Dantiel W. Moniz’s debut story collection Milk Blood Heat is the rare debut the strikes a perfect note with every story, all of which coalesce to an elemental and stunning symphony. The stories mostly center around black women and girls living in the Jacksonville area, and many stories integrate the three title images of milk, blood, and heat, in visceral narratives about love, friendship, and loss. Each story is rendered in brilliant prose, which adds remarkable depth and imagery to narratives about thirteen year-old girls obsessed with their own mortality, a young woman plunged into the depths of despair by a miscarriage, girls facing rejection from religious households, a young woman pondering pregnancy, a woman on a road trip to scatter her father’s ashes with her distant brother, and so on. Moniz’s sensitivity to the female body and everything it carries, both physical and not, suffuses the stories with a deep emotional and metaphysical quality.
The titular story, “Milk Blood Heat”, sets the tone for the collection in a striking way. The story centers on Ava and her best friend Kiera, black and white thirteen year olds (respectively), whose connection is formed on a mutual recognition of sorrow and struggling. Kiera tells Ava that she feels like she’s drowning, and soon enough, the two are thick as thieves, cementing their status as “blood sisters” by mixing their blood in a bowl of milk and drinking it. The two girls become obsessed with their own mortality, imagining ways they could die and expressing desire to know what death feels like. Moniz writes of Ava, “Before thirteen, she hadn’t realized empty was a thing you could carry. But who put it there? Sometimes she wonders if she will ever be rid of it, and other times she never wants to give it back. It is a thing she owns.” The story ends in a shocking tragedy, but Moniz arrives at this ending through such a fascinating exploration of the two central characters, capturing their ethos in heartbreaking images. The story is a sensitive exploration of coming-of-age, existing in the complex space between morality and youth, the divide between life and death.
“The Hearts of Our Enemies” distills many of the qualities that make Moniz’s collection so brilliant: subtlety, a resistance of convention, and deep character development within the short fiction form. Frankie’s husband moves out after Frankie confesses that she had almost committed a transgression, and Frankie’s teenage daughter Margot begins freezing her out. Frankie deciphers a love note that she finds in Margot’s jeans written in French, and becomes curious about her daughter’s love life. The tension between Margot and Frankie is such a nuanced exploration of female desire and motherhood, as Margot’s frustration at her mom is not that she had broken their home, but that she had not gone further in her transgression, that she had not more fully defied Margot’s domineering father. Margot is clearly projecting her desire for independence onto her mother, meanwhile her mother is becoming more concerned that Margot is a victim of a predatory sexual relationship after piecing together the note, and struggles with figuring out the best method of protecting her daughter from harm.
This theme of motherhood and prospective motherhood threads through a couple of the stories in really fascinating ways. There is tension between a story in which a woman has a miscarriage and can’t stop seeing the body parts of her unborn child everywhere, and “Necessary Bodies”, a story where a successful millennial woman contemplates whether or not she wants to keep the child she has just found out that she is pregnant with. She asks herself questions like, “What if the state floods; we reelect that terrible man; if I’m bad at it; I do it and then decide I don’t want to do it; if I don’t do it and miss it; what if someone shoots me in the grocery store, the movie theater, my own home; what about the revisionist histories taught in schools; what if I’m not self-sacrificing enough; if I’m too self-sacrificing; if me and Liam get divorced, shit happens; what if the kid hates me; if I’m cruel; if I really really love it and lose it; if none of this can be sustained, not our love or our planet? What if, in the end, we just dye the ocean and wish it well?”. Moniz’s incredible ability to connect the female body with these types of existential questions is what makes this collection so unique and transcendent.
Milk Blood Heat is a sparkling debut full of some of the most striking sentences and images you’ll encounter in any recent writing. This debut is all the more exciting because of the promise of Moniz’s talent, which it seems this collection is just scraping the surface of. I devoured these stories in a day, but many have stayed with me for much longer, and I think many readers will find themselves returning to this collection frequently. Milk Blood Heat is a nuanced but propulsive collection that explores black womanhood around Jacksonville Florida, but ultimately expands so much further, capturing essential truths of humanity and nature.
Further Reading: For more Florida centric stories, check out Lauren Groff’s Florida.