How to Love a Black Hole by Rebecca Fishow Review by Wes Blake

How to Love a Black Hole by Rebecca Fishow

Review by Wes Blake

Publisher: Conium Press

Publication Date: March 4, 2025 (Limited Edition Hardcover)

October 7, 2025 (General Release Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-942387-22-0 (Limited Edition Hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-942387-23-7 (General Release Paperback)

Pages: 79

Flashes of Intimacy

Rebecca Fishow’s new collection of stories and flash fiction, How to Love a Black Hole, explores the many shades and shadows of intimacy throughout its eighteen wildly imaginative tales. In “Dr. Ear” a woman feels seen when she finds a doctor that not only accepts her extraordinary condition—that causes ears to grow all over her body—but is riveted by this development, which contrasts with her husband’s polite and correct outer response, but apparent inward revulsion. In “Miles” a woman develops a relationship with her ghost child that was never born. Another mother who gave her daughter up for adoption imagines meeting her long-lost child, but continues to imagine small ways she could hide the drab reality of her life from her unknown daughter, and ultimately recoils at having her true self revealed at all in “If She Finds You.” Another story, “Forever Overhead,” features a wedding bouquet, and eventually a new bride, that become stuck in the sky, just moments after the couple exchange vows. 

Like a confession, the first story of the collection, “Dr. Ear,” acquaints readers with a singular voice and makes them complicit in the narrator’s dilemma. Fishow writes: 

Are you kidding, of course I hid it from him, I mean, they say that you’re supposed to

share everything with spouse—your menstrual cramps, body count, passwords—but put 

yourself in my shoes: what would you do, waking with a fleshy, rippled, lump on your 

lower back that looks like an ear but must be a tumor, so you do, you show your man, of 

course you do, but his gentle touch makes you wince more in panic than pain as, in

his “calm voice,” he says it’s probably benign, a harmless fluke, but his face is all terror

as he tells you a doctor visit never hurts . . . 

Fishow’s stories work on several levels. They work on one level as literal, imaginative stories that bend reality in exciting and unexpected ways, engaging the reader and propelling them to hurriedly turn pages. They also work as artful and precise expressions of how it feels to move through life and maintain our relationships with both ourselves and those we let into our world. Fishow’s stories function as Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and “The Hunger Artist” do—as both fascinating and absurd tales that also express the emotional truth of universal experience. When one reads Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist” one recognizes how it feels to be past their prime, unappreciated, and obsolete. Similarly, the stories in How to Love a Black Hole compel readers to recognize how it feels to be embroiled in the spectrum of intimacy—in all the different ways that we can be both close and distant from ourselves and those we’re tethered to by bonds of love, friendship, and family.  Fishow’s stories grip the reader in a visceral, direct, and arresting way. And once the reader is gripped, they recognize how the experiences depicted resonate with how they’ve felt.

“Cockroaches” begins with a woman at a bar talking to a man, who we’re told is not her husband, about her greatest fear—and utters a gruesome and fantastically detailed story of why she fears cockroaches—to drive the man away. Then, when her husband returns from smoking a cigarette outside, she’s forced to gaze into the nature of intimacy in a long-term relationship, when her husband flatly states that his greatest fear is “monotony.” Meanwhile, another notch of the spectrum of intimacy in relationships is explored by “Open Up,” which begins compellingly with a sentence that thrusts the reader squarely into the complicated reality of its moment: “Darcy opens up her legs for her ex-boyfriend.” The story drags the reader into Darcy’s inner world as she has meaningless sex with an ex on a picnic table—while gazing into the window of her great-aunt’s house and marveling at the deep, long, and loving relationship she’s had with her husband. 

“If She Finds You” begins with the narrator imagining the child she gave up for adoption finding her some day and fantasizing about how that might go. The narrator tells herself that “[i]f she makes it to the front door, you could choose to be home, let her in,” and then continues in detail about how the mother and child reunion could go. And yet, by the end of the story, she has become too afraid and ashamed to reveal the realities of her life to her long-lost child and abandons her dream altogether. Fishow writes:

Most likely, if you’re being honest, you won’t meet her at all. If she calls or shows up, 

you’ll keep your answers need-to-know. You had her too young. You weren’t ready. You 

had to think about her future. You knew that she deserved so much more than you could 

give. Hang up. Keep the door locked. Keep the curtains drawn. Sit in your mess in the 

dark. Try to convince yourself to toughen up and stop dwelling. Stop thinking about how 

quickly it all was finished, how unfinished a lifeline is.

How to Love a Black Hole demonstrates a staggering command of language. From great heights of imagination that cut to the bone of emotional truth, Fishow’s language is always precise, always natural. I read many of these stories first to revel in the imaginative journey, secondly to process the emotional truth imparted, and lastly to marvel at the inventive use of language. Every note rings true. Every sentence sounds natural. No word is wasted. Every experience—no matter how absurd or fantastic—feels true. The story “Dr. Ear” is a good microcosm of how the collection functions. In “Dr. Ear,” Fishow takes the reader on a journey: a strange medical condition takes over a woman’s life, and readers are compelled to imagine how they would react and feel in this situation, as they’re led along the narrator’s experience of worrying about acceptance, worrying about how it will affect her relationship, and finally finding true acceptance—all of this transpires in one sentence, and the entire time you feel as if you’re listening to a story told by a friend at the barstool next to you. Rebecca Fishow’s voice is wholly inventive, natural, and earns complete trust from readers.

Rebecca Fishow is the author of How to Love a Black Hole (Conium Press, 2025), The Trouble with Language (Trnsfr Books, 2020, winner of The Holland Prize for Fiction), and The Opposite of Entropy (Proper Tales Press, 2018). Her work has appeared in Tin House, Quarterly West, The Believer, Joyland, and other publications. She holds an MFA from Syracuse University and is pursuing a PhD at University of Illinois Chicago.

Wes Blake is the author of Pineville Trace, winner of the Etchings Press Novella Prize and finalist for the Feathered Quill Book Award for Debut Author (University of Indianapolis’ Etchings Press,  2024); the book was featured on Deep South Magazine’s Reading List. His fiction and essays have been featured in Electric Literature, storySouth, Louisiana Literature Journal, and Blood & Bourbon, among others, and he holds an MFA from the Bluegrass Writers Studio. Learn more at wesblake.com.

23 July 2025