Let’s say you hang out with a curious, funny, bright, caring friend who, as you walk along, talking about this and that, peppers the conversation with, “Hey, will you take a look at that!” And the hour flies by, and after, you feel revived, invigorated, better, because her energy finds a way to love the world.

If you don’t have that friend, now you have Spell Heaven: and Other Stories by Toni Mirosevich, a linked short story collection that takes you by the hand, and soon you’re walking along, listening to the ocean, talking to those who live on the edge of the continent, finding the miraculous and extraordinary in the overlooked.

Toni was one of my professors, and from there, a friendship evolved. Her new collection feels like spending time with her, and it’s a delight. Like her narrator, Mirosevich grew up the daughter of a fisherman, and for the narrator and Mirosevich, the sea holds much meaning. It’s where they both go to replenish, to reflect, to encounter the outcasts.

Whether you are feeling down due to a recent slight, or a spate of misfortune, or the knowledge that melancholy has seeped into your bones, never coming in like gangbusters but sneaking around the edges of the frame, a grayness that blankets the perimeter of the skin then moves toward the center, the heart, the lungs, journeys to the center of your earth, enters and takes up residence, and after that you’re no longer looking up and out at the horizon, to that flat line edge you use to trace forward progress, a line as sharp as a ruler’s edge, a line as an invitation. Then it’s down to the sea for a walk. To the sea, the cure all, end all.

Before melancholy settles in too deeply, humor bullies its way into the stories and upends the sour mood. In “Three Lessons, Four Scars,” Mr. Econoline lives in a rusted van. “Over time the van rusts, his motivation rusts, his get-up-and-go rusts. As the months go on he continues to rust and rust and rust. Beer can, tin can, tin man.”

In “Murderer’s Bread,” the narrator and her wife move into the neighborhood of a foggy coastal town. Instead of waxing poetic about fog, Mirosevich writes, “Every day fog barrels in from the sea, damp sheets of the stuff that wrap around every leaf, limb, and post and give the neighborhood a gray, dingy look. It gives us a gray, dingy look too, but we aren’t complaining. The crummy weather is what makes the houses in the area affordable. No one with any real money would want to live in this constant chill.”

The couple is trying to make friends. In “Where People are People,” one friendship starts with a hey. “Stevie knows how to hey back. She grew up around people who start each conversation that way. Where she’s from that’s the first word out of a baby’s mouth.”

“I remember years ago, hearing Dick Gregory, a Black comedian and civil rights activist in Monterey,” says Mirosevich. “He was talking about the Kennedy assassination and conspiracy theories and people were listening, a solemn mood settling in, and then he told a joke. Everyone loosened up and they could let in more of what he was saying. In class, too, when I teach, I’m always telling stories and jokes. After students laugh, they are much more open to ideas. It’s just what I do. I had very funny parents and grandparents. I found a note from 1976 that one of my grandmothers wrote: shit, laugh if you can. This from a woman who moved to America from Croatia with few resources, who raised four children on her own and knew very little English.”

Throughout the stories, images appear, and then appear again and maybe again, but always transformed. “The Glassblower’s Last Breath” opens with a glassblower in Japan blowing into a pipe, forming a round glass globe. When he’s done, he taps the float off the pipe and makes a sealing button, the last air bubble, the last breath. Later, the narrator’s father finds a green orb floating in green waves and brings it home. The narrator and her father fill it with water and goldfish. The fish die. Not enough oxygen, says the father. By the end, the narrator is wondering about the glassblower, at the end of his life, would he wish for that one breath back?

“For many years, I wrote poetry, and my poems were image-laden,” says Mirosevich. “I remember an old poetry lesson: if you use an image once, the next time you use it, something needs to change so we see the image in a new way. It’s a circular motion; after you’ve traveled through the story, when the image returns, there’s an echo.”

The weaving of imagery, the subtext, and the layering comes from multiple drafts. “That’s how I make connections,” she says. “I used to say in class, look for the drive-by moments. When I see I’ve done a drive-by moment, I realize I’ve missed a chance to go deeper, and if I dive into the moment then things link up.”

The many drafts also invite so much style, too. With alliteration and assonance, music comes into the story.  

Her camel coat is a little frayed at the cuffs and her black shoes—slip-on loafers of some cracked, plastic, material—have seen better days.

Her use of anaphora and epistrophe add melody to the lines:

He’s where he is every day, all day, in his spot at the end of a bench, kitty-corner to the Chat n/ Chew Café and the pier, where he holds forth, holds court, holds my attention whenever I pass.

Similes and metaphors are fresh, surprising.

When he exhales the smoke billows out of his truck window, rising like a trumpet note.

Here, with the wide bowl of the sea and sky before me, this expanse brings with it an expansive feeling, as if some door that’s been locked has opened wide.

“I don’t read work out loud, but I hear it,” says Mirosevich. “I’m listening for repetition and internal rhythms. In my family there were two languages: English and Croatian. There is a musicality about Croatian, and my mother was always singing. Down at the sea, I like to walk by the Filipino fishermen. I don’t know the language, but I listen to the music of the sounds.” She laughs and says, “Though I did have someone at a reading ask why I repeated so much.” This is a book to return to, just as the narrator does, over and over, to the sea; to walk along the shore, talk to Kite Man and the crabbers and Dusty the dog. As Mirosevich writes, “You want to continue the story, you want a surprise. Something or someone who hasn’t come before. Wait. Or something that has?”

Author Photo: Shotsy Faust