Missing Women and Others - Hardcover

June Spence's debut collection of stories, Missing Women and Others, follows men and women who bound their lives in reassuring routine. Measuring out small doses of wine or food or love, they're trying to get a grip or hold themselves together or fix themselves up, just a little, just enough to buy what this kind of currency can get them. They're not pathetic, but they're not exactly life's lottery winners, either: waitresses, typists, accountants, apartment managers--unremarkable people struggling to contain outsize longings inside circumscribed lives. The dieting heroine of "Meals and Between Meals," for instance, strikes up a hasty but sincere relationship with an inmate of Purdue County Correctional, reasoning that "she has always settled for what she could get in the way of a man and Mag is pretty much just that: what she could get." Nell of "State of Repair" finds meaning in a small attic fire--"the only really exciting and near-tragic thing that happened to her." There's not much happening in many of these stories; they are still shots of still lives. Nonetheless, Spence triumphs over the occasional inertia of her subject matter. Her prose is crisp and witty and full of ominous undertones--most especially in the title story, the collection's best and an auspicious sign of Spence's potential. The "Missing Women" are a mother, her daughter, and the daughter's friend who abruptly disappear one night in early summer. At first, the town pulls together in a search effort, until, as time passes, the women disappear from collective memory as well. Told in the third person plural, as if by the whole town itself, the story's tone veers from deftly satiric--"What's next for this wrongly accused fellow who has stolen all our hearts?"--to deeply spooky: "And what of the missing women? They do turn up, but only in dreams.... In the one we don't speak of, we are running down a familiar forest path, hunted, and we sense them beneath the pads of our feet, planted deep in the dark green woods, bones cooling, and we wake, knowing they've been here all along."

June Spence' s stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories 1997, The Southern Review, Seventeen, and The Oxford American. The winner of the 1995 Willa Cather Award, she lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she was born.