atop Baby the giant elephant. Baby is dying, having caught consumption from a songstress who “sang to him every night of the year through the bars of his cage before she expired.” No one can see that the elephant has grown ill—“Two hundred pounds gone do not seem so much off tons…”—but Lula knows he’s getting worse, and the story ends with Lula and Baby holding each other, sobbing. In “Monkey & Birdie,” the simian wife of a circus monkey dies, and the strange Professor, a Lynchian taxidermist, sews her torso onto the tailfin of a king salmon. It’s both grotesque and sweet, a ghostly and sad love story.—Jonathan Messinger
Les Petites Tristes or Through a Fresnel Lens is available at Quimby’s, 1854 W North Ave.
