Sometimes the best thing in fiction, especially in its shorter forms, is simplicity. In Reid Wegner’s (very) short story “Testudo,” the premise is just that: simple. There is a tortoise, living in captivity, who suffers. There’s much to admire about this piece, but what I first noticed was its refreshingly basic formula, of an animal who suffers by the hands of its oblivious human antagonists. This is also a familiar formula—in reading it, one can’t help but think of Black Beauty or Watership Down, and of countless other stories one often encounters in childhood. And yet while “Testudo” is certainly a story that’s been told before, like all fiction’s been told before—it simultaneously stands apart, like all fiction will do if it’s any good.

One of the most obvious differences in “Testudo” is its unusual characterization of the tortoise, Nikolai. The story is written from his perspective, and while animals in fiction are often merited more intelligence than they realistically possess, Nikolai has a believable level of intelligence for a tortoise. Unlike Sewell’s Black Beauty or Adams’s Hazel, Wegner has written Nikolai to have a level of thinking that is not on par with a human’s thoughts. Nikolai is dumb, and he gets dumber as the story advances because his continued captivity. I like that “Testudo” then works to subvert the fairy-tale conception that tortoises are these reverenced, sage creatures. Nikolai is not well-respected by his owner, who forgets to change the lighting in his habitat to simulate day and night, thus subjecting him to “a bewildering string of days beneath an insomniac sun, or…an endless Scandinavian night” [84]. His owner’s forgetfulness, along with the fact that Nikolai is native to Afghanistan but was ousted to icy Russia, create a confusion in the tortoise that only worsens with his age. There is much longsuffering. He declines, scrabbling at the bottom of his plastic bin every day although it gets him nowhere; this makes for a dismal story.

Nikolai’s decline makes for another interesting dynamic in “Testudo.” While a tortoise’s shell is typically depicted as a helpful and unique asset, Nikolai slowly begins to see his shell as a mocking burden. In his sterile but safe captivity, where he doesn’t need his shell to protect him from predators, the shell begins to weigh on him. He’s always tired. He thinks about what sort of creature he might have been had he not been given such a colossal mass to shoulder. And then, of course, there’s the fact that the shell will outlive him—even though it’s inanimate.

While Nikolai’s decline is certainly tragic, what’s most tragic about this story (in a good way) is the ending. At the story’s close, after all of his struggles in captivity, Nikolai symbolically retreats back into his shell, where he says he’ll stay “for the rest of the season, or for the year, or, if need be, for the rest of his life” [90]. (As an aside, the ending is satisfyingly circular, since the story began with Nikolai’s cautious emergence from his shell.) In his final gesture, what once was an object of torment to Nikolai has again become his tool of self-protection—as it should be—only the self-protection’s now from his own artificial habitat and unfeeling human captor. So what I like about this final move—and the piece in summation—is that it’s a tragic tale about a protagonist who doesn’t realize that his story is a tragedy. Throughout, Nikolai lives ‘in the dark’ about the twisted darkness of his life, always expressing confusion but never resentment. This makes the tortoise’s final gesture ironic: As he retreats into his shell, Nikolai experiences a physical darkness and yet still doesn’t comprehend the larger darkness and tragedy of his own existence.

“Testudo” by Reid Wegner can be found in Issue 90 of The Greensboro Review.

Emma Boggs is a first-year MFA candidate in fiction at UNC Greensboro and an Editorial Assistant forThe Greensboro Review.

In the absence of in-person poetry readings, I’ve been seeking out surrogates for the sensation of really being there when a poem echoes around the room. I’ve favored chapbooks for their scope—transporting me for a few hours under a poet’s controlled intention. Zoom readings have provided some of the immediacy and kick of a real human voice (when the internet’s digital gremlins don’t degrade the reader into a kind of glitched-out android). Still, I haven’t found a way to feel like I’m sharing the experience with others, and in missing out on that, I’ve been missing out on one of my favorite experiences: that subtle hypnosis that takes over when a poem completely fills up a room and everybody in it.

I say, forget the mere suspension of disbelief. A really good reading suspends the listeners’ self-control, leading them where the poem wants to go, getting them lost for a while, leaving them someplace they’re not sure how they’ve arrived. It’s part of the magic of live readings, and occasionally a version of that effect manages to manifest on the printed page. Poets who make expert use of mantric language and lists or who lead readers down a slope of sly dissociation might just steal the reader’s very will.

Carine Topal’s “Pleasure Hotel” took over my entire sense of readerly direction in just this way. As the limited, repeating set of words in this poem made their paces through one deft transformation after another, I found myself far outside of my own head, seamlessly pulled wherever the poem wanted me. The poem’s imagery of smoke, rose, and moonless night shift with dreamlike logic from the concrete, “Smoke rose from the pleasure hotel” to the analogous, “burning hotel pleasure rose like smoke” to the surreal, “we face-to-face in the moonless pleasure hotel of smoke, yes, we rose and rose.”

The poem’s compelling imagery pulls a reader immediately into a minimalist but evocative scene. The rhythmic beat of the poem’s mantric language hypnotizes. All the while, the shifting semantics and syntax press intention and movement into that pulsing cadence without resorting to exposition. The cumulative effect is perfectly encapsulated in a prose-poem block that lets each sentence speak for itself while relying on juxtaposition to do the heavy lifting of propelling the reader from one frame of mind to the next.

Whether or not you’re trying to make up for missed readings, the entrancing drift of “Pleasure Hotel” provides a brief but haunting escape from the here and now. Give up a few minutes (and a bit of your self control) and let the poem take you where it will.

“Pleasure Hotel” can be found in Issue 84 of The Greensboro Review.

Michael Springer is a second-year MFA candidate in poetry at UNC Greensboro and Poetry Editor for The Greensboro Review.