Beauty Queen, by Melissa Benton Barker

Prose, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Melissa Benton Barker’s debut flash fiction chapbook, Beauty Queen, explores the confines of the feminine experience within the patriarchy throughout the lifespan. The book opens with a young girl hunting for lizard eggs and ends with an end-of-life reckoning. In between, nine-year-old girls transmogrify into water-creatures, a housewife runs away with a raccoon, and a woman makes an irrevocable choice at her sister’s deathbed.

Throughout the book, the fanciful dances with the quotidian as women and girls chafe against the limitations of traditional femininity. There are lizard eggs, sentient raccoons, devils and gold diggers, and a strange procedure that erases emotion. Written with humor, but unafraid to approach devastation, these pages reveal the darkness within domesticity.

Melissa Benton Barker is a graduate of the MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles. Her writing appears in Pine Hills Review, X-RAY, Best Small Fictions, and other publications. She co-edits the flash fiction section at CRAFT. Melissa lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio with her family.