Becca Lawlor
Sydney Hegele, The Pump.
Toronto: invisible publishing, 2021. $20.95.
Sydney Hegele’s debut short story collection, The Pump, is about the lives of those who reside in a small town called The Pump. While these stories are individual, whole pieces unto themselves, they are beautifully interwoven. Having every story take place in the same world—The Pump—is an excellent way to let readers quickly fall into the next story. Each piece in this collection is more of a perspective and character shift, while the backdrop necessarily remains static.
The preface stomps right out and sets a bleak, curious tone: a woman is abused and escapes to The Pump, ushering readers into this unfiltered world. She has a baby and the description scalds readers: “Your first breath drips with the scent of the lake. The nurse washes you with bottled water. Your mother takes a drag from a hand-rolled cigarette and blows the smoke out like a geyser. / To the nurse’s surprise, you are born alive. The other babies are born blue, mouths open in shock.” This imagery of birth is cold and dismisses pleasantries; the book introduces itself and greets the reader bare, prepared to be seen. It’s stylistically significant that, in the collection, only the preface and the afterward utilize second person narration—this perspective blurs reality at the outset and the close, creating and reflecting a cyclical pattern and beckoning readers into this haunting world.
These short stories delve deeply into poignant, painful aspects of humanity and the hardships people contend with including death, identity, home, and family. Tiny encounters most wouldn’t give a second thought to have huge ripples; everyone impacts and shapes one another. That’s part of the beauty and the heartache of the throughlines of the short stories, seeing how individual lives are carefully or unceremoniously made and unmade by each other. On the first page, we are given a glimpse of this: “She enters the Greenbelt. The words JENNY IS A HOTTIE DANNY IS GAY are spray-painted in bright blue on the rock walls that sandwich the highway.” Even though these characters don’t factor into this story in any crucial way, they affect the protagonist by setting a tone and will later become relevant as these characters pop up again in “Danny Boy,” “Barges,” and briefly in “Grounders,” sometimes just in passing reference. These individual stories feel very reminiscent of a small town, where readers are spectating and gossiping about the township with the speakers, as they stitch more of this town’s secrets and its people together.
While The Pump deals with very real pain and trauma, it is doused in absurdity. People wash in blood; beavers are the number one cause of death; people lick art ravenously; babies are carried off by storks. The strangeness and oddity in these stories is grounded by very real, harrowing stories of domestic violence, homophobia, and grief that careens into you without any illusion. In one of the stories, “Grounders,” a group of adults play a frightful children’s game with dire consequences. In this chilling and confusing tale, when characters are caught on the ground, they grimly walk off the roof to their death. Speculation and analysis can render some kind of meaning to this story; I wondered whether confusion could be a technique used to convey people who disbelieve the victims of trauma, who can’t fathom something so horrible—like people playing a children’s game that results in suicide—but will put their faith blindly elsewhere like religion. However, absurdism may be a more likely culprit behind these thrilling stories. Sometimes trying to find meaning in horror and trauma causes more pain. Life and all its trials are sometimes meaningless—suffering has no point, no merit. It’s just something that happens that we must accept and try to find joy in small, unusual places.
One of the book’s biggest triumphs is how unique each story and perspective is. They don’t follow the same narrative structure and they continually introduce highly fascinating characters. Voices are distinct and raw. This opening line from “The Bottom” is punctuated in such a way so the reader is yanked along by the rhythm and cadence of the speaker: “Ellie got given a job for once thank God [finally] she could help with the help for the first time she was so goddamn helpful” (square brackets are the author’s). With this one line, readers glean so much about this character. We can feel rage, resentment, ridicule. Thoughts flow into one another. We want to know more. Hegele is good at hooking readers and propelling the narrative; being absorbed by this book is rather easily done.
Hegele has a knack for making these dark tales so satisfyingly, sickeningly funny. These stories and all their crude, harsh prose show you how ugly yet simultaneously beautiful the world can be. The Pump may not be easily consumed at times, but there is so much joy in reading Hegele’s work and seeing how they craft mundane tasks, ordinary life and enliven it. This little collection is bursting with the kind of craft that makes one truly marvel.
Becca Lawlor
Becca Lawlor is a queer writer and editor in their third year of the Honours Bachelor of Creative Writing & Publishing program at Sheridan College. They have short fiction story in The Bangalore Review, a review in CAROUSEL magazine, are a member of the Meet the Presses collective, and are working as an editorial intern for The Ampersand Review. Living in Mississauga, Becca reads most moments of the day while drinking lukewarm, over-sugared coffee.