THE MAYFLY is a collection of eight short stories, appealingly diverse in tone, setting, and voice. From athletes chasing personal bests to office colleagues stumbling through awkward interactions (to the titular mayfly itself, manically chasing love before its impending demise), the text evinces both a deep-belly sense of humor and a thoughtful care for how and why we form connections with others.

The most immediate asset is the prose. THE MAYFLY represents an immense and delightful technical challenge – each story has its own clearly-defined narrative voice fit to the telling. In “The Young Man and the Mountain,” where a biker leaves his lover in bed to ride a mountain trail each day, the voice is sparse and lonely; in “The Mayfly,” it’s fast, punchy, buzzing. Sometimes, the text is overtly textual: “On the Rejuvenating Effects of Arch Theft” borrows the structure and style of an academic paper, and the crowning “Man of Letters” is entirely epistolary, a Western told with all the underlinings, abbreviations, and other quirks of real 19th-century handwritten letters. But the power of the collection is in the thematic focus underpinning and connecting each of the stories, where that focus on voice turns out to be a greater attention to embodiment and consciousness (the biker feeling the intensity of the ride; the almost ephemeral body of the mayfly; an overweight man imagining being a horse). The characters here are always in their own heads, self-contained bubbles that move through the world in fits and starts, often barely failing to connect with others.

While each individual story is essentially successful, the collection as a whole does suffer from a gendered imbalance of perspective. These stories often involve some troubled relationships between men and women, but the women are mute; they never tell these stories, and the real relationships end up being those between men. Sometimes women are prizes to be won (“The Mayfly,” “The Unbridled Underestimation of Racehorses,” “Man of Letters”), driving competition or cooperation between men; sometimes women are obstacles to goals, indirectly (“The Young Man and the Mountain”) or directly (“On the Rejuvenating Effects of Art Theft”) obstructing the relations between men. “Man of Letters” memorializes much of this attitude: the protagonist writes shorter, more delicate letters to his beloved, but tells the actual truth (remarking upon the deceit itself) to his male best friend. The observations of THE MAYFLY are no less true for being so one-sided; they merely lack some context which might ultimately elevate them.

While Ben Rogers’ short story collection THE MAYFLY toes the line between focused and myopic, the freshness and care of the prose remain riveting to the end.

~Dan Accardi for IndieReader