I have read many stories about transformation, but none hooked me so much as Julia Armfield’s short story “Mantis” from her collection Salt Slow. What struck me was the language of this story — how it weaves through mystery and foreshadowing, using as its setting both a home in which secrets are kept and a Catholic school where our narrator is just a normal fifteen-year-old girl; it’s all captivating. The mystery of the absent grandfather and father leaves open the question “Did they leave or die?” until the story’s final line, which implies their fate. “Not for kissing but for something more in keeping with my genes” reveals the narrator’s desire to eat the young, infatuated Mark Kemper while resolving the mystery of the missing men: they, too, have been eaten after having mated with the women of the narrator’s family. These missing men are woven through as a plot-line that we think is minor but reveals so much about both the mother and grandmother at the end — and about their characters.
Language can, of course, be complicated or simple, and the language of “Mantis” makes for a much easier read than Thoreau – the style is a slice-of-life, yet becomes more slice-of-life mixed with science fiction as we go — and it makes reading the story fun. One enjoys reading, then rereading over and over, as this fifteen-year-old girl attends Catholic school and then begins to turn into a praying mantis, a genetic inheritance from the women in her family. As a result, the story takes you down hook, line, and sinker every time. Julia Armfield’s style makes it that fun read, how she writes the transformational puberty no different from girls gossiping and teasing each other, how the casualness of the weirdness that is this girl becoming a literal praying mantis in a bathroom at a party seems absolutely normal yet we know it’s not, and how it is written like this is a typical Sunday night for our young Catholic-school attending girl, conveys the emotion that this is expected and this is normal.
Not to go too far into the book review-style blog post, the question is why – why does Julia Armfield use that language? Language always has a reason behind it – whether to foreshadow, convey emotion, or even simply convey that something is happening. So why does Julia Armfield take this no-doubt fantasy and sci-fi transformation and set it in a Catholic (supposedly, based on ages) middle and high school, and why does it happen to this young girl? Simply put – young girls transform at that age.
In “Mantis,” it is no secret the other girls are undergoing transformations — of character, personality, looks, health. Girls start their periods, focus on boys, and start to make themselves look appealing to the aforementioned boys, all while our narrator just oh-so-casually becomes a praying mantis. I couldn’t help but find similarities — the girls are desperate for boys to want them for romance, and the praying mantis wants the male of their species too — although for maybe a different reason. The praying mantis puberty is written as equal to the other girl’s puberties — and I wondered on the first read, confirmed on the second and third – if this was intentional. It was, these girls are undergoing changes to everything they might know – going from sweet little girls to young teenagers – and the way they talk about the boys as if they are prizes to be hunted and won, is similar to the mantis – they mate with them, then eat them. The whole story is one of transformation – we just focus on the fantastic one, but the language makes it clear – especially on those second and third reads – that everyone in this story underwent a transformation at some point, save Mark Kemper, the poor thing, and it changes their characters. Girls that once joked about losing weight now joke about how they will sleep with a boy! and they no longer joke about starving – they actually do. The metamorphosis of our lovely narrator into a praying mantis represents, in my mind, this timeless coming of age – when girls’ thoughts turn from ew Josh? to Oh, Josh!, from avoiding boys (boys drool, girls rule!) to hunting them (Did you see Luke yesterday? He looked sooo cute) and wondering which boy will ask them out, who goes to prom with whom – the praying mantis in this story is written just as casually as the rest, because of that metaphor, of the transformation young girls go through when we experience puberty — because Julia Armfield understands the simple facts, that we all experience that change of avoidance to attraction, and she portrays it in a fantastical way. After all, what better way to illustrate that than the praying mantis itself?