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An expedition of women all named Tina is sent to an isolated island by the Syllable Foundation to decipher "oracle bone script... a pictographic system of the early Shang Dynasty," a sort of I Ching random generation of symbols with multiple sub-variations widely open to subjective interpretation. One of the Tinas falls sick and is shipped back home; her blue-haired, pot-bellied replacement disrupts what had been a more-or-less happy little community. The narrator calls the replacement the "anti-Tina." The narrator is working on interpreting a character that looks like an upside down "F," which she calls the Feather. She thinks it represents some sort of drinking song. The anti-Tina ridicules that interpretation. The narrator thinks she detects small horns beneath the anti-Tina's blue hair. All the other Tinas love the anti-Tina. The narrator decides she must leave. She has a vision of a rune, two lines crossing at a slant that means "go," or "stay" or perhaps both.

Ed Parks's "Well-Moistened with Cheap Wine, the Sailor and Wayfayer Sing of their Absent Sweethearts" (the title is what the anti-Tina insists the Feather character actually represents) is perhaps emblematic of the meta-fictional aspirations of many of the tales in Kelly Link's Trampoline anthology. The pop culture mockery ("Tina" is presumably a reference to Tina Louise who played the sex goddess castaway marooned with Gilligan's Island crew) combined with "lit-crit" speculations about the relative meaning of the words on the page you are reading that comprise the story you are trying to decipher. Add into the concoction the strange title, the absurd fantastical situation, the profundities of the closing paragraph in which the reader can ponder his own psychological island and whether he should move off or move on. Not to mention the feminist slant to a story presumably written by a man.

As they used to say in the 60s, "Heavy, man."

While I happened to like Parks story, sometimes there's a fine line walked between the portentous and the pretentious. Most of Link's selections manage to leap in the right directions, though there are a few that thud.

Take for example the lead-off story, Christopher Rowe's "The Force Acting on the Displaced Body," a tall tale about a guy from the Kentucky backwoods who travels to Paris by the somewhat circumspect route of connecting backwaters on a boat made of strapped together corks. I suppose there's some meaning here about self-identity and destiny, but it all strikes me as something that might be handed in to an MFA writing instructor particularly appreciative of abstruseness.

Next is the aforementioned Parks, which I think better and funnier, though perhaps a bit too clever for its own good. Those with similar reactions are urged to hang in there. Shelley Jackson's "Angel" packs a wallop, one of the best stories here. This macabre stitchwork concerns a taxidermist with failed artistic aspirations for his craft, spurned by both an unloving father and a Goth girlfriend, now employed in the aptly named "Wine and Spirits" shop. When the taxidermist stumbles upon the corpse of a boy, he employs the tools of his trade to create an unnatural angel. Exquisitely creepy and disturbing metaphor on claiming redemption.

"Impala," by John Gonzalez, follows, one of two straightforward SF stories, this one rooted in the cyperpunk-land of the Matrix, something that could conceivably have appeared in a more mainstream publication such as Asimov's. It's a bit more than cyber-junk, however, in providing an archetypal depiction of a doomed father-son relationship. Then we're back to MFA-land with a triptych by Samantha Hunt concerning various characters in search of significance (literary and personal) cast in a series of fables. Only the first, "The Periodic Table of Liquids," about a boy saved from the sea who as a grown-up Reverend does a belly-flop into the dangerous waters of love works for me. Alex Irvine's, "Gus Dreams of Biting the Mailman," takes on the issues of fictional meaning in a meta-story that is more obvious than Park, but, to my taste is more successful. The narrator is an intellectual whose girlfriend kicks him out of their apartment because of an argument over Charles Bukowski. The story concerns debates with his buddy Eli and fellow employee at the Doug's Bakery about the nature of reality, and by extension, the reality of narrative. In mimicking the philosophical discussions of college sophomores, it is quite funny.

This brings us to the real doorstop of the collection, both in terms of page count and prose density. "A Crowd of Bone" by Greer Gillman invokes Celtic myth concerning a young girl who seeks to escape a witch by duping a young fiddler into thinking she loves him and that the child she bears is his. From the beginning we know the girl has suffered great punishment, but the child is alive, though in danger. At novella length, this is the longest story here; it is also the hardest to read. It probably helps to have some knowledge, if not affection, for the various tropes of Celtic and wicca mythology. English majors who've ploughed through Beowulf in the original Old English may find the language fascinating. This English major found it tedious, and at one point just stopped reading it and went on to the next story. I did eventually go back to finish it, but still considered it rough going. Whether you will depends on what you make of such exposition as this:

Her lips were colder than the moon's, and soft. He felt them falling in a drift snow, bedazzled, over ears. Her lap, he thought, she lulls them in her lap. Moon and stars. He saw the burning bush. He saw the bird of her, flown up, amid her branches -- that he could not take. He shook himself, remembering the traveller's eyes, and shrugged the greatcoat off. "Tis the fiddler's turn to dance."

"To pipe and drum," the traveller said.

Thea and the traveller took the coat between them, lofting it and laying upon the sprining heather, so it makde a bed. They stood at head and foot of ti, as in the figure of a dance; the taveller spoke.

"What thou gets here, though mun leave betimes."

"I must bear it," Thea said.

"And will."

"Undone and undone."

The traveller crouched and tweaked a corner of the coat aside, tucked something in, and rose. "What is ta'en here, cracks t' glass. What is tinder s'll be ash. Go lighter of it, until dark." She flung a pair of shears on the makeshift bed. They lay there open, like a striding stork. She turned and gathered up her pack. "I's off."

They saw her go. They lay together on the coat, of leaves as deep as hallows. After a time, unspeaking, they undid her hair, and went into another night.

David Soyka is a former journalist and college teacher who writes the occasional short story and freelance article. He makes a living writing corporate marketing communications, which is a kind of fiction without the art.