“In ‘Wet,’ Jaclyn Desforges’s narrator dwells in the discomfort, surreality, and sacrifice that motherhood engenders, populated by such candid admissions as ‘Mother, the happiest I have ever been is in the pockets of time in which I felt alone.’ The narrator, raised by a distant stepmother, is herself the mother of young adult Julie, who has returned home for a visit only to find that her mother is caring for an unexplained gaggle of babies who are not her own. Here is where Desforges’s gift for narration begins to gleam, in all its surreal and embodied glory. Simultaneously, she crafts a unique approach to the passage of time, or lack thereof, as the narrator grapples with the hurt she carries with her from her own childhood—the narrator is both mother and daughter, forever reliving the cruelties of her girlhood while also trying to raise her own daughter free of her own fear and loneliness.

This fear has taken many forms: disordered eating, emotional and physical distance, and a devotion to self-sacrifice as her own needs are sublimated beneath those of the ‘mysterious babies.’ These struggles are rendered in detail that is both lyrical yet grounded in the unavoidable concrete facts of the body, staying faithful to the truth of motherhood in all its beauty and grotesquerie. At the heart of it all—thundering through the story toward its glistening, uncanny conclusion—is love. The all-encompassing love the narrator feels for Julie, and an innate desire that Julie should understand how enormous and unstoppable that love can be. In her author’s note, Desforges describes the struggle of constructing a short story in which the strength of the poetic language is so undeniable: “How do I move beyond beauty in order to make meaning?” Here, we find a piece that unites those essential virtues of sentence-level innovation and overall thematic coherence to create a short story that is stunning in its degree of complexity and elegance. 

— CRAFT Literary