The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender
"The Girl in the Flammable Skirt" by Aimee Bender is a collection of interconnected vignettes centered around the life of a teenage girl navigating complex familial relationships and personal struggles. The narrative is steeped in symbolism, portraying the girl's experiences with her father, who is a wheelchair user and has health complications. Throughout the stories, the girl grapples with feelings of responsibility, love, and the weight of her father's challenges, often illustrated through metaphors such as a heavy stone backpack that she must wear.
As she reflects on her life, the girl also contemplates her relationship with her boyfriend, Paul, and the contrasting dynamics of their home lives—her own being quiet and burdensome, while Paul's is chaotic and filled with the noise of alcoholism. The vignette structure allows for a non-linear exploration of themes such as grief, anxiety, and the desire for freedom, culminating in a poignant moment where the girl recalls a tragic news story about another girl whose flammable skirt caught fire, symbolizing both danger and passion. The work invites readers to consider the emotional entanglements of youth and the burdens of familial obligation, as well as the search for identity amidst chaos.
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The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender
First published: 1998
Type of plot: Psychological
Time of work: The 1990's
Locale: A high-rise apartment in an unnamed city
Principal Characters:
The narrator , a teenage girlHer father Paul , her boyfriendA girl in a flammable skirt
The Story
"The Girl in the Flammable Skirt" is a series of loosely connected, often symbolic, vignettes narrated by a teenage girl.
In the first section, the girl comes home from school to find her father wearing a backpack made of stone. She tells him to take it off, and he responds by giving it to her. She puts it on her own back and stands bent over in a corner, leaving her father free to move around the house. She asks him what is in the backpack, which is very heavy. He is watching television and replies simply that it is something he owns. She asks if she can put it down, but he says no, it has to be worn. The girl returns to school wearing the heavy backpack. The teacher sits down beside her while the other students do math exercises. The teacher brings her a tissue, even though the girl is not crying. The teacher says she just wanted to bring the girl something light.
In the second section, the girl relates a joke she has heard about two rats, in which one rat is in reality a dog.
The third section returns to the girl and her father. She tells him she loves him more than salt. He is touched by this remark. He had a heart attack two years ago, and because he has weak legs, he must use a wheelchair. Once he asked her to sit in a chair for a day to see what it was like. She sat in it for an entire afternoon and spent an hour of that time knocking against the wooden chair leg with her hands, for luck and protection. This annoyed her father.
She then visited the bathroom and gazed out of the window. The family lives in a high-rise apartment, and the girl often wonders what would happen if there was a fire and they had to evacuate. Who would carry her father? She has a dark fantasy about what might happen in such a situation. The fantasy involves the death of both her father and her mother.
The fourth section is about the girl's relationship with her boyfriend Paul, whose parents are alcoholics. She keeps him in her closet, bringing him food. He loves sitting in the dark and also the fact that her house is so quiet and sober. She says that it is quiet because her father feels bad and is resting in the bedroom. She also reveals that her home is a humorless one, and she imagines a much more relaxed atmosphere in Paul's disorderly home. Paul takes hold of her hand and holds it for at least half an hour, then kisses it. He pulls her inside the closet and kisses her some more. However, he lets her out because she begins to cry.
In the fifth section, the girl's father is on his deathbed in the hospital, but he does not die. The scene has happened several times before, which makes it hard for the girl to take it seriously. She prays for him, but her prayers are strained. When she leaves the hospital, she passes a janitorial supply closet, where two rats poke their noses out of a hole in the bottom. It is late afternoon and she is alone. She does not know what to do with herself and sits down near the closet. She feels free and light but wants her father to come and give her his heavy backpack again; her back is breaking without it.
In the final section, the teenager thinks of a girl in a flammable skirt whom she read about in a newspaper. The girl wore the skirt to a party but danced too close to some candles, causing the skirt to catch fire. Her dance partner rolled her up in a carpet but she received third-degree burns. The narrator wonders whether in the first moments of the fire, the girl believed she had caused it herself in the sheer heat of her passion for the music and the dance.