Double-Check for Sleeping Children is Providence writer Kirstin Allio’s second volume of short stories and her fourth book. It might also be her best. In twenty lyrical short stories of everyday life, Allio delicately reckons with the ways in which adults reveal themselves to be sleeping children, lulled by the same forces that endanger them. With these stories Allio suggests that it’s past time to wake up by taking the measure of our hypocrisies and illusions.
Allio’s collection won the prestigious Catherine L. Doctorow Prize for Innovative Fiction, awarded annually to a mid-career American writer along with $15,000 and publication with FC2 (Fiction Collective 2), a nonprofit press founded in 1974 by a group of pathbreaking American writers whose members include Fannie Howe, Leslie Scalapino, and Ronald Sukenick. Originally independent, FC2 is now an imprint of the University of Alabama Press.
The stories in Double-Check are marvels of condensation. “First Love” unfolds over a mere two pages in which a single mother of twins learns of the death of the infant son of Joe D’Amata, “the first boy I ever kissed.” Reasoning that lightning never strikes twice in the same place, she believes this child’s death means safety for her own children, who may or may not also be the children of Joe D’Amata. Because she knew Joe before the tragedy, that period has come to seem Edenic, a time of innocence. But if Joe is an innocent, why should he suffer? Outraged, she asks: “Doesn’t it seem like the one courtesy Jesus could offer, with those huge grave eyes, would be to spare the innocent? It may sound like church to you, but I am speaking of Joe D’Amata.” Brimming with memory, tragedy, and yearning, stories like “First Love” pack a disproportionate wallop .
Many of these stories are set in small towns gripped by post-industrial malaise. Allio doesn’t sugar-coat these places or the people who live there. Even as her characters struggle with hardship, they remain acutely aware of one another. Here’s how the narrator of “First Love” describes her first kiss with Joe D’Amata: “We kissed like frogs. Our mouths wide open and our privates pounding.” Allio’s homey imagery stuns in its directness. A building superintendent has “a lumpy mug like a walnut muffin.” A teenager arrives in a classroom where he “slid his bony butt under his school desk, just like a lobster tail.” Middle-class hypocrisies are skewered with similar flair. Settling in with her knitting, a commuter admits: “I was guilty of canceling the Greenpeace membership after receiving the free tote bag.” Another character comes clean about her cyber-stalking: “I come across my best friend’s house on Zillow. Dirty dishes in the sink, the medicine cabinet flung open,” and, worst of all, “we haven’t talked in three years.”
In less careful hands, these moments might seem like cheap shots. But Allio avoids that trap, infusing her sharp observations with tenderness and humor. In “Stop in for a Free Coffee If You’re From Arkansas,” a mother of two adult sons, both lost to addiction, goes to find them in the rundown apartment where they’re living. “The trunk of the toilet was cracked, and cockroaches,” she observes, with rueful humor, “pimped the rim.” In “The Distance,” two aging deacons share a ride from Boston to Long Island. Each has known the other long enough to finish his thoughts. Ray recalls his teaching days, how he mediated between restive kids and their pushy parents. “That’s what their parents wanted, reform school,” he says. In reply, Kevin teases Ray: “And you, a seminarian.” This tender answer reminds Ray that he’s more than just his responses to the indignities of the classroom.
The collection is arranged in three sections, each preceded by a hybrid piece that combines prose and poetry. The first of these, “The Sea,” a fast-moving seven-page odyssey of a marriage, opens with three lines that suggest a man of immense power: “Roland Remos was fat and tall / Off duty he wore a sun-faded baseball cap / Bottom-loaded as a mountain.” As “The Sea” continues, it becomes clear that the poem is really two stories woven together, pulsing forward and back like waves hitting the beach , until the two stories meet in a moment of astounding violence. This is not the poetry of English class, which bores and alienates and stimulates fear of poetry. Allio’s lines glide past, bending the reader’s attention to the story’s rhythms. The reward for sticking with it? A moment that hits, as it does in “The Sea,” like a sudden mouthful of seawater, a bracing reminder that rip currents exist and require your attention.
As a Providence writer, Allio is attuned to details that hold special meaning for those who live here. Refreshingly, she doesn’t flatter, leaving soft-focus stuff in the tourism sector. In “The Distance,” two men on a long drive pass through Providence, “with its billboards for God and plumbing services, and the Big Blue Bug.” As soon as the quirky landmark appears on the story’s horizon, Allio undercuts its significance, describing it as “just that, something for children to stick in their childhoods.”
A similar deflation occurs in the collection’s closing story, “Time of the Testudinidae,” in which the narrator, suffering from an unnamed illness, boards a northbound train at Providence Station and is surprised by how quickly the city recedes: “It seems like it should take great effort to clear Providence, but in less than a minute, light flexing between brick mill buildings, the train glides behind Home Depot.” Soon after, the narrator comes unexpectedly face-to-face with her chemo nurse: “I run into her the next day at the supermarket, and we greet each other like old friends.” It’s a moment that will be familiar to any Rhode Islander. “Coincidence,” Allio writes, “makes us believe in Providence.”
Featured Book: Double-Check for Sleeping Children by Kirstin Allio (Tuscaloosa, AL: FC2/University of Alabama Press, August 2, 2024), 254 pages, $18.95. ISBN 9781573662062
Diane Josefowicz’s writing has appeared in the Boston Globe, Dame Magazine, LA Review of Books, and Conjunctions. She is the author of two full-length works of fiction as well as two histories of nineteenth-century French Egyptology. Her next book, Guardians & Saints: Stories, is forthcoming in October from Cornerstone Press, and her novel, The Great Houses of Pill Hill (Little Place of Departed Spirits) will be published by Soho Press in 2026. Sign up for her newsletter, What’s That Noise? at www.dianejosefowicz.com.
