Review: Everything's Changing

Ghost Stories, Magic, and A Whole Lot of Weirdness
​Review: Everything's Changing
​Qwayonna Josephs

​Chelsea Stickle
Collection of Flash Fiction
Thirty West Publishing, pp.35
Cost: $11.99

“Change is the only constant,” Chelsea Stickle writes in “Worship What Keeps You Alive”, the first flash fiction piece of her chapbook. This quote perfectly encapsulates Everything’s Changing, where nothing’s as it seems. The world has changed and the possibilities are endless in Stickle’s book, but one thing is as prevalent in this book as it is in society, and that’s the struggles of women and girls. Stickle uses absurdities throughout the book to tell stories, depicting women attempting to navigate a world that doesn’t like nor respect them. The problems women face are often overlooked, but Stickle reimagines these problems and tells them in a way that’ll have readers begging for more.  

Chelsea Stickle covers a broad range of obstacles women face. Everything’s Changing begins with more grounded stories revolving around a lack of communication in relationships and judgmental friends. She brilliantly shows that there’s no one person to whom all the issues can be traced back to; the problem may be someone on the outside, or it might be someone we care about, or both. A great example is from her story “Animal Party,” where raccoons take advantage of a woman simply because they can. The raccoons proceed to get intoxicated and throw a party in the narrator’s trashcan the night before trash day. Despite the raccoons interrupting her show with their noise and making a mess that she ends up cleaning, the narrator does nothing to stop their fun.

Stickle uses the absurdity of partying raccoons to show how women often put the comfort of others over their own, especially concerning someone they perceive as a threat. The narrator comments, “They know I won’t take a baseball bat to them. I won’t lock them out. I won’t poison the garbage. I just want them to be happy” (21), insinuating that she is aware of the relationship, however she is cautious of the raccoons and that stops her from standing up to them. Stickle’s use of anthropomorphic animals is similar to the technique implored by George Orwell in Animal Farm. She uses a method commonly used in children’s stories to convey a lesson, using something that will keep kids interested and tailoring it for an adult audience. “Animal Party,” like the stories that precede it, creates a smooth transition, easing the audience into the fantastical shift that follows.

As the stories continue to grow more intense, Stickle treads farther away from the reality we know and more into the fantastical world she’s created. The stranger the story, the deeper the meaning behind it, as if trying to lure the reader to get to the lessons by presenting absurdities up front like the cute white rabbit that lured Alice down into Wonderland. Stickle writes of the extreme changes needed for girls to protect themselves in “I Told You I Would Take Your Hand.” She creates a world where girls grow sharp objects from their bodies during puberty as a way to defend themselves against unwanted advances from boys and men. In this story, a bit of power is given to the powerless, but despite being weapons, the girls in the town are still tested. 

The tragic revelation is that it isn’t enough and men still try to touch the girls’ bodies, and they lose their hand as a result. The more hands that get chopped off, the sadder it gets because those represent the men “who thought they didn’t need permission” (28). When the first woman from that generation gives birth to a daughter who starts to grow blades while she’s teething instead of at puberty like the others, the mother is relieved because “it was never too early to start” (28). Stickle uses that last line to portray the cycle of assault that affects even infants. She uses this fantastical element to raise awareness of issues that are prevalent, but often overlooked. 

​Introducing a town of women with knives growing from their bodies is a great method to draw the readers in before hitting them with a lasting lesson. The impossible transformations the women go through to protect themselves and change their role in the world function as an escape and create the perfect illusion to keep the reader hooked. As Stickle takes us with her down the rabbit hole, dragging us into her world of oddities, it begins to feel like we belong. The strange elements in the stories aren’t out of place anymore because we’re able to feel the raw emotion on the page. 
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Chelsea Stickle doesn’t introduce new ideas in Everything’s Changing, she takes the stories we’ve heard, stories that a lot of women and girls can relate to, and uses ghost stories, magical realism, and a whole lot of weirdness to reintroduce them in unique ways. In doing so, she crafted a masterpiece that will leave readers hanging onto every word until the last page. Although women are at the forefront of each story, this chapbook appeals beyond that audience because at the core of these stories are people simply trying to survive, something to which we all can relate.