The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter

'The Old Order' section returns repeatedly to Miranda, a girl raised amid her grandmother's fading Texas plantation memories, and 'The Grave' distills the whole sequence into a few pages: Miranda and her brother Paul, out hunting, find a dead rabbit carrying unborn young inside her, and Miranda, years later and far from Texas, suddenly understands what that discovery was actually telling her about her own body.

'Flowering Judas' moves Porter's attention to revolutionary Mexico, where Laura, a young American teacher supplying alibis and cigarettes to men she doesn't fully trust, keeps the manipulative organizer Braggioni at arm's length while unable to leave the movement or commit to it either. The judas tree blooming outside her window gives Porter her title and her charge against Laura directly, a woman who mistakes withholding herself for integrity.

'Pale Horse, Pale Rider' brings Miranda back once more, now a wartime newspaper reporter delirious with the 1918 influenza, her fever dreams tangled with memories of her soldier lover Adam, who catches the same epidemic nursing her and does not survive it. Porter writes the fever itself as a kind of narrative technique, letting real and hallucinated scenes trade places without warning until Miranda's survival feels less like victory than like being left behind.

Porter wrote 'Pale Horse, Pale Rider' years before some of the 'Old Order' pieces that precede it in this volume, so the collected arrangement gives Miranda a childhood assembled after her adulthood already existed on the page. Reading the volume in its printed order supplies a bildungsroman Porter never actually wrote in sequence, one the collection itself constructs out of stories composed and published for entirely separate occasions.

Braggioni sings to Laura through most of 'Flowering Judas,' his voice and his revolver treated by Porter as interchangeable instruments of the same appetite, and Laura's polite endurance of his singing becomes the story's clearest measure of how much of her own safety she's willing to trade for the appearance of solidarity.