"In the interest of security, we agreed to put out your eyes and burn out the insides of my ears."
So begins the story "Folie A Deux," the third story in Brown's collection Annie Oakley's Girl, which must be read with The Terrible Girls and What Keeps Me Here. In these collections we see the set-up and enactment of an I-You relationship. The narrator in all of these is an unnamed I, who recounts events to the You, the beloved. The narrator comes off as an innocent being acted on by the You, but studied more closely, we see the I is both object and subject, victim and creator. Slowly the I progresses, matures, to see the You as a separate person (as She) and not someone to possess and be possessed by. Setting in these stories is not concrete or necessarily realistic, but symbolic and surreal. The characters aren't hinged on the external world, but on internal ones. These stories are at once simple and complex, witty and powerful, brutal and forgiving. They're not to be taken lightly and not to be missed.