Hollay Ghadery's ​Widow Fantasies

Reviewed by Sheri Doyle

(Gordon Hill Press, 2024)

Widow Fantasies is an unforgettable collection of flash fiction that delves into the hidden thoughts and lives of women at every stage of life—as girls, teenagers, mothers, wives, elders—and often alongside the partners they support, escape, detest, love; and the children they adore, the friends they keep.  
 
The slim but spirited collection, containing 33 stories, is infused with a full spectrum of emotions, from rage and revenge to fierce love and soft longing. In bathrooms and bedrooms, in the lines of a drawing or a diary, whether steering a kayak down a ditch or standing on the rooftop of a building, the characters share the power of autonomy through their private thoughts with intimacy and grit. Each story plunges into a conflict or desire with immediacy and swiftly pulls the reader into the experience. These stories often shock or surprise and yet are easily relatable and absorbed.
 
When I first set eyes on the wondrous cover with its image of a swing ride, both dreamlike and haunting, I slipped into my own daydream about its title. I imagined that ‘widow fantasies’ might refer to the act of fantasizing about becoming a widow, or perhaps they would be the fantasies of a widow. This evocative book title is indicative of what you get inside, starting with the allure of flash story titles, among them “audience as patio furniture” and “mrs. mallory’s home remedies for women”.  I immediately wanted to see this exact audience and discover these remedies. And who are the “horse girls”? I simply must know what ‘this’ is in “nothing will save your life, but this might buy you time”.
 
In these stories you’ll find relief or remorse, the ironic or the all-too-human, embedded into everyday objects, whether in the course-correcting power of a pencil skirt, or the sense of betrayal seen in the hunch of a partner’s shoulders, sniffed in the tang of his body wash.
 
In “jaws”, a nameless woman defies loneliness and her husband’s disrespect by loving a goldfish who proves to know her as its mother.
 
In “purple bears”, a woman fantasizes the unspeakable with mother bear energy.
 
In “tarot of st. petersburg”. Mrs. Fellows searches for signs in the confined spaces where she cares for Mr. Fellows, her elderly husband. She looks for shapes in the bath water steam that might speak of freedom. She sees messages in the shadows of the tree that grows just outside the window, “throwing shadows like ladies’ arms, like ladies’ elbows on the bed and on the wall. Ladies’ fingers on the handles of his wheelchair and in his hair.” Here, even the shadows are feminine energies tending to a husband’s needs.
 
Most of the stories are two or three pages in length. The shortest, but one of the heaviest, “post-partum ocean view”, is just a paragraph in length and expresses the nuanced weight of a baby’s glance. The longest, “massospondylus”, at just over four pages, is structured in short, dated diary entries but also reads as epistolary in second person, the beloved ‘you’ of the entries unknown until a few entries in. In the October 8 entry, the narrator writes, “That’s why I’m writing to you. To bring you closer.” And as with all the stories, the reader too is brought in closer through this intimacy of voice and perspective at every turn.  
 
In “tiktok virgin”, Ava explores a private and unallowed fantasy, thoughts that “[h]er parents would disown her” for.
 
In “khoshgel”, one of my favourite stories in the collection, a young girl experiments with the concept of beauty, taking power and perspective literally into her own hands with a crayon drawing, and later with implied scissors, to flip the narrative of the many women who surround her and call her khoshgel, the Persian word for beautiful. Instead, she wants to show the beauty of a black emperor scorpion: “One of the biggest and strongest scorpions in the world” but also “[t]he nicest.” This young character asserts herself, insisting on who she will be in this world, that she intends “to be strong . . . [t]o be kind . . .”, despite what she is told about insects: “Those dirty things carry diseases!” This story is giving Kafka’s Metamorphosis but with a feminist spin.
 
In “ditch run”, Cassie makes the until-now ludicrous imagining a reality—she’s about to leave her kids behind for a moment of sheer joy by grabbing her kayak and letting the current take her down a ditch filled with snow melt. This is the genre of fantasy that I live for, ridiculous and absurd enough that kayaking anywhere else pales in comparison, and I’m all in to watch Cassie see it through.
 
These glimpses into women’s realms, whether imaginary or real, might offer only snippets of lives, but they have sustaining power. Each story closes as if to frame scene and emotion in a striking tableau that stays with you. I still see young Reya asserting the beauty of the scorpion, pressing the crumpled page on her mother’s belly. I still envision Cassie in the kayak, speeding, if momentarily, away from everything, “plunging forward, eyes darting between the banks like minnows.”  The stories might leave you, as they did me, daring yourself to do the things you’ve only ever daydreamed about. And yet, this book reveals that fantasizing, on its own, can be the freeing act.
 
The stories are immersive and vivid, but the writing is nuanced in its tones and textures, allowing readers to come to their own conclusions or extend the fantasy however they wish. Hollay Ghadery has a flair for creating realistic scenes grounded in true-to-life conversations, yet sparkling with dreamscapes and subtle insights that are free for pondering in the true spirit of how fantasies are formed and internally revised. In a style that allows us to formulate our own connections and desires, the fantasies challenge us to linger in unsettling scenarios or imagine what we long for.
 
At its core, the collection speaks of resilience. At once dreamlike and realistic, with both elegance and grit, through directness and subtlety, these stories are for the imagination and the yearning heart. 

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​Sheri Doyle (she/her) is a writer and editor living on the treaty lands and territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. Her writing has appeared in Existere, The Antigonish Review, The Ekphrastic Review, untethered magazine, and other publications, including the anthology Bring Me Gold: 50 Poems for Palestine, published by Dahlia Publishing in 2025. Her debut poetry chapbook A Dress Made from Light was published by Vocamus Press in 2022.