SSW: "Dead Women" by Allie Mariano, PHILADELPHIA STORIES, Fall 2020; Fiction Editor: Teresa Sari FitzPatrick

Can be read here: https://philadelphiastories.org/article/the-dead-women-second-place-winner-of-the-marguerite-mcglinn-prize-for-fiction/

The FictionMags discussion list had a bit of a discussion of Marguerite Young a few weeks back, sparked by a New Yorker "rediscovery" of her most ridiculously long novel (half a decade ago, The Paris Review likewise took a whack). Given how Young tended to be drawn to subjects that I am also, I was moved to search for her shorter work I thought I might've read over the years, and "The Dead Women" (collected in the Dalkey Archive retrospective Inviting the Muses: Stories, Essays, Reviews, 1994) proved elusive (if easier to find when one isn't catching something, but instead recovering), but this story, with a similar title, popped up, and given I've not mentioned anything from Philadelphia Stories for a while...

Allie Mariano's story is deftly-written, a relatively slow burn as it contrasts a youngish academic's unwise affair with a married man (riddled with the usual character's [and people's?] fantasies of How Everything Will Surely Go Swimmingly) and a party being thrown by elder fellow academics who set her up, to some degree, with an Appropriate Young Male Relative, as the dinner  conversation is dominated by recent revelations, in this New Orleans-set story, of a string of murders of young women sex workers. Everything, including a lonely middle-aged male highway patrolman pulling her over on her way home to her paramour after the party, touches on the potential menace of contemporary life, invited and otherwise, and while it's not a revelation of a story, I'll take a look at further work by Mariano. 

Philadelphia Stories is a freely-distributed slim print magazine, as well as web presence, that has been visible in the city and environs for more than two decades, and more power to it. For more of today's short stories, please see Patti Abbott's blog, where these are gathered weekly.