The Trouble With Growing Up Is That the Messes Grow With Us

There is a pleasant narrative we tell ourselves about age: eventually, we’ll know better. And through that wisdom we will stop loving the wrong person, saying the wrong things, mistaking anxiety for instinct, or stomping into emotional traffic without looking both ways. Experience will make us sensible, they say. The trouble, as Mick Bennett demonstrates in Messes We Made, is that age does not eliminate disorder. It merely gives us more elaborate ways to create it.

Bennett’s newest collection contains eighteen short stories organized into three sections: “Maturing,” “Adulting,” and “Aging.” The arrangement gives us structure but doesn’t, by any means, give us a clean arc. The book dives right in with younger characters who are volatile and impetuous, but the older characters in the later part of the collection are not cured of these traits.

In the “Maturing” stories, love is thrilling partly because it is dangerous. Young people treat romantic intensity as proof of intimacy and recklessness as a form of devotion. In “Daredevils,” a character compares his romantic life to an airplane performing perilous stunts in midair. It is an apt image for the section as a whole: these characters are exhilarated by speed, terrified of crashing, and not always honest about which outcome they expect.

Elsewhere, “Can You Hear Me?” follows a man overwhelmed by guilt and anger after his girlfriend is raped while he is away. Bennett doesn’t turn trauma into a convenient mechanism for male heroism, though. Instead, he examines the useless fury of someone who cannot reverse what happened and does not know where to put his grief.

The collection’s middle section replaces adolescent volatility with the quieter crises of adulthood. These protagonists have jobs, marriages, businesses, aging parents, and practiced social roles. They are supposed to know what they are doing. I’ll be the first to inform you: they do not.

In “Accidents,” a husband and business owner is seized by fear that won’t budge even in the face of reason. His anxiety is not theatrical. It is invasive, humiliating, and difficult to explain. “Spring Back” approaches illness through a daughter’s conviction that her mother will recover from a burst aneurysm. Hope, in Bennett’s hands, is neither uncomplicated virtue nor naïve denial. It can be a lifeline, a defense mechanism, or both at once. The story captures the suspended state of a family waiting for the body to declare what happens next.

By the time the collection reaches “Aging,” the characters have fewer years ahead of them to correct their mistakes. Retirement leaves former teachers without the routines and authority that once defined them while illnesses, estrangement, and loneliness alter relationships.

Yet Bennett does not treat older age as a slow march toward erasure. His characters remain unruly, desirous, funny, and capable of astonishing behavior. A senior citizen’s tap dancing leads him toward a hot date and a mugging. In “Beach Voices,” an estranged cancer survivor becomes the unexpected protector of a precocious and dangerously intoxicated fifteen-year-old girl.

That moral complexity runs through the entire book. Bennett doesn’t care to mingle with black-and-white portrayals of people…in dividing people into the innocent and the guilty. His characters have usually been both.

The title story brings the collection’s concerns into their sharpest focus. After the death of his dearest friend from alcohol abuse, the narrator looks backward at the damage, loyalty, excuses, laughter, and grief contained within their friendship. The phrase “messes we made” implicates more than the person who drank. It includes the habits friends tolerated, the truths they avoided, the interventions that came too late, and the complicated guilt of surviving someone they couldn’t rescue.

Bennett doesn’t offer a moral lesson at the end and reminds us that grief doesn’t usually provide comfort. He isn’t afraid to point out that love doesn’t always save people and good intentions aren’t always good enough.

Mick Bennett spent thirty-three years teaching English at the high school and community college levels, and his short fiction has appeared across five consecutive decades. Bennett’s experience resonates throughout his incredible attention to detail, whether it's a fantasy used to survive a deadening room or a joke that hides an accusation…Mick knows what he’s doing and he does it damn well.

Messes We Made is a collection about flawed people across youth, adulthood, and old age; Bennett’s characters struggle to live alongside what they have done and what has been done to them. They do not always become wiser. They do, however, occasionally become braver, kinder, or more honest.

For most of us, that may be as close to triumph as life gets. Messes We Made by Mick Bennett will be published by Unsolicited Press on September 22, 2026. The 172-page paperback is priced at $19.95.