Wendy Wimmerâs debut short story collection, Entry Level, contains a range of characters who are trying to find, assert, or salvage their identities. These fifteen stories center around the experience of being underemployedâwhether by circumstance, class, gender, race, or other prevailing factorsâand the toll this takes on an individual. Wimmer pushes the boundaries of reality, creating stories that are funny, fantastic, and at times terrifying. Her characters undergo feats of endurance, heartbreak, and loneliness, all while trying to succeed in a world that so often undervalues them. From a young marine biologist suffering from imposter syndrome and a haunting to a bingo caller facing another brutal snowstorm and a creature that may or not be an angel, Wimmerâs characters are all confronting an oppressive universe that seemingly operates against them or is, at best, indifferent to them. These stories reflect on the difficulties of modern-day survival and remind us that piecing together a life demands both hope and resilience.
Entry Level was selected by Deesha Philyaw as the winner of the 2021 Autumn House Fiction Prize.
Wendy Wimmerâs debut short story collection, Entry Level, contains a range of characters who are trying to find, assert, or salvage their identities. These fifteen stories center around the experience of being underemployedâwhether by circumstance, class, gender, race, or other prevailing factorsâand the toll this takes on an individual. Wimmer pushes the boundaries of reality, creating stories that are funny, fantastic, and at times terrifying. Her characters undergo feats of endurance, heartbreak, and loneliness, all while trying to succeed in a world that so often undervalues them. From a young marine biologist suffering from imposter syndrome and a haunting to a bingo caller facing another brutal snowstorm and a creature that may or not be an angel, Wimmerâs characters are all confronting an oppressive universe that seemingly operates against them or is, at best, indifferent to them. These stories reflect on the difficulties of modern-day survival and remind us that piecing together a life demands both hope and resilience.
Entry Level was selected by Deesha Philyaw as the winner of the 2021 Autumn House Fiction Prize.
When Mary Ellenâs left breast grew back on its own during our Saturday dinner break, we had confirmation that something weird was happening.
It was between shifts at the Rola-Rena: a private Cub Scout party had just left and our Saturday Night Late Skate didnât open for another two hours. âWasted Skateâ was our little staff secretâtwo hours to kill and a twenty-four pack of Old Milwaukee because these days we werenât likely to party after closing down and were more likely to collapse a lung trying to hurdle the mop bucket like we used to twenty years back.
Mary Ellenâs mastectomy scar had been hurting like crazy all night, sheâd said. Iâd spied her from the DJ booth, touching the pack of Virginia Slims she carried in a jeweled leather pouch in her breast pocket as though the stiff cardboard were poking her scar. She had limped off the rink slowly, her whole left arm collapsed against her side. We were all pretty used to Mary Ellen disappearing from time to time, between the smoke breaks and her chemo panics, you just trusted sheâd pop back up before you missed her. Vera had gone into the restroom to pee and caught Mary Ellen with her blouse open, not even in a stall. Mary Ellen was inspecting the scar where her nipple used to be. The angry red puckered monster was scabbed and weeping, even though it had been healed over for seven months. She told Vera that she figured there was nothing to do until the late skate was done, so she popped an Advil, and then I happened to play a particularly lovely ELO flashback mega mix, which coaxed her back onto the rink. During the swell of the Moog organ, Mary Ellen took a nasty spill in the back turn. She was usually a ballerina on her Riedell Quads, so my first thought was that one of those little Cub Scout cocksuckers had dropped a lollipop stick on the rink. I skated over to help her up, and she reached into her blouse and pulled out her falsie, then felt up her reemerged cancer-riddled titty.
Nothing made sense, but when youâre staring at a breast that defies all reasoning, you start adding up all the facts real quick. We all started comparing notes. It wasnât just Mary Ellenâs prodigal breast. Vera pointed out that she was somehow gaining three pounds per shift, even though sheâd cut back to 672 calories a day, a precise number because it consisted of three Kessler and Diet Cokes plus two dry pieces of toasted diet bread. Each of us had held onto the observation that our fingernails werenât growing as fast as they used to, werenât growing at all, actually. Weâd all hoarded that secret shame, assuming our worst fears were finally coming home to roost: After all the years of drinking and pharmaceutical recreation, our bodies must have finally called a time-out. But, it turns out, after twenty years of taking care of the rink, that old rink had decided to return the favor.
Randy thought we were all full of shit, but then after five laps to Michael Jacksonâs âThriller,â he felt the memory of his bruised shin return like heâd only just slammed the car door shut on it that second. The skin was a mean purple, but after two more laps, the pain and the bruise were both gone. Then he fell to the ground, skates splayed out in front of him, bent his head, and said Hail Marys until âYear of the Catâ ended. âTime Passagesâ by Al Stewart seemed to have the best effect, although anything by Fogelberg or The Alan Parsons Project worked good too. The Bee Gees worked a little too well, if you know what I mean, made our eyes feel swimmy, like our brains were remapping the colors and state capitals. It might have been the disco ball, hanging since the Rola-Rena opened in 1972. Or it might have been the skates, an aggregation of forty-odd years of foot sweat and popped blisters reaching critical mass, leaking back up through our soles. Or it might just have been the new formula of the blue raspberry slushie that we were testing out, a blend of high-fructose corn syrup, energy drink, and enough fake flavor and coloring to make it glow under the black lights.
Kyle made us stop every five minutes and measured the length of our hair and fingernails and asked us a few questions that had no rhyme or reason. Did we need to go to the bathroom? Did we feel tingling in our extremities? What day was it? What year was it? What was three times four? How did you spell âshish kebabâ?Randy didnât know how to spell it, but the fact that he consistently misspelled it was good enough for Kyle. After an hour, Kyle had amassed some data to form a few hypotheses: Counterclockwise worked; clockwise didnât. The disco ball needed to be spinning, but the data was inconclusive on whether the laser beams had any effect. There were some issues with more modern music, leaving us feeling older and anguished in a deep way, like after youâve been crying a long time. But heavy synths from the early â80s seemed to have the best return on our time investment. The rink was erasing anywhere between a day to a week every time you circled. Your body was getting younger, going back through time, anywhere from a week to a month in the spread of five minutes.
As soon as we put a calculation to it, we all shut up and started skating really fast.
My calves felt itchy, unused, a sense of growth in my spine; I felt taller. Somewhere in the last decade, I had gotten an inch shorter. My doc had said it was spine compression because of all the vitamins that were leaching out of my blood stream. He told me my bones belonged to a man twice my age.
We all should have been winded from skating miles around the rink, but each lap felt like a new start, as though it erased the one before it. Running around the rink without skates on didnât seem to do anything. Kyle had a theory about spatial contact and rogue sound waves that no one cared to listen to. I needed to do more laps. We all needed to. Time could have been running out for all we knew.
âWe should close the rink.â
âWe canât tell anyone else about this,â I said, pointedly staring at Randy, who concentrated on tightening and retightening his laces. Randy was on probation and could get sent back to jail for even being near all these kids. We made sure he was never alone with any of them, but that wouldnât matter to his probation officer. If we told and the news got out, Randy would be right back in jail.
âWhat are we going to tell the owner?â Veraâs buttons were straining. I hadnât noticed it, but sheâd been slowly losing weight over the last few years. Still, she looked healthier, having rolled back something like six months or more at that point.
âAsbestos removal,â Kyle said, squinting. He was twentysomething, but already the boy had soft, supple middle-aged hips that reminded me of slow dancing. He held a pair of skates by the laces, the way you might hold a dead rat.
âThem kids,â Vera said, fiddling with her heart monitor wristwatch. âWhatâs it going to do to them? How many times does a kid skate around a rink? Twenty? Thirty?â
The implications were toughâlosing twenty or thirty days was nothing for used-up bodies like ours. But kids, that was a different story. The potty training gone to hell, the forgotten ability to tie their own shoes or speak. We all looked around and nodded, half thinking about the children and not wanting to admit that we were also thinking about having more time on the rink. Or less time, if you think about it that way.
Vera was flipping through the events calendar and announced, âDerby.â
The derby team practiced at the Rena every Saturday and Tuesday and could really rack up the rotations. A lot of strong skaters who couldnât even get on the team unless they could circle the rink twenty-five times in five minutes. Theyâd un-age a full year in a single practice. Theyâd use up the rinkâs youth juice, and they didnât need it. Not like us.
Vera made us all do pinky swears for the lack of a suitable bible. âFor now,â we said, as though weâd make any other decision until the miracle of the rink stopped working. We made a sign on the clean side of a Dr Pepper box:
Asbestos! TBA
Normally, you donât think about how many times you do laps. If you do, you start to get a little dizzy, go all Camus about the futility of the situation. Your laces on the right side start to get loose from always turning against them. Normally I switch it up, do a little fancy footwork and skate backward for a bit, but what if that messed up the youth magic? What if I sped up time instead of reversing it and my face melted off like the Nazis when they opened the Ark of the Covenant?
We had been so excited about the discovery that we didnât notice that Mary Ellen still hadnât come back from the bathroom after her breast reunited with its beautiful partner. I could see her through the little window in the DJ booth, whenever Iâd go in to change the songs. She was standing out back behind the dumpster in her stocking feet, taking long drags off her cigarette, occasionally touching her left breast, feeling for the area where there had been a lump. Or there was a lump again. She had a slushie cup that she was using as an ashtray, the butts collecting in blue raspberry melt. I threw on the soundtrack to Xanadu. I could hear Kyle asking Randy if he thought the rink could be used for other means, philosophical questions. âJust bring a special lady here for a friendly skate. If she were knocked up, not that youâd know or even be sure, but that thing would just be gone. She wouldnât even feel it. She wouldnât even need to know what was happening. Just skated out of reality, are you feeling me? And then a guy would be off the hook, and it wouldnât be a sin. This is Godâs wayâthis is an act of God; you get what Iâm saying?â
Randy was muttering, making negative sounds.
I rubbed my bicep. The skin didnât feel as rubbery. When had it gotten rubbery? I hadnât noticed, sometime over the last five years, apparently. Mary Ellen needed to get in on this, more than any of us. I leaned my head out the back door, feeling the rise of Olivia Newton-Johnâs sweet vocals pulling me to skate.
âYou coming in and knocking down some laps?â I was careful to not let my skates hit the pavement, my front wheels locked over the doorjamb. The owner was insane about the chastity of the skate floor: We swore she could spot street grit with a sixth sense, but I also didnât want to impact the sanctity of the connection between the skates and the unending oval time rift that we were freestyling on.
âDiet Coke tasted like dirt or needles for so long after the chemo. It just started tasting right a few weeks ago.â Her hand went to touch her left breast but then stopped in midair.
âThe tumâthe lump is back?â It was a punch in the gut, the idea that roller skating had regrown tissue. Everything it was taking from us, it had given something back too.
The question loitered between us in the alley. If you didnât know better, youâd never believe she was the girl in the oxidized photos from the â80s that still hung in the rink locker room. Somewhere along the way, her forehead had cast a long divot between her eyebrows and a constellation of pockmarks on her chin and cheeks from God only knows what. A feather of a scar curved down from the corner of her lip, so soft and light it seemed that it was a missed stripe of lipstick. Mary Ellen had taken a headfirst dive off a boyfriendâs Harley about a decade back. She probably should have gotten stitches, but the boyfriend had been drinking and doing a little pharmaceutical, so they didnât dare go to the ER. Then he dumped her a month later, saying that he lost his boner when he looked at her ruined face.
And now Iâd get to see the lady unspool, undo the decline of the early 2000s and the pessimism of the â90s. Roll back through the hip-hop years, slide past grunge, and then coast through synth pop, all the way back to looking fine in her Leviâs. Iâd only been nine or ten when I first started coming to the rink, but Mary Ellenâs clipped business voice as she dished out your skates, followed by her amazing sideways and trick footwork during the slow periods had made me curse our age difference even then. I had vowed to marry her someday. Of course, somehow, we never managed. Back then, Iâd practiced my tricks and jumps, but then came the war and the sand, and I put the rink behind me. When I was working my way off the needle, during the worst of the anhedonia, Iâd get a beautiful vision of her swishing through the brain fogâa blur of tight satin pants and lip gloss. Had to look her up once I made it past the night sweats and found she was still at the rink. So I ended up with a job that was meant to last me for a little while. That was over a decade ago. Sometimes itâs too easy being easy.
A shout erupted from the rink, over the sweet, mellow licks of O.N.J.âs vocal Xanax. I skated back over the carpet and into the rink, to the center where Kyle was curled into a fetal position, as though heâd been gut punched. Randy and Vera hovered over him nervously.
Kyle struggled to his knees and dry heaved, letting one string of spit slowly drip toward the floor. He had the grace to catch it with his hand and wipe it on his pants. He motioned for a pull up, and we all stood in an awkward silence, looking at Randy, who was the lowest on our pecking order, the one who knew that heâd be kicked out if he made himself even a tiny pain in the ass. Randy obliged and stuck his hands in the front pockets of his jeans for a discrete wipe.
Kyle looked shiny and undercooked, like raw chicken beneath cellophane. His eyebrows were completely gone, and his hair was all short and bristly. âDonât skate too close to the epicenter,â Kyle finally said. âIt really fucking sucks.â
He limped back to the side, picked up his reporterâs notebook, and panting, fell onto the nearest bench. I was impressed that he knew the word âepicenter.â Above us, the disco ball was an unblinking eye.
âDancing Queenâ queued automatically, as though the ancient MP3 shuffler was making an editorial comment, urging us to continue to circle circle circle. Vera squealed in approval and shoved off, hugging the wall. Her pale doughy stomach peeped out where her shirt had popped a button. Judging by the size of her ass, she had to be coasting back into the winter months of three years ago, when sheâd been her heaviest. She skated with a need to feel her jeans get looser, to know that she was skating closer and closer to some version of herself that loved her thighs. Mary Ellen had come back in and was carrying her skates back over to the bench. I watched her for a minute to see if she was going to put them back on, but it seemed like she wasnât sure either.
âHey.â
âHey.â Her face had gone slack and sallow, her eyes bright. A few times, Randy had mentioned that he thought Mary Ellen was tweaked. She had never seemed that way to me. Now a sweetness clung to her, like burnt cinnamon and old hair spray. We always thought the crack pipes in the back alley were from the hobos that liked to dig through the rinkâs garbage for half-eaten Super Ropes. Maybe they werenât.
Randy skated past us and shouted, âWoo!â as âLike a Virginâ automatically played. It was Randyâs theme song. He got a little too excited about music with heavy innuendo, songs that usually made the rest of us uncomfortable, but in my quest for early â80s music, I had forgotten to remove it from the playlist. Maybe we were all involved in some kind of collective acid trip. Maybe there was a mold in the rink, the kind that made the girls in Salem all go crazy and then get tried as witches. Had they thought they were getting younger? Had they imagined that body parts were growing back on their own?
âEben!â Vera shouted across the rink to me. âNo Madonna! Madonna doesnât work!â She had ditched her blouse and was now wearing just her bra, her body glistening with sweat. Randy was taking in the view, weaving behind her like a mako shark behind a seal. Kyleâs entire skull seemed to glow under the skin. I pushed off the wall with enough force to ruffle the Coke advertisements stuck to the side. Lava! Hot lava! A childâs voice played in my head. Going back a day at a time seemed a safe rate. Best not to screw with the natural order too much. Dabbling, that was what we were doing. Dabbling. Nothing serious. Nothing like Mary Ellenâs consequences.
What you forget to think about is the logistics of the situation. You couldnât think about it because you wanted it too badly. Instead, you think about the hairline you had when you were seventeen. You think about the way you could stroke off forty times a day and only so few because you had to sleep and go to school during the rest of the time. You think about how each of your coworkers mouth that over time had formed a perpetual frown, like tire ruts in a gravel driveway. Enough time and you could go to college with the incoming freshmen, get a real degree and not some late-night television infomercial certificate of technology that meant nothing when you actually tried to get a job somewhere that needed a rĂ©sumĂ© instead of a paper application.
Mary Ellen had her purse on her shoulder and was clipping her lighter to her jeweled leather cigarette pouch, the conclusive movement that signaled the end of every shift since Iâd known her.
âYouâre not going to skate anymore?â I shouted over The Holliesâ âThe Air That I Breathe.â
She shook her head and pressed her lips together. A delicate asterisk of lipstick wept into the creases of her lips when she did that, years of pursing to inhale on her smokes. She bumped the door open with her butt and for a moment, she was cast in shadow, backlit by the golden cast of an orange sunset. She paused again, and I skated over the carpet, reaching to steady myself at the cashierâs table. The front wheel of my skate kissed the entryway, but she was already walking backward into the parking lot.
One vendor I found classifies this book as âmagical realism.â Thatâs wrong. Thereâs no magic here. Instead, Iâd call it âweird realism.â
Wendy Wimmerâs phantasmagorical short story collection, âEntry Level,â traverses some strange literary terrain. Many of its fifteen stories read like lucid dreams. Indeed, Elle, the sleep scientist in âIntersomnolence,â wonders about the lost meaning of her dreams:
âItâs impossible for the normal human brain to not dream. Elle dreams but simply does not remember. She knows this for a fact. Working graveyard as a polysomnography technician at the sleep lab, she has the luxury of complimentary brain scans⊠She has held her dreams in her hand on a black-and-white printout. They look like bunny tracks in the snow.â
It torments Elle that although she collects extensive data on her subjectsâ dreams, she can only guess about her own. Somewhat similarly, readers of these stories may appreciate Wimmerâs wit and whimsy, but at the same time be unsure if they understand the endings or if there are levels of meaning they missed. Â Â
The strength of this collection is that Wimmer places quirky but relatable people in unreal, implausible scenarios and turns them loose. In the first story, âStrange Magic,â the staff at the Rola-Rena skating rink discover that by skating backwards to certain songs, they can reverse time. In âWhere She Went,â some unspecified supernatural or extraterrestrial beings referred to only as âweâ disturb a womanâs happy domestic life by sending her dreams of a baby. âFuseâ explores the challenges of cultivating a love life when you are half of a cojoined pair. A shady network service provider offers a package whereby customers can receive a deceased loved oneâs âTexts from Beyond.â Readers approach each new story wondering, what in the world can Wimmer come up with next?
Overall, the quality that makes this collection so much fun is its inventive scenarios. Wimmerâs characters exhibit some peculiar attitudes, struggles, and predilections, so they are by no means one dimensional, but itâs the offbeat circumstances surrounding them that stand out. These stories tend to be short (under 4000 words) â Iâd like to see the author give the characters room to grow and change, and for more complex plots to develop.
âEntry Level,â an aptly named debut collection, arrives with excellent credentials, having won the 2021 Autumn House Fiction Prize. Â Watch this writer.Â