The Pets We Have Killed
by Barbara Else

After her Ockhams-nominated memoir Laughing at the Dark, Barbara Else returns to adult fiction with The Pets We Have Killed, a collection of short stories that embraces realism, the speculative and the satirical. The stories span from the wars of the twentieth century to an imagined 2077 in Aotearoa, and even further into a dystopian future. The collection’s far-reaching scope and inclusivity resonate with its central themes; it plays with form and genre to explore the human condition and the enduring complexities of the gender divide.

Else has noted that these stories spring from the silence expected of her during the rise of second-wave feminism, and silence is a motif throughout. Women’s struggles are viscerally portrayed, yet the characters rarely voice them, often wrestling to articulate the issues they face. In ‘Thrall’, silent acknowledgements pass between the wives of misogynistic husbands in the 1980s. In ‘File: on Woman, 30’, a mother of four breaks down before her doctor but cannot express why, and is later referred for psychiatric assessment in a stark illustration of Betty Friedan’s ‘problem with no name’. ‘I don’t know what to ask for,’ she says. ‘I don’t know how to ask.’

And yet, despite the absence of words, the problem is undeniable – apparent even to children. It is often the children in these stories who sense something is amiss and dare to question why these issues remain unspoken. In the title story, the young protagonist laments the lack of answers to her questions: ‘She wished someone would tell her, that was all,’ and ‘how could you know what [the problem] was if it didn’t have a name?’ Similarly, in the remarkable ‘Collateral Damage’, a schoolgirl is left feeling ‘grubby and crushed’ after a teacher uses her as a sacrificial victim in his ego-driven conflict with a colleague. The girl laments her inability to speak of the problem: ‘She should have said it didn’t feel right. She should have said.’

The young women in these stories often silently resist. In ‘Moonbeams’, a solo mother changes her address to avoid the attempted reappearance of the man who abandoned her and her son years before. In ‘Annie, My Annie’, a woman refuses to marry despite the stigma as an act of dissent, and quietly pays for her niece’s education. In ‘Vengeance’, an overburdened wife, mother and employee slowly builds a compost heap against her husband’s fence to see it rot. Then there is the euphoric rage fantastically depicted in ‘Needlework’, a stylistic take on fairytale tropes, in which a woman – witch, princess or both – stitches a quilt from the pelts of the ‘wolves’ she has killed.

The characters who do move beyond silence usually muse in hindsight, where thoughts have percolated with time and emerge as poignant insights. A character in ‘The Mysteries of My Sister’ reflects that ‘It’s taken me long enough to realise I don’t have to do the expected anymore, do I?’ Similarly, in ‘Gossip’, an older woman who has spent a lifetime feeling oppressed by the status quo assists her elderly male neighbour and concludes that he might also have lived a life conforming. She contemplates what might be shared experiences of embarrassment, fear, anger and regret. She wishes she had spoken up, while also acknowledging the ridiculousness of the societal norms she struggled against. There is an astute reflection, here, on the duality of the problem – both unserious and serious at once. ‘She could even laugh at some of it, possibly.’ And, ‘Why did I take it all so seriously? And yet it was, in its way.’

Throughout the stories, the problem initially manifests as societal expectations and the pressure to conform to them – or to live by ‘the rules’. In ‘The Huntington Road Girls’ elocution lessons and hope chests are required of girls, and ‘God’s law says you put up with a horrible husband’. But following the rules does not benefit the characters. In ‘Darkling’, a woman juggling life as a mother and scientist, a ‘female geek’, follows the rules but is taken advantage of nevertheless. The rules themselves feel arbitrary. From time to time they are played with and flipped on their heads. In the satirical ‘Our New Elections’ a dubious new method of electing a senate is proposed for a future climate-ravaged Aotearoa, and in ‘The Pets We Have Killed’, set in a dystopia where men are enslaved, a child wonders: ‘why shouldn’t she be the one to make new rules for someone else’s sake?’

The experimental and varied styles and genres of the stories further embody the theme of ‘rules’ – bending them, challenging constraints, and defying expectations through form and execution. ‘Needlework’ unfolds in fragments, bullet points, and emotionally charged, metaphoric reflections. ‘Gossip’ is structured in four parts, one for each quarter of a woman’s life. ‘Our New Elections’ adopts the format of a draft document, complete with ‘personal notes’ to the committee. Yet ‘The Huntington Road Girls’ feels so grounded and vivid that it might have been plucked from memory.

At its heart, the collection explores how rules and expectations are wielded to subdue others, a theme powerfully conveyed through the motif of pets. Pets appear everywhere, in many forms. Literal pets, such as the snake used to intimidate in ‘Thrall’, or the dog gone wild in its master’s absence in ‘Annie’, to the metaphoric. Warring teachers are depicted as ‘strange animals’ in ‘Collateral Damage’. In ‘The Huntington Road Girls’ Debbie doesn’t want to marry, ‘she wants to be a vet.’  In ‘Scarabs’ a man called Rover wants to be petted and runs after smells in the wet grass, and in ‘File: on Woman, 30’, a desperate mother and wife identifies with a goldfish trapped in a bowl. The motif culminates in the title story, where men are kept in pens and used solely for breeding, and the boys are killed as babies. It is a warning to, in Else’s own words, understand each other ‘simply as human beings with our own wants and needs.’

Else has said that much of her fiction has to do with ‘bringing women out of the shadows,’ but this collection also hints at the broader problem of the human condition. The metaphor of people in the shadows is a mirror image, reflected in the opening and closing stories of the collection. At the very beginning, a woman is described as ‘a living shadow.’ At the end, a male slave stands in the shadows and contemplates escape. The image has flipped on itself, and society has reverted, continuing a pattern of subjugation where humans cast one another into darkness.

The Pets We Have Killed is a masterful collection that examines how humans treat one another in inhumane ways. Through its reflections on the struggles of women, the book underscores the urgency of addressing broader inequities. As Else has put it, ‘if our society could rid itself of misogyny, we would be much further on the way towards getting rid of other inequities to do with race and culture, gender and poverty, everything.’