Dissecting Narratives

Death is a prevailing theme of this summer issue, even Caren Beilin’s seemingly childish ‘Zoo Balloons’ displays a morbid fascination with the shapes animal balloons take in death:

‘like walking a molting, dead, abstracted dog, if a dog abstracts into birds.’

Part of a triptych of stories, ‘Zoo Balloons’ is a slightly surreal account of balloons in the shape of animals taking flight. Much like a balloon’s ephemeral nature, the story is changeable in its distribution of meaning: the balloons veer from mere toys, to life-like representations with orifices, to a symbol for endangered species, to even the animal itself. This tentative study continues in the other two thirds of the triptych, particularly its closing story ‘Death Balloons’, where Beilin writes of the ballooning of the dead. The idea that ‘We make balloons out of the dead’ is engagingly bizarre, capturing the contradictory nature of grief:

‘If you are an adult, with a dead child for a balloon, hold onto it, until it wrinkles into a wither on your living room floor’

Diagram is a wild-card of a journal ambitiously aiming for innovation in all three of its categories. The fiction featured displays an obsessive relationship to dissection and decorticates genres, voices, people. Sometimes this mad-scientist effervescence overwhelms the content to the point of un-readability, but more often than not, it elates. Diagram is a welcome shock-therapy to more traditional online journals – a breath of unruly air displacing paperwork.