The Pillow Museum: Stories, by Claire Bateman

“Claire Bateman, the dark-haired American woman of a certain age who sometimes sits across from me discussing current events and the state of the union bears no resemblance at all to the universe-sized, star-studded symphony of light, dark, and phantasmagorical strobing color that belts out the 56 microfictions comprising The Pillow Museum: Stories, her latest book, published this spring of 2025 by Fiction Collective 2; belts out, I say, like a Colossus-of-Rhodes-sized Bette Midler, in some echoing planet-sized amphitheater located (as far as I can tell) in the radio galaxy Alcionius.”—Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

Book Review

By Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

“But this animal does not figure among the barnyard animals, it is not always easy to come across, it does not lend itself to zoological classification. Nor is it like the horse or bull, the wolf or deer. In such circumstances we may be face to face with a unicorn and not know for sure that we are. We know that a certain animal with a mane is a horse and that a certain animal with horns is a bull. We do not know what the unicorn looks like.”—Jorge Luis Borges, from Book of Imaginary Beings

“The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo: she succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm, with its legs hanging down, but generally, just as she had got its neck nicely straightened out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it would twist itself round and look up in her face . . . .”―Lewis Carroll, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

PENDLETON South Carolina—(Hubris)—April 2025—I preface this review of Claire Bateman’s most recent book, The Pillow Museum: Stories, with an admission: I know the author. Theoretically, knowing something of her biography, having read her previous books and corresponding as I do with her (in my capacity as Editor of Hubris and her capacity as Poetry Editor), you might be forgiven for imagining that I know Bateman too well to write about her work with any objectivity. In this you would be mistaken.

The Bateman whom I know as a former colleague in Clemson University’s English Department and as the poet who, monthly, introduces Hubris’s readers to contemporary poets is not, in any way, shape, or form related to the author of The Pillow Museum.

The dark-haired American woman of a certain age who sometimes sits across from me discussing current events and the sorry state of the union bears no resemblance at all to the universe-sized, star-studded symphony of light, dark, and phantasmagorical strobing color that belts out the 56 microfictions comprising The Pillow Museum, her latest book, published this spring of 2025 by Fiction Collective 2; belts out, I say, like a Colossus-of-Rhodes-sized Bette Midler, in some echoing planet-sized amphitheater located (as far as I can tell) in the radio galaxy Alcionius.

When I read Bateman, I struggle for metaphors and similes, you can see: she is large; she contains multitudes.

The stories themselves are micro, in the sense of Béla Bartók’s Mikrokosmos, and they are, similarly, études. Each brief fiction drops the reader into a tableau, convincing in every detail, introduced by a narrator whom we immediately accept as authoritative and trustworthy. Everything—physics as we know it, the properties of pianos, the four seasons, the powers that be, time, physiology—flies out the window in the opening sentence or sentences, but the narrative voice holds steady, sure.

In the title story, museumgoers experience strangers’ dreams by taking micro naps on their pillows.“Home Art” launches with, “It was snowing the night they had the fight about the glass piano whose music provided all the light in the house.” “The Quest” opens, “You can tell Orpheus has passed through your neighborhood by the wreckage in his wake: churned earth where trees uprooted themselves to follow, debris of buildings that dragged themselves after him, vulnerable to the violence of his music—also the motley collection of everyone within earshot plus the families, friends, and neighbors they’ve summoned by text: VERIFIED SIGHTING ON ARMSTRONG AVENUE JUST PAST CVS HEADING SOUTH.”

The reader is yanked into an ultra-condensed odyssey (or iliad) in medias res, and charmed or beguiled into accepting all manner of outlandish givens from the git-go. Reader, you go with the flow.

While I’ve long admired Bateman’s microfiction “Rising Time,” which I always include in our Best of Hubris issues, as it’s one of my favorites, I had no idea that there was an entire forthcoming collection of Batemanian microfictions in this mode, so I was thrilled to see that “Rising Time” was not simply a one-off.

Ursula K. Le Guin has exhorted us not to pigeon-hole writers or writing, donning some silly Sorting Hat to consign this to the fiction bin; that to the non-fiction. But Le Guin would be pleased as punch with the un-pigeon-holeable Pillow Museum; its portals, tableaux, architectural elements, and denizens. If a reader is fond of Kafka, O’Connor, Le Guin, Calvino, and Borges (especially Borges), the Museum is a rewarding destination.

You will be off balance from Page 1 but, among the pillows, you will find levity and the pleasant distraction of absconding, for just a bit, from reality.

Bateman is a writer of radical empathy, a poet unafraid of, though respectful of, the dark. Somehow, her authority (if not precisely spirituality) infuses all her writing. Like St. Francis, she holds out her arms (all 1,000 of them) in our post-apocalyptic world, and names but shrinks not from the radically alien, mortally altered creatures that alight, resting in her gaze. The short pieces, as I read through them, alone, at night, propped up on my own hard pillows, seemed, more than microfictions; instead first person accounts of interstellar travel, exorcisms, Anthropocene sacraments, tinctures against too much sobriety, too much certainty.

Certainty is a substance Bateman holds at bay.

“The Fleet Ones” opens with, “It’s a fine thing to be born with feet all over your body, though it does increase parental workload with so many little socks to wash, dry, and sort.” But, soberingly, we soon learn that a multitude of feet only enables those so gifted to slave away their lives as fleet runners for the “Holy Trinity of Amazon, FedEx, and UPS.” Those born two-footed and slow are left to dream of revenge (among other things). Still, Bateman is no cynic: addressing the parameters of each invented micro-cosmos, each fictive narrator is struck with wonder.

Like the best of our fabulists, Bateman neither exhorts nor demands. Nor does she comfort. The author and I both inhabit a shared reality the late Polish poet Adam Zagajewski describes in “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” the last four lines of which read: “Praise the mutilated world/and the grey feather a thrush lost,/and the gentle light that strays and vanishes/and returns.”

One of the microfictions of The Pillow Museum, “Relics,” follows.

Relics

By Claire Bateman

No one looks forward to harvesting a harp, but on the first anniversary of a death, the family
trudges together to the cemetery, shovels in hand.

It’s not just the labor of displacing all that earth that’s so disturbing, or the eeriness of
unsealing the coffin and slicing open the corpse’s protective sheath so you can reach in with your
gloved hand to pluck the harp from its nesting place just over the heart, but the uncanny nature of
the instrument itself. A fist-size bony protuberance, it’s not bone, cartilage, or desiccated sinew,
but something like soul residue, a concrescence of the deceased’s memories, at least insofar as
anyone can determine.

Everyone knows that it’s forbidden to make skin contact with the harp or play it, even
shielded by your ceremonial gloves—not that you’d be inclined to do so, any more than you’d
want to caress a loved one’s internal organs. No, you slip it into the designated blue silk sack and
take it home to uncover and hang in your garden, then bide your time as you wait for its
awakening, though there’s often a long indeterminate stage during which it may be only feigning
somnolence.

Eventually, though, it always comes to, initially retaining its inwardness, refusing to
make a sound; during this stage, be sure to avert your eyes whenever you walk by—give it time
to acclimate to the loss of its coffin privacy. In the expansiveness of light and open air, it begins
to unclench, releasing those first tentative tones you must make a show of ignoring as you
nonchalantly clip the hedges or sweep the stoop lest the harp startle, succumb to its reticence,
and fall silent forever. Instead, it must overhear itself gradually and inadvertently as though
barely apprehending the melody, then little by little, it can begin to get used to its song until at
last it allows the music to flow unimpeded.

Then the whole family gathers beneath the harp. Depending on how this experience
unfolds, they might express grief, bewilderment, and even anger: This music’s not what we’d
expected; why did she live among us as a stranger? The opposite outcome is just as tragic: No
surprises here—the notes seem all too familiar, as though he was squeezed into his role. Usually,
though, the song embodies a combination of the unpredictable and the fondly known; family
members respond with astonished gasps to some passages and sighs of recognition to others.

And everyone secretly wonders, What will my own song be like? as they experience a mixture of
grief and relief that they’ll never know.

Of course, no garden hosts only a single harp; the breezes coax out shifting harmonies
from generations of instruments swinging lightly from the branches. Listeners find even the
occasional dissonance satisfying: Those two never did get along, one might murmur
affectionately. Things are just as they always were.

That’s why everyone scorns the family that left their grandmother’s coffin above ground
during the crucial year to spare themselves the labor of excavation; they should have known the
body would turn out to be harpless since it requires the pressure of the soil squeezing the coffin
on all sides to cook the instrument. What a sad place their garden has become as they huddle
together, trying to occupy the gap in the sound.

Author’s Note: “Relics,” included in The Pillow Museum: Stories, first appeared in The Fabulist Flash and The Fabulist Book of Miniatures, vol. 1.

To order Elizabeth Boleman-Herring’s memoir and/or her erotic novel, click on the book covers below: