Another thing that the short story does really well is experiment with different forms. But the best stories don’t merely use unusual forms for the sake of it – they marry the form to the content. Ruby Cowling’s story, from her collection This Paradise, has two narrators and their texts are laid out side by side on the page. So far so interesting, but it’s only when we learn that the two narrators are twins that the story starts to take on added significance. Their different stories echo and fight each other, come together and part as the twins navigate their way through childhood and adolescence and into adulthood.
First published in I Am Because You Are, Freight Books, 2015; collected in This Paradise, Boiler House Press, 2019
A Personal Anthology 