Bare Ana and Other Stories by Robert Shapard Review by Steve Heller

Bare Ana and Other Stories by Robert Shapard

Review by Steve Heller

Publisher: Regal House Press

Publication Date: September 2, 2025

ISBN: 97816460335328

Pages : 128

Sudden Excellence

We used to call them “short-shorts.”  Robert Shapard and his longtime editing partner James Thomas changed that with their landmark anthologies Sudden Fiction, Flash Fiction, and their various sequels. Today, literary journals across the globe are replete with very short stories of no more than 500, 300, or even fewer words.  Some flash fictions can be consumed in two or three breaths.  “Glyph,” the shortest narrative in Shapard’s new collection, Bare Ana and Other Stories, is exactly 99 words:

He’d loved hieroglyphs since ever since Indiana Jones twisted one, a stone temple figure, and the walls rumbled open.  Now he was just a guy with a sputtering Ducati motorcycle, who fell in love with a girl and took a poetry class to be with her.  He learned that all glyphs, hiero or otherwise, were images, which could take form in any of the senses, so her scent in bed was a glyph, her touch was sometimes a glyph, and between her lips, when she said goodbye, though he pleaded with her not to, his name was a glyph.

“Glyph” is all summary.  It dramatizes no scenes, renders no action in significant detail.  And yet the story flows and turns like most narratives, using the shifting contexts in which the word “glyph” delivers an ending that is surprisingly poignant.

In his first full-length collection, Robert Shapard proves himself to be not only an accomplished editor but a master practitioner of the shortest prose forms.  Most of these narratives end with a subtle manipulation of point of view that turns the reader’s perspective to a different angle.  

In another single-page story, “Turtle Creek,” Shapard skillfully pulls the story’s camera eye back from a group of teenagers witnessing the aftermath of a fatal motor scooter accident on a bridge over a flooded creek, stretching time more than distance, to reveal the tale’s true subject:

It was the end of summer.  A lot of us went on to college, which a lot of us didn’t finish.  Years later, the drowning was all some of us remembered from high school.  The thundering creek, the cops, the strobing lights, the drugs, the summer rain starting again, washing us all away.

Some of the stories turn toward discoveries or renewals of love.  In “Aperçus” a woman in her mid-30s, Amanda, meets Andy, whom she used to date when they were younger.  Andy is successful and still attracted to Amanda, to whom he once proposed marriage.  Today, however, Andy is also in the process of divorcing his wife. Timid and uncertain, Amanda tries to figure out if Andy is the man for her by using aperçus, “moments of cosmic awareness,” a French philosopher once claimed should be employed to ask oneself Is this the meaning of my life?  Amanda looks for aperçus in Andy’s answers to questions such as “You’ve got everything.  Why would you need me?”  His replies are mundane: “You would be nice to have around.”  At a party Amanda finally decides “aperçus couldn’t tell her what to do.”  After determining that she must make a choice, she has a dream that begins with a memory of her brother and her walking on water but morphs into a vision of Andy trying to save her from drowning:

She yelled above the roar, “You really do love me, don’t you?”  His hat flew off and he fell scrambling to his knees.  He didn’t answer, but kept coming.  “It’s dangerous out here,” she yelled, “but don’t worry, I’ve chosen an aperçu!”  He looked relieved, and lost.  She wanted to laugh, he was so sweet and funny, she stretched her hand to him so they could be swept away together.

The title story, “Bare Ana,” takes us to a future in which tattoos are not merely omnipresent but expected. Ana’s unnamed husband, whose body is completely covered with tattoos, narrates the story.  “You’ve heard of people who have no tattoos but you probably never saw one. Ana’s completely bare.” Ana, who is pregnant, claims it’s her husband she loves, not his tattoos. He responds:

 I had to laugh.  I said, “How are my tats not me?”  They’re me more than anything.  I chose them, whereas everything else about me is a pre-nate gene correction, including my straight teeth.  I don’t say that’s wrong.  If our parents didn’t do that, we’d probably all get diabetes or schizophrenia in our teenage years.”  

However, Ana’s mother never allowed her to get a tattoo. Ana’s resulting bare skin makes people stare at her “like some kind of freak with a skin disease.” Nevertheless, Ana decides her daughter should have a beautiful pre-nate tattoo. She asks her husband to choose the tattoo for her and not let her know what he has chosen until the baby is born.  This presents the husband with a dilemma:

Okay, so we’re not like most parents.  I see the logic.  Refusing to choose, she can be true to her mother.  Yet, by letting me choose, our daughter can be born normal.

Ana’s husband chooses a dragon tattoo but remains worried: “. . . with a pre-nate you can’t be sure of anything until the birth.”  The shift in point of view that resolves the husband’s anxiety is one of the main themes of the collection: the human need for empathy.

Ana doesn’t say anything for a moment, looking at the baby.  She seems exhausted from her labor, weak and sleepy.  Then she whispers, “Oh, she’s beautiful!”

But I know she’s not even seeing the dragon.  I start seeing things through Ana’s eyes, like I’m on some kind of high.  All she sees are the baby’s little fingers, which are perfect and bare.  The baby’s little wrists, mouth, ears, and eyes—all bare, bare, bare.

Although Shapard’s specialty is the epiphanic flash of short-short fiction, several of the later stories in Bare Ana are longer.  One of the best is “At the Back Door,” notable for its use of what Wayne Booth called “narrative distancing.” Through most of the story, Shapard maintains a non-judgmental distance between the reader and the protagonist, Hoffpauer, an auto repo man, referring to him always by last name only, even on the night the woman he loves tells him to “Get.  The.  Fuck.  Out.” When Hoffpauer finally attempts “a new beginning,” Shapard reduces the emotional distance between the reader and the seemingly emotionless repo man, not by investing Hoffpauer with more sensitivity but by abruptly dropping the reader into the story:

Then, suddenly, Hoffpauer’s there, seeking his new beginning, leaving his car parked in darkness down the street, stepping into the backs of houses and if he’s not careful into the bushes and up to his ankles in flower beds.  Leaving globby footprints on the little moonlit walk under the kitchen window.  Up the back steps, knock, knock, knock.  Who could it be?  You open the door.

Whether flashing through the sensuous landscapes of the shortest forms or steadily illuminating a longer, more traditionally structured narrative, in these finely crafted stories Robert Shapard’s clear and insightful vision of humanity shines through.

Robert Shapard co-created and edited many of the acclaimed W.W. Norton flash and sudden fiction anthologies.  His own stories, mostly very short and a few longer, have won awards and appeared in many literary magazines.  Bare Ana and Other Stories is his first collection.

Steve Heller is a two-time O. Henry Award winner  and an author of three novels, a collection of short stories, and a collection of short nonfiction narratives.  His literary novel, Return of the Ghost Killer, is forthcoming from Regal House Publishing in 2027.

24 September 2025