I was fifteen when my mom announced that we’d be moving to the US because she had a new job there. My younger brother was not thrilled by the prospect of the move and tried to negotiate a way to stay in Nigeria, perhaps with relatives or friends. I, for my part, was ecstatic, my head filled with scenes from the American shows I’d seen on TV, like A Different World and The Cosby Show. I remember asking my mother what winter was like, since she’d lived in New York while she was in graduate school. The freezer, she said. On a humid, 85-degree day in Ibadan, I stuck my head into the freezer compartment of our standing fridge and smiled as the icy blast soothed my overheated face.
Months later, when our flight landed at Boston’s Logan Airport and a chill that I had never imagined could exist drilled into my bones, it was my turn to ask whether I could go stay with one of my uncles in Ibadan until my mom came to her senses. How on earth could anyone live in this kind of cold? It wasn’t just the icy weather I found myself navigating, it was the people who couldn’t understand my accent, the strange food, the high school gym teacher and track coach who took one look at me and said excitedly, you’re built like a gazelle.I did my best, but the gym teacher gave me a D, because no matter how hard I tried, I galumphed like a giant tortoise.
All of these experiences came rushing back when I started writing my linked story collection, Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions—the longing for the sights, sounds, tastes, and smells of home. The disappointment when, at last, I visited, and things weren’t quite as I remembered. The feeling of never quite fitting in, in either place. The four friends at the core of my book meet in an all-girls boarding school in Nigeria, much like the one I attended. Their lives take them to the US, where they finish college, work, marry, divorce, remarry, relocate to Nigeria, and return to the US, all the while holding on to that special connection forged when they were nine and ten years old.
I find that I gravitate toward books about migration, feel my insides clench when the writing fully captures that sense of dislocation, the nostalgia, need to adapt, to belong. I’m drawn to stories that embody the hope that people will see you as you truly are, as you wish to be seen, and not invent some caricature of you. Below are seven collections that do just that.
Meron Hadero’s A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times is a brilliant and sometimes heartbreaking collection that goes back and forth between Ethiopia and different parts of the US. In fifteen stories, she examines the lives of refugees and immigrants: what it’s like to move from one country to another until you finally land in the US, to adjust as a child who must quickly learn about race/caste in America. The collection also examines how the next generation negotiates the duality of their Americanness and ancestral ties to the country that birthed their parents. In “The Wall,” a pre-teen Ethiopian refugee who relocates to the Midwest from Germany makes a connection with a retired professor who fled Berlin following Kristallnacht through their shared fluency in German. “Sinkholes” recounts a disastrous lesson in a 1970s Florida classroom in which a teacher rounds off teaching Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man by asking a classroom with only one Black (immigrant) child what her students understand about race by writing slurs on the chalkboard. The final story, “Swearing In, January 20, 2009,” describes the narrator’s feelings of hope and possibility following the 2008 US presidential election, and then the despair stemming from the backlash that continues to the present day. Hadero also won the 2021 Caine Prize for African Writing for “The Street Sweep,” a story in this collection.
Unigwe’s collection is a compact, gut-wrenching set of linked stories that follows the lives of a small group of Nigerian immigrants in Turnhout, Belgium. We meet Prosperous, uncomfortable hostess of weekend Nigerian gatherings, who finally asks her husband, Agu, “How can you just sit there and watch your friend use a woman like that?” after more than one of his associates marries an unsuspecting European woman for papers. In “Cunny Man Die, Cunny Man Bury Am,” we see the tables turned. In other stories, we feel the grief of a young mother who suffers an unspeakable loss and the disbelief, terror, and unexpected shame that follow a woman’s violation on her train ride home. All of the stories capture the frustration and sense of defeat that sets in when immigrants who had college degrees and decent paying jobs (that afforded them cars, big houses, and maids in Nigeria) end up working dead-end menial jobs in Belgium because of the language barrier, their pride preventing them from returning home to Nigeria and admitting that leaving may have been a mistake.
The late Anthony Veasna So’s loosely connected stories feature Cambodian immigrants from Northern California’s San Joaquin Valley. The characters are complex, haunted by loss, reincarnation, genocide, and unacknowledged PTSD. The next generation grapples with different identities: Khmer, American, queer. In “The Monks,” Rithy spends a week at a temple to honor his dead (and deadbeat) father, all the while missing his girlfriend Maly and enduring the contempt of a monk who can’t understand why anyone whose family was devastated by genocide would sign up to join the US Army. In “Human Development,” the narrator, in his twenties, hooks up with Ben, a forty-something, previously closeted Cambodian man. He worries that much of Ben’s attraction comes from a sense of obligation or duty, saying “I can’t be with a Cambodian guy just to be with a Cambodian guy.” In “Generational Differences,” based on true events, a boy discovers that his mom survived a white supremacist school shooter who took the lives of five children and injured thirty more, “to defend his home, … against the threat of us, a horde of refugees, who had come here because we had no other dreams left.”
Arimah won the 2019 Caine Prize for African Writing. What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky explores the contours and limits of power for young women of Nigerian descent. In “The Future Looks Good,” one sister is mistaken for another by a young man, a domestic abuser “… unused to hearing no ….” “Wild” is the story of a Nigerian American girl two months away from college, sent to Lagos to live with her aunt and cousin as punishment for “acting wild”—kissing boys; taking ecstasy; and getting high with her best friend, the only other person of color in her grade, among other offenses. In the final story, “Redemption,” the thirteen-year-old narrator is obsessed with thirteen-year-old Mayowa, her neighbor’s fiery new house help, who “the day after [they] met, … sent a missile of shit wrapped in newspaper like a gift.” Two of Arimah’s stories from this collection, “What it Means When a Man Falls from the Sky” and “Who Will Greet You at Home,” were shortlisted for the 2016 and 2017 Caine Prize for African Writing.
The fifteen short stories in Roxane Gay’s Ayiti swing between Haiti and the US, giving an unflinching portrait of Haitian immigrant life and the sometimes laugh-out-loud funny ways in which immigrants cope with othering. Several of the stories are flash fiction, a page or less. There’s Gerard, the defiant young man in “Motherfuckers,” who tells his non-French-speaking teacher “Je te deteste,” (I hate you) when she chirpily notes his accent and asks him to say something in French. In “Voodoo Child,” the Catholic narrator takes full advantage of the ignorance of a college roommate who, upon hearing that she’s from Haiti, assumes that she practices voodoo. “There is No ‘E’ in Zombi, Which Means There Can Be No You or We,” gives the story, set in Haiti, of Micheline, who wishes to hold on to Lionel, a man resistant to commitment. “Sweet on the Tongue” is a harrowing story that follows a young Haitian American woman whose honeymoon in Haiti with her new American husband ends in a kidnapping.
Winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies is a powerful, yet subtle collection of nine stories that examines the lives of Indian Americans and Indians, as well as relationships with people from Pakistan following partition. “A Temporary Matter” chronicles the lives of a couple as they spiral apart in the aftermath of a stillbirth. In “Interpreter of Maladies,” an Indian American woman on vacation in India with her husband and three children unburdens herself to the chauffeur and part-time translator shuttling her family around. Bibi, a young woman prone to seizures, is the focus of the story “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar,” set in India. After her mother dies in childbirth, Bibi is raised by her father, and then taken in but mistreated by her cousin Haldar and his wife after her father’s death.
The Dew Breaker, from Edwidge Danticat, features nine stories that revolve around a member of the Tonton Macoute (torturer for Haiti’s Duvalier regimes) and the people whose lives have been impacted by his misdeeds. We come to understand the Dew Breaker’s life in New York as a US immigrant, as well as his past in Haiti through the effect he has on different members of the Haitian American community. We meet his daughter, learn the terrible secret that complicates his relationship with his wife, and learn about the lives of his victims and their descendants, some of whom recognize him, or think they recognize him, in New York.
On her first day at an American high school, the protagonist of my novel, Hira, faces a dilemma. She considers herself well-read, but as she rifles through a thick textbook in her English Literature class, she realizes that none of the American authors in there are familiar to her. It is 2010, and she has just arrived for a yearlong exchange program, swapping urban Pakistan for rural Oregon. Her literary world up till then has consisted of Dickens, the Brontës, and Austen, literary staples of the subcontinental bourgeoisie. Who are Poe and Thoreau, she wonders?
Hira is the protagonist of my debut novel,American Fever. Just like her, I too spent my childhood inhaling the Victorians at the expense of reading writers closer to home. In my 20s, I tried to remedy this by actively seeking out and reading more South Asian writers, both in English and Urdu. The mandate to create any sensible list of South Asian writings is too broad and intimidating, so I present here a more contained list of fiction set in Pakistan, books that I have been influenced by at various stages of my writing life. It is as arbitrary as any list claiming to represent an entire nation can be.
The Women’s Courtyard by Khadija Mastoor, translated by Daisy Rockwell
The Women’s Courtyard follows Aliya, a young Muslim woman who moves in with her uncle’s family after her father is sent to jail for anti-colonial activity during the Partition years. The central, brilliant constraint of the novel is that the narration happens from within the interior courtyard of the house. We hear of the outside world only through newspapers, the hawkers on the street, or through the men who move freely in and out of the house. The book is at once a coming-of-age story, a Partition narrative, and an indictment of the patriarchal structures of the time.
While Muhammad Hanif is most well-known for his crackling debut, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, his second book about a Catholic nurse at Karachi’s squalid Sacred Heart Hospital is just as riveting, written with dark humor and a knowledge of the city gained through his long career in journalism. Alice performs healing miracles and falls in love, all the while navigating the challenges of being both a woman and a religious minority in urban Pakistan. Hanif is one of the best English satirists Pakistan has produced, and this book is glorious proof of that.
Love in Chakiwara and Other Misadventures by Muhammad Khalid Akhtar, translated by Bilal Tanweer
This collection recounts the ups and downs of various characters living in a small Karachi neighborhood, told in the wry voice of Iqbal Hussain Changezi, a bakery owner. And yet, even in the preface it is made clear that the main character of the story is the neighborhood Chakiwara itself—on the precipice of tremendous change in a post-independence Pakistan, still trying to hold on to the old ways. The book came out in the 1960s and won an Adamjee Award, but a 2016 English translation by Bilal Tanweer brought it back to the limelight and made it available to a wider audience.
The eponymous Faraz Ali, a police officer, is sent to the mohalla, Lahore’s red-light district, to cover up the murder of a young girl. Faraz himself is a product of the mohalla, the result of his powerful father’s tryst with a courtesan, and his return to the neighborhood sets into motion a series of events that could have a devastating effect on all involved. Lahore’s red-light district has been the subject of much fictional curiosity and inquiry, some excellent and other decidedly not. The most famous documenter remains Saadat Hasan Manto, whose stories of prostitutes and pimps set in the immediate aftermath of Partition are a firm part of Lahore’s literary imagination. Aamina Ahmad herself has spoken of her debt to Manto, and through this riveting novel, she creates a story of the neighborhood that is her own.
This short story collection by Farah Ali takes on a variety of ordinary lives—a mother coping with her son’s death, a young couple trying to keep their complicated relationship alive, and more. All thirteen stories are a masterclass in human psychology, and often use loneliness as their touchstone.
While Mohsin Hamid is acclaimed for his books Exit West and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, his lesser-known debut novel is the story of a Lahori stoner. Daru loses his job at a bank, starts sleeping with his best friend’s wife, and turns to drugs and crime, all during a single summer. Hamid provides a critique of class and excess among the elite, while at the same time writing a steamy love story.
Mirages of the Mind by Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi, translated by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad
It is hard not to wax poetic about Yousufi’s masterpiece, just as it is hard to categorize it. You can’t quite call it a novel; in fact, in the book’s preface, Yousufi almost forbids the reader from using that label. Set during the Partition, the book details the journey of Basharat and his family as they leave India for Pakistan. Speaking to the pain of migration without directly confronting it, Yousufi describes the wry, melancholic dawn of a new country using character sketches and palavering anecdotes. Mirages of the Mind is a linguistic feat, one that has been valiantly translated by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad.
“All worlds, fabricated or not, are equally real. And so they are equally unreal,” says Agnes, the narrator of The Book of Goose.
Yiyun Li’s newest novel is a propulsive and provoking exploration of what it means to create a world through words—not only that, but what it means to co-create. The Book of Gooseis set in a rural French town, struggling with poverty and lack of resources in the wake of World War II. It centers on the friendship between Agnes and Fabienne, two peasant girls on the cusp of adulthood; they define and complete one another, coming up with their own forms of communication, world-building, and philosophy. In their world, nonsense and reality take equal priority. Aided by the village postmaster, they come up with a plan to fool the world.
Li’s prose, as always, is luminous and cutting; despite the heavy topics, it’s also laden with a sly sense of humor (her wordplay game is exquisite, as are her metaphors!). The Book of Goose blurs the line between artistic exploitation and personal intimacy, as well as what it means to define—and seek out—happiness. To me, this novel offers its own system of philosophy and answers to the age-old questions: Who does a story belong to? How do we make sense of the world around us? How do we understand ourselves through other people?
Being a long-time fan, it was an honor to connect with Li over the phone, where we talked about the “sense-making” joy of fiction, passive narrators, and geese.
Jaeyeon Yoo: To start the conversation—how did this novel begin?
Yiyun Li: I was reading an old review that reviewed books about French prodigy children in the 1950s. One of the names was unfamiliar, Berthe Grimault. I started to look into this girl, who was a French peasant girl and nobody had heard of anything about her. She disappeared from history; I just liked that. I forgot how I found it, but someone donated personal papers to a library in upstate New York, from a woman who was the headmistress of an English finishing school. Her report was that this peasant girl was actually illiterate. She wrote really nasty words about this girl—said she was uncouth, did not read or write. I had a feeling [Berthe] might be a literary hoax, but I wasn’t as interested in the hoax. I found the whole thing was not quite making sense. Any time you write—if something doesn’t make sense, that makes you want to write.
JY: The friendship between the two girls, Agnes and Fabienne, was the heart of the novel for me; it reminded me of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. What drew you to focus on friendship and two girls rather than one girl?
YL: I didn’t think of the Neapolitan novels until I finished the novel. My editor mentioned and said, “Wow, you know, this pair reminds me of Elena Ferrante’s.” I am interested in girls, especially girls in their early teenage years or not even teenagers yet. I find children that age very interesting—fascinating, in a way, more than older teenagers. Their life is on the cusp between children and adulthood. They feel a lot of things. They see a lot of things. Most children that age, I wouldn’t say they have developed an entire system of talking and articulating their feelings and thoughts.
This pair, because of their upbringing and the lack [of resources], along with who Fabienne is, they invented their own language. They invented their entire system, without knowing it. That is special for girls that age. Something that came before the entire novel, before the plot, was this idea of Fabienne and Agnes sitting together and asking one another, “How do you grow happiness?” “Can you grow happiness?” They’re making a kind of nonsense, but it’s also just very sensible. It makes total sense, who they are and why they are making that nonsense. That’s their entire sort of system; they talk to each other in that way. And then, layer upon layer, they build their world of words.
JY: I think that system comes across very clearly. In that vein, I was struck by Agnes’s take on reality versus fiction, of how she frames their make-believe as closer to the truth. What’s the relationship between sense, truth, and fiction for you?
YL: Can I ask you a question? Why did you choose the word “sense” instead of “facts”? I think people would usually say, “What’s the difference between facts and truth?”
JY: I was listening to you, talking about how they make their own sense and how they use language as a way to make sense of the world around them. That’s why I chose that word.
YL: One thing is, when I am writing, I am not as interested in truth—I’m more interested in what you call “sense,” which I think is a very good word. It’s not that I’m not interested in truth, but I don’t think that truth is something that serves me. You can present something as “true,” but that might very well be not true, right? So, truth is not a pursuit—truth is sort of a byproduct for me. I think making sense is the most important thing for me when I write fiction; I try to make sense. Agnes starts this novel as a way of making sense of her younger years, through writing. For her, whatever truth is about her friendship with Fabienne and swindling the whole world, that truth is less interesting to her than saying, “I’m going to go on record and say this is what happened. This is our story.” Human force is to make sense of something, and to revisit. In that sense, I would say maybe my interest and Agnes’s have aligned here. Because I am not interested in truth as something outside of us, something you want to capture. When we talk about truth, oftentimes it’s already there; you write to reveal or pin down the truth. There’s something with sense that is very hard to pin down, something not for revealing—something rather for poking.
JY: Is this kind of sense-making what fiction is for you? Perhaps a way to help process what happens in the world around us?
What I say to explain my writing to myself is just to make sense of things—and sometimes, also, to make nonsense of things.
YL: Yes. I like that phrase, “sense-making.” Usually, what I say to explain my writing to myself is just to make sense of things—and sometimes, also, to make nonsense of things. I think I do sometimes do a little bit of wordplay. It’s like the two sides of the coin, as cliché as that is: it makes sense but it also makes nonsense. I just love that, I think that give me joy—when I can try to make sense of something and, in the meantime, I can also make some nonsense. Fabienne is also an expert in doing that.
JY: What was the process of doing historical research for The Book of Goose?
YL: The funny thing is, I probably did less research than most people would do when they write about a historical time. There’s a reason for that. My entire thing about getting into the character’s head—Agnes and Fabienne would never think of themselves as living in the post-WWII French countryside. Someone asked me, “How do you make that post-WWII French countryside convincing?” But when you ask that question, you are assuming that you are not from France, you are not from that time. Agnes and Fabienne are not going to think of themselves in that way. In other words, I tried to really imagine that Agnes is telling the story. She has no obligation to convince the reader, “I am a peasant girl from the French countryside.” What she really wants to present is: this is my world, this is the world I created with Fabienne. What is so unique for Agnes are those moments talking about happiness, growing happiness as beets and potatoes. Once I figured that out, research didn’t help me. Does that make sense? Because when you’re researching, you get a lot of facts—about what they eat, do. I gathered all these historical facts, but they cluttered her life. I felt, if I am in her head, that these things didn’t matter. That’s how I approach writing a book. That said, I did do research and I did read history books. For instance, a history book about American occupation in post-WWII France. The good thing about the way I research is that I forget right away [laughs]. The forgetfulness is helpful, actually, because it points out what’s not important.
The only thing I remember from my entire research is what I read about oranges. One day, the American military came to Western France. The French peasants had never seen oranges before then. Not only had they never seen oranges, but they had never seen anything in that orange color. “Orange”—as fruit or color or word—was not in their lives. For the local French peasants, the coloring changed in their lives when the Americans came. What an astonishing thing, right? I was not a French peasant, but I can tell you a relatively connected story. I grew up in Beijing in the late ’70s, early ’80s. Neon green, like the color of a tennis ball, wasn’t in our lives. We had a lot of colleges around, where we grew up. One day, there was an American student going to college, and he was doing inline skating in the crowded streets of Beijing. His inline skates were neon green. I had never seen that color in my life. That realization is a kind of sharpness. So, I read this historical anecdote and that’s why I took the orange as being meaningful [in the novel] because, across culture and history, there’s always a moment when you first encounter something—and that something stays with you.
JY: Agnes and Fabienne’s intimacy really blurred a lot of lines between the intellectual, the emotional, the romantic.
There’s always something uneasy with intimacy between people.
YL: Anytime intimacy exists, it’s never that simple or easy to mine. There’s always something uneasy with intimacy between people. The relationship between Agnes and Fabienne is romantic, but it’s also pre-sexual, right? They’re not sexual girls yet. Their intimacy and Fabienne [as a character] surprised even me towards the end—I only then realized how much despair she has. I liked the intimacy between them; I liked that Fabienne had to introduce [a male alter ego] to get a romantic relationship with Agnes, and then “killed” the boy. But it’s all from the characters. It’s not me, as an author, deciding to put things into the story. It’s really Fabienne’s doing, and she is probably a very good writer.
JY: At one moment, Agnes reflects, “Am I passive? I’ve noticed that Americans are quick to call a person passive, which is never meant as a compliment.” What did this type of “passive” narrator allow you to do? I suppose another way of asking this is: why Agnes, and not Fabienne?
YL: Yes, why can’t I have Fabienne be the narrator? Fabienne is very sharp—her entire being is sharp, and she’s always just trying to get to the point, the essence of things. Agnes is less sharp than Fabienne and also less pure, in the way she is attuned to all different people. She observes, she absorbs, but I also feel like she doesn’t have that kind of commitment to anything that Fabienne does. In American culture, we tend to call people like her “passive.” But I like characters like her, who are a little smudgy—muddier. I like that, because not everything is clear and she has a lot of ambivalence. And I think that attitude narrates her reading, opening up an interesting space: less pointed, less driven. By nature, I like that kind of narrator. Maybe I myself am one of those.
JY: I like these types of narrators, too. And I love those terms, “smudgy” and “muddy”—I wonder how they might connect to the idea of idiocy, because Agnes is often described as an “idiot” or “imbecile.”
YL: For some reason, I’m so fond of those two words. If I talk to myself, I would say, “Yiyun, you idiot.” I know these words are considered to be not that good. But [to me] it encompasses the capacity for not acting. Agnes possesses that capacity of not taking any action, not committing to anything, of waiting to see what’s going on. She can just plant herself like a tree. She’s not stupid, but she is slow. From the outside, that looks passive or idiotic. That, to me, often reflects some sort of depth. Fabienne is so sharp, so fun, so interesting, but I wouldn’t say she is extremely deep. I have a feeling that even Fabienne knows, that this kind of depth is what she can rely on [Agnes for]. Speaking of the two characters forming into one, what Fabienne doesn’t have is exactly this capacity for muddiness. But that’s why Agnes is always called by Fabienne as an idiot.
JY: Is this focus on slowness and idiocy part of what inspired the title?
YL: It’s a very strange title, right? I don’t know why, but the title came very early on. I just wanted to write a book called “The Book of Goose.” I think the goose is a fascinating kind of animal. If you look at language, the goose is never reflected well in language (in Chinese or in English): silly goose, wild goose chase. The goose is never a smart animal. But they are smart! They’re complicated! I feel very fond of geese. I thought this complexity, this mixture of a little slow, a little funny—it reminded me of Agnes.
JY: Do you keep geese?
Happiness is not going to be the product that you grow; it’s always something that, while you’re growing something else, just comes in momentarily—not everlasting, not enduring.
YL: For years and years, I said every spring that maybe we should have a couple of goslings. No one in my family liked that idea [laughs]. I still think about it. Where my husband grew up in China, they kept geese as guards. They are very fierce birds, so I don’t know—I don’t think my dog would like it. My dog is very timid.
JY: Something that’s prominent in this book, as well as your other works, are these themes of hindsight and retrospection. Could you speak more about the role of memory in your writing?
YL: If one wants to be glib, I think one will say all fiction or all literature is about memory. But that’s a little glib. We do live simultaneously, in multiple times in life. When I teach, I always say to my students, “You’re sitting here, listening to me lecture. Part of you is also living in the moment when you were thirteen, and you and your best friend were out there in the river swimming, or you were on a holiday.” I think the moment we consciously feel, we are proceeding multiple moments in our lives. It may not be even articulated or continued memories, but the moments of something impressionable from the past. And that’s important for my writing. I don’t usually write from beginning to the end. Because whatever happens now becomes a patterning—something has had to happen in the past, to make this happening at this moment. When we’re thinking and writing, we’re going to make certain moments connect—that are not actually connectable. It’s more about exploring what can be connected, even though there’s no connection on the surface. That’s why I love fiction, how you can do that.
JY: I think this connects beautifully to what you were saying before, about how fiction also allows you to make sense out of nonsense. I have one last question, which does veer a bit on the nonsensical. As Fabienne asks in the beginning of the novel to Agnes, “How do you grow happiness?”
YL: I would not grow happiness! If you try to grow happiness, it surely will fail, right? Happiness is probably a byproduct. It’s not going to be the product that you grow; it’s always something that, while you’re growing something else, just comes in momentarily—not everlasting, not enduring.
Wren was leaving New Yorkto live in Wyoming with a white man named Riley. Yessenia and Junip, her friends and business partners, told her not to go. Not because Riley was white but because it was Wyoming.
“I mean, why Wyoming?” Yessenia asked in short.
“Why-yo-ming?” Junip stretched out into something resembling a caterwaul.
They grew up outside Tuba City, Arizona—second-generation Nahua transplants and non-tribal citizens—but four years in the city had turned them into New Yorkers, as Yessenia and Junip explained it. They did care that Riley was white but neither was quite willing to admit that to Wren.
“It’s where Riley keeps his fortune,” Wren said, and left.
She called Yessenia a month later to say Riley hadn’t been lying. The house was huge. Three stages of the last ice age visible from the front porch, a little bit of the epoch before that one. She and Riley had begun living together in a bowl surrounded by some of the youngest mountains in the world. The silver noise of bull elk, bugling for love, kept Wren up most of the night. Black-footed trumpeter swans roosted in trees draped over a nearby lake Riley promised to dive into buck naked the first day of spring. As much as Wren looked forward to watching her stoic millionaire mountain man freeze his ass off, she admitted the idea of Riley’s naked body slipping under the frigid glass of the waters, parting the steady reflection of those broken mountain peaks, turned her on. She said that Riley had his pilot’s license, too. He’d fly them over Idaho to his beach house on the Oregon coast, where they’d take after the little oystercatchers dotting the shoreline and spit any pearls they found right back into the sea—they didn’t need them, that’s how rich they were, rich as birds. He’d already hired a contractor to convert the property’s thousand-square-foot barn into a ceramics studio for her and was looking into buying a storefront in Jackson where she could sell her wares to tourists and collectors, just like in New York. Yessenia and Junip could come stay with them during the summers, hike and kayak through the Grand Teton National Park, attend intertribal powwows, if they wanted.
“That does sound nice,” Yessenia was finally able to say, the fuzzy hum of the apartment’s lousy phoneline tickling her inner ear in the little silence that followed. Maybe it was Wren’s mountain line producing so much interference.
Yessenia rubbed her ear and stared into her water glass. Catching the light of a lamp, the water looked the color of olive oil. She pictured Wren marching contentedly through forest snow, the animals watching her without stirring as she passed.
Truthfully, Yessenia couldn’t trust anyone with so much money, and Wren had broken their childhood promise never to go anywhere without each other. Now Wren was half a country away from the only two women who could keep her safe. Not that Yessenia thought she could say any of this to her friend. Wren insisted she’d been rescued from New York and the chokehold of the struggling artist, that she’d made the smartest choice she was ever going to make in her life. Instead, Yessenia tried to believe her. She tried very hard to be happy for her.
“We won’t be having a wedding,” Wren eventually clarified. “But you should visit, you really should. The two of you would make a killing in Jackson, I’m telling you.”
For the second time that evening, Yessenia considered the invitation. There was no money for travel. Not visiting could be a punishment, at least for as long as they all still meant something to each another.
“Maybe next year,” she said, and then, to get Wren off the phone, and because maybe it was true, “We’re happy for you.”
Four years straight, Yessenia made excuses for why she and Junip couldn’t visit; each year she would listen for the disappointment in Wren’s voice, the regret and hesitation in her own, and hang up.
Junip and Wrenwere ceramicists. Growing up, they took lessons from their mothers, Navajo women from Tuba City, and a white woman from Lake Tahoe who lived like a lizard person in the desert between Tuba and Bitter Springs. They blended principles, techniques, systems, and meanings. They could make anything out of clay; they only kept making cups and plates and bowls and pitchers because people liked having things that helped them hold on to other things. Taking one of their saucers or butter dishes or bolo pendants into your hands, however, you sensed something beyond the object’s purpose, some sort of indigenous Michelangelo genius, the way the items were as thin as bone tools, fell right into place anywhere, could double as body parts whenever you felt lonely.
Yessenia was a weaver and a loom artist, well versed in Nahua, Navajo, and modern techniques as well, and the three hid behind her shawls year-round. With every garment, she tried to make something to make a woman appear larger, the way a bird might when it feels threatened. It worked sometimes. Junip would come for Yessenia some nights, to yell at or hit her, and Yessenia would open her arms like a condor, her shawl dropping and spreading at her sides, and send Junip stumbling backward to the couch or bed to fall asleep. Afterward, Yessenia would search for something else she’d woven, a blanket or even a towel, to drape over Junip while she slept, to offer her the protection too. Sleep was to be at sea, her mother had told her, a person couldn’t be any more vulnerable. Once, wrapping Junip in a tzalape, Yessenia heard Junip begin to speak to her from her dreams, the sea.
“I hate you,” Junip said, over and over. “I hate you, I hate you.”
They could fight over anything, but those days Yessenia and Junip mostly fought over whose idea it had been to leave Arizona in the first place; whose fault it was Wren had left; how they were supposed to keep on living in New York now that they’d lost a third of their income and a fourth of the rent they shared with a Jamaican man named Steven. Though, Junip had been violent with Yessenia before Wren left and long before they’d ever made it to New York.
Standing over Junip’s furious, sleeping body that night, Yessenia thought of Arizona. A land of double-wides and LSD and long, droning hours belonging to the Navajo old-timers who’d tell them to shut up and listen to the world as it had been before the world they’d been born into. And not just the one the young girls had been born into, but the one everyone had, as far as memory could recall. Was it the same world her people remembered? The Otomí? The Mazahua?
Stepping away from Junip, Yessenia recalled the Kaibab National Forest. The time she, Junip, and Wren dragged a gas generator up a hill through knee-high cliffrose to watch a scary movie with a bunch of ponderosa pine. Looking over her shoulder as she climbed, Yessenia was dismayed by what she saw. Hummingbirds driving the clear-cut lane they’d left behind, butter-colored petals flying off in the wind. It stopped her where she stood, and Wren had to turn to her and say, “There’s plenty more where that came from. It’ll grow back,” to get her moving again. When they reached the trees, they set up camp, passed a joint around, and ate sandwiches they had packed while they waited for it to get dark. After nightfall, they fired up the gas generator and climbed into their canvas tent, where they’d also positioned a miniature TV and a VHS player, both borrowed from the high school. Seated atop their blankets and sleeping bags, the girls lit another joint and pushed play. The Amityville Horror. Within minutes, Wren was asleep, snoring and farting long before the fake blood started to ooze. Glancing at Wren’s sleeping figure, Junip asked Yessenia to please stay up with her.
“Are you scared?” Yessenia said.
“I just don’t want to be left alone,” Junip answered, and turned to look back at the tiny screen.
Like most of the movies they watched, The Amityville Horror made Junip laugh. People died horrible deaths in the movie and Junip laughed. Blood splattered and sprayed and Junip laughed.
Watching her friend watch the movie, Yessenia wondered how anyone could get so much pleasure out of violence. It wasn’t like people didn’t have violence in their own real lives. When the film ended, Junip caught Yessenia staring at her in confusion and said it was all the stuff about the Indian burial grounds that made her find the whole thing ridiculous.
“White people are so funny,” she whispered, careful now not to wake Wren, though she hadn’t seemed to care much at all while the movie was playing. “Losing their property is their biggest fear.”
“That’s what you got from the movie?” Yessenia said.
“Yessie, the whole movie is about a family trapped in a bad real estate investment. No harm would’ve come to them if they were just willing to cut their losses. And doesn’t the white man know they’re the ones haunting us?”
Yessenia kept staring at her friend, lit by the light of the credits, the soundtrack music warbling as they breathed, the generator roaring beside them through the tent’s canvas wall. Wren had already stolen all of the blankets. Junip was the smartest person Yessenia knew. She simplified the world to a complex state of insignificance.
“Sometimes I think you’re too smart to be hanging out with people like me and Wren,” Yessenia said, hurting so bad but also amazed by her friend’s insights and shaken still by the movie. Yessenia didn’t know if she was haunted. Wasn’t their little group just left all alone? Was it better to be haunted or alone?
Was it better to be haunted or alone?
“We’re all too smart for this place,” Junip said. “And someday we’re all going to get out. And not because of my smarts, but Wren’s looks.”
They stared at the sleeping Wren again. Her even skin, her endless hair. Her even brows and thin nose. Junip was intelligent. Wren was beautiful. Yessenia didn’t know what she was.
“And your talent,” Junip said, reaching to touch Yessenia’s hands. They’d worn her shawls up the hill, as the sun had set, and they were wearing them now. Wren got tangled in hers as she tossed and turned. Junip let go and instantly Yessenia felt brittle, incapable of moving her own fingers without losing them.
“It’s too stuffy in here. I need some air,” Junip said and unzipped the tent. “And I gotta turn off this damn generator. The squirrels are trying to sleep!”
Yessenia knew just the ones, with their tasseled ears and red spines and shocking, white tails. She followed Junip into the cold. For the squirrels, for Junip, for herself. The sky, an ice cave of gauzy constellations, beared down on them. Junip turned off the generator and, within seconds, took off all Yessenia’s clothes. She left on her own. Within seconds, Yessenia lay down her hardening body on the tilting Earth and spread herself like she was about to have a baby. Brilliant Junip moved her hands all around. Hypothermic from the waist up, fevered from the navel down, Yessenia stared straight into the sky, her breath casting obscuring clouds in even streams beneath the starlight. She did nothing with her own hands. The stars were hers; her body, Junip’s. She listened for the world as it had been but heard only the world as it was.
In the end, it was Wren’s beauty that delivered them, the beauty of the objects she created. A shelf of bowls in a restaurant gift shop and an impassioned directive from a woman from New York on an Artist’s Retreat.
“Move to Chelsea. Make some real money. I’ll help you.”
The girls rented two corners of a shop in Brooklyn that people rarely visited. Mainly, people came in looking for a bathroom. Twice, someone ODed on the toilet, and the staff had to put up a hand-painted sign. They subsisted on each other, living in a two-bedroom with Steven. Yessenia and Junip slept in one room, Steven the other, while Wren slept on the couch. The eighties crept on with glorious indifference toward them for forty-six months before Riley appeared in the shop.
Wren’s arms, dipped in plaster, from her fingers to her elbows, were the color of milk when he found her. Her black, black hair fell over her shoulders, so long now she could tuck the ends into her shoes. Yessenia and Junip watched her fall in love and disappear. It took two months.
“Wren did this to us,” Yessenia whispered to Junip. She knew Steven was already awake and listening. He’d want to talk in the morning. “This is all Wren’s fault,” she said again, louder this time.
Four grueling yearsafter Wren’s first phone call from Wyoming, Riley was dead. Wren had killed him. Again, she called to speak with Yessenia on the phone. Again, Yessenia listened without saying much at all. The murder was totally legal, Wren explained. Self-defense. She’d gone before a judge and jury and emerged triumphant, as a kind of Rosie the Riveter of battered wives, a Take No Shit Sheila, she said. Women everywhere believed they could do it too! Shotgun blast in the living room, a ruined rug. Buckshot collecting in the arm and knee pits of the room, between frills and door hinges.
“He was beating me, Yessenia. He was going to kill me someday. But it’s over now.”
“I’m so sorry,” Yessenia said.
Junip watched her from the other end of the apartment the night of the phone call, shifting, in her usual way, from curious to upset. She didn’t like Yessenia talking on the phone too long. She didn’t care to be left out of anything.
“I’m not,” Wren said. “I’m just glad I had a gun and knew how to use it. Might not hurt to have one in the apartment the next time Junip goes on a rampage.”
Yessenia didn’t say anything, stared at Junip as she began angrily moving their few things around the kitchen.
Wren said, “I’m just kidding, Junip’s not that bad.”
Yessenia gagged into the receiver. She’d had no idea. AIDS was crawling through the walls in New York; a team of crafty youths was extracting stereos from every car on the block. They didn’t own a car, but they could imagine the special kind of violation that must come from hearing your hi-fi play someone else’s favorite radio station as they drove past your window. Her friend had been abused, had lost her husband, was a murderer no matter what a judge or jury said. She shouldn’t have ignored her all these years, but when Yessenia tried to comfort her, Wren told her to give it a rest.
“All I need now is a hand moving my stuff out of the godforsaken state,” she said.
“What is it?” Junip hissed.
“Wren needs our help,” Yessenia said, cupping the receiver.
Three stages of the ice age. Part of another one. Wren could afford the movers but none of them would have the heart it’d take to really see it through properly. There were enough racks and points and antique Navajo rugs in it for Yessenia and Junip to pay their Brooklyn rent for a few years if they only came out and saw her, helped pack a U-Haul, and caravanned back to Arizona.
Off the phone, Yessenia told Junip everything.
“What’s the weather like this time of year?” was all Junip could think to ask, simplifying the situation into a complex state of insignificance.
Landing in theJackson airport on a blue October afternoon, they were only a few minutes on the ground when they saw Wren drive up in an old mustard-colored Jeep. Her hair was short. The truck had belonged to Riley’s father; like many things, it was Wren’s in the end. The man had named the truck Mister. Wren called it Mister, too. An Alaskan huskie named Cheer Up sat in the back with Junip while Yessenia rode up front, choking Mister’s dial for anything but country and bible babble, settling for Corinthians read in a twang before turning it off altogether.
The reunion didn’t feel four years in the making, and the drive along the Grand Teton National Park was too beautiful to take death seriously. Sprawling stiff yellow prairie and purple sage. An endless stand of evergreen. Quaking aspen, dropping their yellow leaves and flashing their witch eyes, kept watch over everything. You could wear the aspen chalk as sunblock, drink the earth in a tea. The mountain peaks shined with something called alpenglow.
“Riley called them the tits. Used to bother me, but I guess that’s what tetons means, in French. He’d say, ‘Hey, Wren, ain’t life the tits?’ He had a lot of fun getting me worked up.”
Yessenia listened for misery in her friend’s voice, an openness to regret. She needed regret, she decided. Wren had looked so happy, waving at them from her mustard-colored truck, her hair shorn like the girls’ in the punk clubs, a smiling dog by her side. Yessenia had been in rooms with men and women Junip had slept with, attended a birthday party and talked for twenty minutes with an uncle who used to feel her up when she was a kid, but being beside Wren contorted her, blurred her insides. She needed remorse.
“He wanted to put up a billboard,” Wren said, “to remind people that all of this was worth fighting for. He had guns against animals and guns against men.”
Yessenia imagined the billboard blocking the face of a mountain, a bullet hole tearing through the image or text the way bullet holes blew through the road signs back home in the desert.
“And you offed him with a shotgun like the beast he was,” Junip said, and leaned forward, husky hair dashing her eyebrows when Yessenia turned to cut her a look.
Over the stick shift, Wren said, “Well, I wanted to get my point across.”
“And you didn’t even need a billboard,” Junip said.
Silent, Yessenia stared at the back of her friend’s ear. She’d never seen this part of Wren’s body. What was it for? What could it help you hold? Michelangelo genius still throbbed inside, she tried to remember.
Yessenia saw the house and what a beautiful life it could’ve been, may have been for a little while. A massive cabin of blond, flaying timber with long windows encasing the sky like tall glasses of water. A house large enough for parties and guests but mostly to be alone. “Why Wyoming? Why so far?” she’d asked Wren. “Because Riley wants me for himself,” Wren had said. “Wyoming is somewhere to belong to no one else.” Yessenia was glad no children were involved, but her mother had said a woman without a heart for children was like a canteen filled with sand. In every home Yessenia had ever occupied—apartments, trailers, tents—she’d always imagined space for children, for the idea of them, the consummate. From Mister’s front seat, she could see Wren and Riley’s home in the Tetons was a basement excavated, propped on stilts, emptying. A ruin of selfishness at the end of the world, the beginning of another. She was glad children weren’t involved, but how else was it supposed to have ended? How was Wren supposed to regret the inevitable?
At the foot of the icy Tetons, Yessenia gulped the hard, glacial air, watched herself approach the house with bags in hand, Junip’s and her own, in the cabin windows’ reflection. An unsteady Sherpa with stale apple on her breath, a childless woman with distended breasts sloshing across her broad chest. The Puerto Rican girls she knew called her Poca Tonta. The look made white men laugh at her and white women want to trample her into the gutter on the streets of New York. Junip and Wren, talking to one another behind her in the reflection, were like avian twins, sisters from the same egg, with necks to climb. The only difference between them was Junip’s teeth were destroyed and Wren’s were not. If they never opened their mouths, they’d both be perfectly beautiful.
Inside the enormous cabin, Yessenia was taken aback by what eerily effective work Wren had done cleaning up after the murder. Not a trace of buckshot, no smell, no gore. A little island of blood on a Navajo rug, which Wren pointed out with a shrug. Some things go and they’re gone. Yessenia remembered watching a man’s body burn into the dry air when she was little. Different from the Navajo and Nahua customs, they’d gone to California for the funeral, a family friend. His spirit, she’d assumed, was probably that quaking heat-air gumming up the atmosphere just above the flames’ tallest point. She didn’t pay much attention to the metaphysics of most situations, so she was never sure, but she was almost certain all spirits had at least the power to congeal. She saw the tits from the kitchen windows, a woman laid on her back, tethered to the heavens by her nipples, a kind of religious torture.
“Know Southern women during the Civil War were jarring their pee to help make gunpowder for the troops?” Wren said. She was knocking around, putting together a snack.
Yessenia tried to see the antebellum ladies napping in their hot, cobwebbed parlors surrounded by glinting jars of golden urine. It was important for her to see the physical aspects of things people said. In New York, she’d almost painted Riley’s murder to quit its lurching question in her mind. Now she could see she’d have been way off. A dead body in the home was like a dead body in the street; it’d most likely just have been lying there, for a while, at least. She’d seen a body in the street once. A boy napping in jeans and gym shoes, his shirt probably crumpled in his mom’s apartment, on the couch—New York was sweltering. His face had a smoky opening in it the size and grimace of a swallowhole.
“Who told you that?” Junip said, asking about the pee.
“Read it in a letter some chick wrote me. Crazies from all over write me stuff like that every day,” Wren said, and put fistfuls of pretzels into elliptical bowels, half-moons of ice into whiskey.
“Fan mail?” Yessenia asked.
“I guess that’s what it’s called,” Wren said.
Then Junip shouted, “Bingo!”
She’d rolled a doobie one-handed, unnoticed, like a miracle.
“Oh, thank God,” Wren said, and rushed for some matches in the stone and walnut kitchen. “Riley wasn’t exactly a homeopath,” she said over her shoulder. “More of a psychopath.”
The oil was two generations family-owned and in Texas. Wren had seen the fields once, the tall crows going at it. “How I make the Earth move, let me name the ways,” Riley had told her, and for a while it seemed like there wasn’t a single object on planet Earth that wasn’t connected to his field in some way. She’d asked him why Wyoming. He’d said because oil was dirty, he’d smelled it from the womb, it’d tanned the water he drank, and it was the war paint on his daddy’s face when he beat his mother. When his brother and cousin died in a plane crash, up in oil flames, and it was all his, and he could afford to be away from it, he went to the cleanest place in America. Glacial-scrubbed. Wasn’t there oil in Wyoming? Still, the rocks were so sharp they winnowed the air. For Yessenia, too thinly. In the kitchen, as she sucked at the canoeing joint, curled and gray brittle paper flecking to the timber rafters, she felt faint and had to find a stool. Outside, onyx colors were chasing after the pink setting sun. The chill in the house was a solid, and the women had circled close. Cheer Up had made himself into a neat pile in the middle of them.
“So, what was the last straw?” Junip asked.
Junip was capable of asking anyone anything. The ideas came from her ruined teeth, which had always been gray—a side effect of an antibiotic—and were blackening now. She was the one who got them rides when they were kids, scored them dope, collected spare change for beers; she was their pushy salesperson in Brooklyn. It was her brilliance, all grown-up. She’d directed Yessenia’s life since that night in the Kaibab Forest. Junip, twenty-four now, the only one of them who’d grown up with a father. Yessenia remembered it taking Junip three months to finally take her clothes off in front of her, to show her the body she’d somehow hidden their whole lives. It was speckled with cigarette burns.
Wren pinched the remaining weed, soot, and paper to a ball and swallowed it like a pill.
“That’s what the lawyer wanted to get straight. He said if we could tell a clear enough story, the jury would understand why I did it and believe that I’d done the right thing. He gave me this triangle diagram and was like, ‘Okay, this corner is you marrying Riley, this opposite corner of the base is you shooting Riley, the peak’s the worst thing that he ever did to you, you pick something extra bad for that one and two or three events scaling up from the marriage and two or three others scrambling down to the death.’ What that guy didn’t understand was being married to Riley wasn’t like climbing a mountain and killing him certainly wasn’t like coming off one either.”
Being married to Riley wasn’t like climbing a mountain and killing him certainly wasn’t like coming off one either.
Then her eyes were off like buoys, bobbing, blinking in the darkening room. Yessenia, high, wheezing, hoping her clutching lungs weren’t actually making the sound she was hearing in her ears, caught sight of a dusky cylinder beside the fireplace. It wasn’t a fire poker, but probably the murder weapon; she didn’t look at it long enough at first. She’d been the one Wren had called, but Junip was the one who’d said they’d go. Upon second glance, the shotgun slanted against the stone wall like James Dean.
Breathe, she told herself. Hesitation had followed Yessenia like a sick dog her whole life. It would inflame and grow lethargic and keep her from herself and other important things. When Wren called, she was glad the old dog was still kicking around. Wren had killed her husband. The will designated her heir apparent to his wealth—the wells belonged to a board of trustees or a company, but some inexplicable amount of money was automatically hers. Breathe. Yessenia had watched enough TV to know the virtues and trappings of the black widow. Even if she believed Wren had had a right to kill Riley, which she didn’t know if she had, there was the question of what Wren was owed in the end: her freedom, sure, but a fortune? Aware of her hair pushing through the skin atop her skull, her cuticles overwhelming her nails, Yessenia noticed Wren’s white Keds skimming across the dark wood floor. Who wore white shoes to a murder scene?
“What will you do with all the money?” she asked Wren. “Whatever I want,” Wren said.
Breathe.
Around midnight they were all high and drunk. Junip was using the unloaded shotgun like a cane. A gate outside swung open and shut, and Yessenia thought wind rarely exercised so much courtesy. Reagan’s ghastly old face was on the TV. She wouldn’t have noticed it then, but years later she’d reflect on how everything on TV in the eighties looked like a dream—it was the resolution.
“And you just keep sleeping in that bed?” Junip asked. They’d talked of nothing else.
“It was my bed too. And now it’s just mine. The movers are gonna kill themselves getting it into the truck. Solid mahogany,” Wren said.
Yessenia, a distant planet, muttered, “I thought we were your movers.” “We’ll move the little things,” Wren said.
Yessenia couldn’t take it anymore. The ambiguity. The indifference. The altitude, the alcohol, the weed.
“You don’t feel any guilt?” Yessenia said.
She wasn’t fearless, she just didn’t drink often. “About what?”
“Killing your husband.”
“What part of he was beating me do you not understand?” “You could’ve left. You could’ve come home.”
“She is home,” Junip said.
“You just didn’t want to give this up,” Yessenia said.
“Why don’t you run away?” Wren asked Yessenia. “Why don’t you go home?” she said, and somehow this made Junip smile.
“What did you think was going to happen?” Yessenia said. “You came out here knowing it was going to be a nightmare.”
“It was heaven for a year, Yessenia. I had no idea what Riley was capable of.”
“He was a man,” Yessenia said.
“Steven is a man,” Junip said.
“Riley was a straight white man,” Yessenia said, toggling between Wren and Junip, uncertain with whom she was arguing, what she was arguing.
“Not all of us get off on women,” Wren said. Yessenia felt saliva readying her throat.
“And if you knew something back then, why didn’t you say anything?” Wren said.
Yessenia hadn’t said anything because she was scared. She didn’t say anything now because she was scared.
“I’m not asking for anyone’s forgiveness,” Wren said, lowering her voice. “That’s not why I asked you two to come. No forgiveness, no guilt. I asked you two to come get me the fuck out of here. To put an end to this. That’s it.”
“You weren’t supposed to go without us,” Yessenia said.
“You’re right, Yessie,” Wren said. “But we’re together now, aren’t we? And it’s a miracle that we are. Not just me. All of us. It’s not anything but a miracle.”
Yessenia knew what she meant. Junip did too. They both knew Wren was right. They all knew sleep might’ve been a sea, but life aboveground, on dry land, in the desert, where everything else had a stinger or an armored face . . . Yessenia tried to remember how many girls. How many girls? Everyone talked about how the men had been picked up in buses and never came back. Only a few people ever brought up the girls. In Yessenia’s mind, each of the disappeared, when she pictured them, were always walking, the last you saw of them were their elbows and the soles of their shoes. But then she knew they’d later been seen washing their faces in truck stop restrooms, holding a Budweiser in a dance hall in Perry or Cheyenne, answering an ad for an at-home nurse in Tulsa. She knew a stranger had seen the last of them before they disappeared forever.
Wren said, “And I’m glad we’re together, even here. I need you, Yessenia. It’s so important that you came.”
She grabbed Yessenia by the hands, and for a moment, Yessenia did not feel so brittle.
“The kindest man I’ve ever met was a bear trainer,” Wren said, weaving her head side to side to stay in Yessenia’s sightline. “He was Riley’s friend, he came to the house once, he didn’t bring his bear. I told him all about you and Junip and our childhood and he listened and asked questions and didn’t drink too much and told me all about his wife and kids. You’ve seen his bear in movies and commercials, I promise. He was sitting right where you are when I asked him, ‘Let’s say Debra Winger was acting in a scene with your bear and your bear starts to go haywire and tries to eat Debra Winger’s face off, would you shoot it?’ He didn’t like this question, said he didn’t like to imagine it, but if something like that did happen he’d let it happen. ‘Can’t blame a bear for being a bear,’ is what he said at first, and then he told me a story about the first time he and the bear went to the southern hemisphere. They got off the plane in the middle of nowhere, someplace in South America, and the first thing the bear did was look up at the night sky and start crying. They had a police escort and the cop raised his gun to the animal and the trainer put his own body between them. The bear was only frightened, he said. Because the bear couldn’t recognize any of the constellations in the night sky. He’d been all over Europe and the United States and never made a fuss because he knew exactly where home was. In South America, he was lost. The trainer said he couldn’t kill a thing that read the stars or experienced the fear of getting lost. You’re right, I should’ve known. Because that’s what a man is. A person who forgives the animal. You’ve been right about everything forever.”
Wren showed Yessenia and Junip to their room. Beside the bed was an Afghan loom on which the fine startings of a shawl were strung, stuck and dangling. Outside was a tallow moon. Moose, beleaguered with rut, horned in the woods, and when Wren left, Junip gave Yessenia a devilish look. Yessenia hated it when she didn’t want to have sex because she always had to anyway. Getting turned on took courage first.
“I’m gonna pee,” Yessenia said, and the way she said it made it sound like she was taking a stance, but she really wasn’t.
In one of the upstairs bathrooms, from a few feet away, overlooking the toilet, a mounted doe watched you go. The taxidermist had given her a pulse in her throat, which he’d forced softly to the left. Her ears and nose were tuned to something, the hunter or her children, while her black eyes kept forward, dividing her captivation. What was the last thing the doe saw? Food? A skunk ambling through the litter? Or was the doe still seeing, watching now a stoned woman on a cold porcelain toilet, pretending to still be peeing? A male deer might gore a man during mating season. Female deer occasionally trample people when they think their young are in danger. Winding her hand with toilet paper, the expensive kind that left her feeling fuzzy and unclean, Yessenia remembered the month she’d worked as a janitor at an all-girls school when they first moved to New York and the smell of the rag traps she emptied every day. Waiting, she thought she could smell that rich and tarring scent in the room. She tucked down, but it wasn’t coming from her. It was drifting off the doe’s tongue. She’d only just located the clammy toilet handle under her armpit when she heard Junip shout her name and then “Wren!” Someone’s feet running down the hall. Fists pounding at the bathroom door.
“Yessenia, Yessenia, Yessenia!” Junip’s voice called from the other side.
She’d barely opened the bathroom door when Cheer Up came charging in, barking and circling, his whole body an electric fizz. He pointed to the doe and then went tearing around again.
“There’s somebody in the house,” Junip was saying, but Yessenia was after Cheer Up, smoothing his collar fur, telling him it was okay while she choked on that smell. She’d managed to pull her pants back up but hadn’t buttoned them yet.
“Wren, is that you?” Junip called into the hall.
Cheer Up snapped and growled, let out a chirp.
“Goddamnit, shut that dog up,” Junip said.
But Cheer Up wouldn’t stop barking, outing the doe, drawing whoever Junip was talking about to them in the upstairs bathroom.
“What is that awful smell?” Junip said, and reached down to grab Cheer Up by the snout at a pass. He bit her, and she paused for a spell, looking at her blood on her hand before kicking the dog in its side. Bewildered, Cheer Up quit for a split second and then nearly knocked over both women racing back into the hallway.
“You hurt him!” Yessenia said, and Junip had to grab her to keep her from running after Cheer Up.
From the bathroom, in Junip’s arms, Yessenia heard the animal’s nails on the stairs, galloping down in the way she knew old dogs do, hip swiveled, front paws in quick succession, back paws in quick succession, tail a swinging side gate, the whole thing an unstoppable mess. And then she did hear him stop at the landing and could picture the dog looking onto the darkness, at something in the pooling shadows. The courteous wind. Their visitor. The man. Wren appeared in the doorway with a shotgun in her hands, a different one, more beautiful and polished, but she just as soon darted off too, down the stairs, leaving Cheer Up where he stood. “Argos, my ass!” Wren shouted, bursting out the front door.
From the landing, with Cheer Up by her side, Yessenia heard the report of buckshot on the field and its echo. The living room was lit up and there was nothing there but the stool on which she’d sat, greasy drained tumblers, the sleeping TV. Junip slinked past her and met Wren as she came back through the open front door.
“Think I scared him off,” Wren said. There was a little bluing on the gun or some effect of night.
“What the hell is going on?” Yessenia said.
“There was someone in the house,” Junip said.
“Don’t know how, I set the alarm. Must’ve shut itself off, didn’t go off when I ran through the front door,” Wren said. “Shit.”
“I don’t understand,” Yessenia said.
“I was lying in bed and Wren comes in and whispers that she hears someone downstairs, then I see someone running down the hall, Wren darts off to grab a shotgun and that’s when I came after you,” Junip said. “Thought he was going to get you.”
“He’s gone?” Yessenia said.
“On foot, he’s still on the property for at least another thirty minutes in any direction, which means I ought to hunt him down while it’s still considered trespassing,” Wren said.
“No way,” Junip said. “Just call the police.”
“He’s long gone by the time anyone gets out here,” Wren said.
“It doesn’t matter, he’s out of the house,” Yessenia said. “We should get out of the house too. We’ll come back when the movers get here.”
“I’m not leaving this house until I’m done with it,” Wren said. “Did you even see him?” Yessenia asked Wren.
“Just his shape,” Wren said.
“You too?” she asked Junip.
“Just his shadow, yeah.”
“Either each of you stays here or each of you takes a gun and flashlight,” Wren said.
“What the hell, Wren?” Yessenia said.
“Those are your options. And if you see him and you can’t shoot him, you aim at him anyways and you start screaming like hell,” Wren said.
Rileyhad these beautiful boots, and when they stepped into the studio in Crown Heights that first time, Wren asked him if she could put them in a shadow box for display. Rattlesnake. He’d killed and skinned each of the serpents himself. His friend crafted them into the size-fourteen masterpieces from which his giant body erupted. Stooped and slouching a bit at forty, he suffered from adventure, he was still beautiful in stone-wash jeans and a wrinkled oxford that Brooklyn spring day. There was ash in his brown hair and his glasses were circular and gold and he could take them off as he pleased and make it around the workshop no problem. Yessenia was working the register and Wren was working the slip. Wren’s hair was long enough and her waist narrow enough that she could wear her hair as a belt, which she sometimes did at parties, much to the distress of her roots and ends, but the crowd usually loved it. Artisan textiles and wares, that was Riley’s passion, and Wren said she didn’t like big cities that much anyway. She never asked them what they thought about Riley. Had she, Yessenia would’ve said she liked him a lot. He’d checked himself out of his hotel in Manhattan and stayed with them in their dingy apartment for a time. He cooked and cleaned and stomped roaches but let mice carry on their way and he was easy and good to anyone who walked through the door no matter who they were or what they were on or who they’d slept with and he knew more Nahua history than they did and he once remarked to Yessenia and Junip that he knew love when he saw it and he wasn’t at all the zealot he could’ve been, had every right to be, but was instead kind and gentle and smelled of cigars and cedar shavings. “He’s like Teddy Roosevelt, or something,” Junip had said. He reminded them of a time they’d never known. Before Yessenia’s and Wren’s fathers and half the other men were carted off to Vietnam never to return. A time immemorial and unimaginable, with separate plans for a different future. Maybe love had lived after all, Yessenia had thought, icing the olive marks Junip had left on her neck. Maybe this white man would rescue her too. But then Riley must’ve sickened with some evil in Wyoming. Maybe it was those boots that bit him. He cut Wren’s hair because he was finding it in his shit. He told her she wouldn’t get a studio after all because her work was shit. He beat the shit out of her in that magic home of his beneath the mountains. Yessenia had had no idea and now she did, and Riley hadn’t been bitten by anything but himself.
At some point in the night the moon had guttered, a totally different phase than the one Yessenia had seen from the bedroom window less than an hour earlier. Her flashlight caught the moisture on the black air. Wren had gone her own way, and Junip was hunched over her rifle like a plastic army man, even the way she stepped was reminiscent of their toy feet, bound in the mold. Ahead of them was a bristling wall of evergreen, colorless in the dark. Cheer Up, repaired from his spell on the staircase, went headlong into the underbrush. The Pluto of Wren’s flashlight bobbed against some tall grass beside Yessenia.
“Cheer Up knows what’s up,” Junip whispered.
Junip walked enough paces to shrink to the size of Yessenia’s thumbnail. The glacial air and marijuana turned Yessenia’s thoughts thin and useless. Drained of adrenaline, she could hardly muster fear. Her great-est anxiety was an asthma attack, though she did not have asthma. Her every cell focused entirely on staying awake. But the trees were brushy and drowsy. She was looking at things or nothing changing shapes in a field of charcoal static. She looked for Junip, but Junip was buried in the dark. She listened for Wren, but heard only the rutting moose, the calls and the woodsy sound of their thrashing antlers. An elk bugle. Cheer Up did not bark or whine. The night swirled and swirled.
Then, from out of the dark scribbled wood came something like a sliver of soap. Milky like soap, slick and eroded to something smooth and tenuous like soap. In relief against the blackened wood, the white, soapen figure, as it drew closer, became not so small and not so tender, but more than six and a half feet tall, broad, stalking, and belonging to a man who was also stark naked in the gelid, open air. She could only see so much and so she composed the rest from memories. The truth was plain and awful. He had returned. He’d come back. There was no mistaking it. She’d seen the body before, swimming in a pool at the Y. While everyone else was busy staring at the black python streaking behind Wren’s head as she swam, Yessenia had been watching Riley’s body scale the green and generous length of the pool. She’d sat on those shoulders with that smoky head between her thighs to chicken fight Junip, who sat atop Steven’s rickety frame. Nude Riley, back from the dead, paused midstride and turned to look directly at Yessenia. His ghost eyes were great and she knew he saw her perfectly without his glasses. He remembered this woman. The body beneath the body, the muscle-strapped skeleton, warped the surface of his skin, like a baby kicking inside. She’d seen a cat twitch like that. Why had she come to antagonize him at his home in the mountains? The gun in her hands, the last living thing he’d ever seen, he wouldn’t let it have him again. He’d died ashamed of the shock and surprise. Never again. Riley. He’d cleaned himself of oil, she could see this now as he moved towards her, walking, running.
When he got to her, Riley would reach into her mouth and tear out her tongue, rip her hair from her skull, break her legs, and eat her for coming here, for seeing the shameful spot where he’d died. She saw her future yards away. Feet away. She saw it practically upon her, it was also her end, and then Riley’s naked body tore off, dashed into a shadow, and left in its place the massive bloom of a moose charging out of the wood, the animal’s broad, winged antlers. Cheer Up was dancing at its legs. Wren was shouting, “Shoot it, Yessenia! Shoot it!” Yessenia could feel it moving the ground. She could smell its yearning as it charged her, rearing its headpiece into the dying moon.
The beast ran for some time beyond her, rutting and dying before crashing like an aircraft, peeling up a curling dermis of earth in its final slide. The veins in the bull’s antlers ebbed and winced with the last of it. A reddened cave had opened up in its neck. Junip and Wren were panting with Cheer Up, and Yessenia could barely sip the air. She had no idea who’d taken it down. An elk kept bugling in the death silence.
“It was Riley in the house, wasn’t it?” Yessenia said.
Wren bent over, panting.
“Riley’s come back, hasn’t he?”
“Did you see someone?” Wren said.
“I saw Riley.”
“Did you shoot him?”
“I couldn’t.”
“Why didn’t you shoot him?” Wren said.
Yessenia realized for the first time that Wren was wearing one of her shawls.
“He was naked and running towards me. I was scared,” Yessenia said.
“Why didn’t you shoot him, you idiot? Why didn’t you shoot him?”
Junip pulled Cheer Up back from the moose. The husky was a bloody swab now.
“How could you be so stupid? Why didn’t you shoot him?” Wren sobbed.
“You knew it was Riley. You knew he’d come back,” Yessenia said, sobbing, too. “You’ve known all along, haven’t you? That’s why we’re here.”
But Wren tore back running, back into the wood. Junip looked up,
holding the bloodied dog, her face bloody, too.
“You’re so stupid,” she said. “You’ve always been so fucking cowardly and stupid.”
Yessenia saw Junip was also wearing one of her shawls. She looked away, toward the moose. Between its splayed legs, it had no testicles.
Wren, who put Yessenia and Junip on a plane back to New York that next day, moved to San Diego in the end and wrote letters to Junip but refused to speak to Yessenia for not having re-killed Riley. New York kept cleaning up its act and Junip took rent escalation as permission to return to the desert to do things that remain a mystery to Yessenia. Steven passed away. Yessenia, carrying an urn of Steven’s ashes, climbed his favorite mountain in the Catskills and scattered him in the wind as his will had dictated. Shortly thereafter, Yessenia left New York too, to teach looming at the Rhode Island School of Design. In Providence, she purchased a home, her first and only, on the Seekonk River. In the spring semester of 1998, she and two other staff members took a group of students to Uzbekistan as part of a study-abroad program hosted by an Uzbek artisan collective. It was a raining spring, a time of wet boughs, black soil, and the odor of roses. The government was cracking down on Islam that year, and she recalls having watched Muslim men being beaten in the streets. Over the course of her brief stay she met a man named Ablayar, fell in love, and married him. In the fall, once his papers were processed, he joined her in Providence. That winter she discovered she was infertile, which caused them both a great deal of suffering and nearly ended their marriage. Ablayar died of stomach cancer in 2005. “Forgive me,” he’d said. She’d vowed never to cut her hair again, but he’d died anyway. As per his will, Yessenia traveled back to Uzbekistan with his cremains and scattered those along the Turkestan Range The country was again rainy. At dinner with her father-in-law in his home, the old man, grief-stricken and stunned by his son’s death, asked her about a story Ablayar had once told him. It involved a female moose with antlers. It was not fair that his son should have escaped the gruesome deaths of his generation, moved to America to be a husband, and still have died before his time. For her father-in-law’s grief, she told him the story, in its entirety, not in any way she’d ever told Ablayar. After which, having opened a window a crack to wet his fingers to wipe his face, her father-in-law said, “Yes, that seems right. An unfortunate preservation, but sometimes it happens.”
Dropping her off at the airport, her father-in-law offered her a suggestion for her hair, which she’d vowed not to cut when Ablayar first fell ill, but she was now burdened by. “You should weave something out of it,” he said. “Something pretty.”
She did as her father-in-law suggested and wove a short scarf out of her hair. From time to time she wears it for protection, as from the banks of the Seekonk she has seen men swimming, ferociously, in the nude shapes of Junip’s father, Riley, Steven, and finally Ablayar, men of other places and times, and she can never be certain what kinds of pasts they want to build out of her future. And because she still cannot kill them or forgive them, she must live somehow safely with them. Beside the Seekonk, she is big, and no longer bruised, and so alive. And the men, dead, rutting in the waves, threaten and apologize. She wishes the old dog would quit her. And no longer does she listen for the way the world had been.
A major part of my life before turning to writing was my immersion in classical music. I trained to become a professional violist, and performed in orchestra and chamber music groups for years. Although I ended up on a different professional path, classical music infuses my writing and provides the soundtrack for my prose.
My debut novel, Three Muses, is a love story between a ballerina and a Holocaust survivor. Song, Discipline, and Memory are the muses who frame the book. John survives the Holocaust by singing for the kommandant who murdered his family. He falls in love with a prima ballerina, Katya Symanova. Unbeknownst to John, Katya is enmeshed in an abusive creative partnership with her choreographer. John and Katya’s path to each other is fraught and complicated.
The struggle to become an artist is so much about discipline and rigor. Intense self criticism is a necessity but can also be a crippling obstacle. Self doubt is endemic. The memoirs below recount the authors’ journey to music, what makes them so committed, how they express their love for it, and what happens behind the scenes. Moving in their authenticity, these writers describe on the page the emotional conflicts that a life in music generates.
Margo Jefferson is a brilliant cultural critic who wrote for the New York Times for many years. As a Black woman who grew up in privilege in Chicago, she has written two searing memoirs about just how much racism interferes with and infects her career. In this book, the second of the two, Jefferson ties together her own rigorous classical piano training with eminent Black musicians. Her riff on Ella Fitzgerald is at once horrifying for the bigotry Fitzgerald suffered, and celebratory of Fitzgerald’s dignity and prodigious gifts. Writing in an experimental style to highlight her injuries and observations, Jefferson’s book is a disturbing account of the reality of racism in America.
Debut writer Natalie Hodges trained as a concert violinist with all the pressures that that entails, including performance “failures.” As she graduates Harvard, she begins to examine her chosen life. In this unusual memoir, Hodges weaves in and out of the science of time to examine her life in music: “Music itself embodies time, shaping our sense of its passage through rhythm and harmony, melody and form.”
Of special interest is her venture into learning how to improvise, a skill that is core to jazz, rock, and many other forms of music, but absent from classical training. With carefully wrought lyricism, Hodges provides music history and mature insight, especially into how she wants to care for her body and soul.
Jeremy Denk is a concert pianist and an insightful and edifying writer. This memoir deconstructs his life’s trajectory, from growing up in a dysfunctional household with parents who want only for him to become a professional pianist, to how he survived it—by complying, and by going through the grueling competition circuit to get his name out there. Los Alamos in New Mexico was home for much of his childhood, so accessing the more well-known teachers on the coasts was a challenge. Most interesting is Denk’s personal growth, recounted with bluntness and humor. His years at Oberlin College and in graduate school are compelling for the vast new worlds he encounters, and for his growing realization that he is gay. A very special part of this book are his cogent musical explanations which fascinate and enlighten.
Garrett Hongo is a renowned poet and essayist, and this memoir shows him to be a person of insatiable curiosity. He is a magnificent writer. Ostensibly about his search for the perfect stereo, this book is Hongo’s love affair with music. Starting with the music of his Japanese Hawaiian ancestry, he explores myriad musical mediums, from rock to jazz to opera to the entire classical oeuvre and way beyond. Hongo can’t get enough of music or the equipment on which to listen to it, but really, he can’t get enough of life. He recounts his world travels, introducing a remarkable spectrum of people obsessed with audio equipment or music or both. With something to learn on every page, the book is a literary and musical feast.
While not a memoir, this book is a much-needed exposé of the importance of Black classical musicians in America in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The book can be dense at times, but it is well worth the read. Celebrated Bohemian composer Antonin Dvorak was recruited in the 1890s to start a classical music school for Black students in New York. Dvorak quickly concluded that the future of American classical music was with Black and Indigenous composers, due to their rich, wholly original music and its rhythmic complexities. In a terrible and familiar trope, the white musical establishment did everything to prevent this happening. Participants in this suppression effort included some of the most famous names in American twentieth century music. They were painfully successful. Horowitz feels this suppression of Black classical musicians drove them to “invent” and nourish the glorious world of jazz.
Sopan Deb covers basketball and cultural issues for the New York Times, as well as performing as a standup comedian. In his debut book, a memoir, he embarks on a journey to find his Bengali parents after they separately abandoned him before his early twenties. This, despite what looked on the outside like a typical suburban upbringing in New Jersey. The book is notable for breaking myriad stereotypes about Bengali immigrants in America. One amusing sideline is Deb’s classical piano lessons, which his parents insisted on when he was a young boy, especially once it became clear he had real talent. While not the major theme of the book, Deb writes with wisdom and humor about the torture of practicing for these lessons despite his skill and the pleasure his playing provided to the people around him.
This harrowing memoir unspools the loss that shattered Min Kym’s life: the theft of her prized Stradivarius violin. Kym is the daughter of Korean parents who immigrated to England to further their child prodigy’s violin career. With few bumps in the road, Kym glided through her training toward stardom, studying with famous teachers, and obtaining lucrative recording contracts and concert gigs. Everything changed with her involvement with a controlling boyfriend, who took increasing charge of her life. He brushed off her security concerns as they grabbed a bite at a train station café, and in a split second her violin was gone. This wrenching trauma nearly destroyed her life. How had she allowed herself to stay in a loveless relationship when her Strad was clearly her first and only love? How could she continue in music without it? Who was she as a person now that her Strad was gone? She descends into severe depression and lethargy before finally beginning to reinvent her life, slowly and with significant obstacles along the way.
Imagine being married not to one person, but to three. Such is life in a string quartet. Arnold Steinhardt, who played first violin in the celebrated Guarneri Quartet for over forty years, recounts his childhood and violin education, and how the Guarneri Quartet came to be founded. His descriptions of living with four people together on the road more than they are home, trying to make beautiful music while living with each other’s foibles and tics, is fascinating. There’s a lot more than practicing and rehearsals that goes into a long-lasting, world-famous string quartet.
Jordan Peele is an increasing rarity in Hollywood: a writer-director of original genre films who releases box office smashes every few years. He does what op-ed columnists and anonymous studio execs tell us is impossible: get people in theater seats. If you have somehow not seen Peele’s latest, Nope is a neo-Western that explores visibility and spectacle through a story about alien abduction. It’s also the only movie that has been able to fully capture the many disappointments of the Biden administration.
It’s unsurprising given Peele’s unique talent for capturing nationwide sentiment through genre tropes. Get Out (2017) was an uncanny reflection of Obama-era colorblind racism–has any single line of dialogue encapsulated 2010s white liberalism better than, “By the way, I would have voted for Obama for a third term if I could?” Us (2019) might have had a slightly more obscure gloss but it explored the aftermath of a failed and subsequently abandoned government policy: a perfect piece of Trump-era nihilism. Despite what social media might have us believe, it is possible for a horror movie to be more than an elaborate metaphor for a single family’s grief. Yes, Nope is dealing with individual relationships with grief and trauma, but it’s also asking how we survive in a world that has been largely abandoned by the people supposed to keep us safe.
Siblings OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald (Keke Palmer) have inherited their father Otis Sr.’s (Keith David) horse wrangling business. OJ is desperate to continue the legacy not just of his father but also of his great-great-great grandfather, Alistair Haywood, a horse jockey who was the first person to be captured in a motion picture. Since Otis Sr.’s death, OJ has struggled to run the business and has been forced to sell some of his horses to neighboring amusement park owner Jupe (Steven Yeun). When an alien appears in their desolate valley, OJ and Emerald become obsessed with capturing an image of the creature they dub Jean Jacket to sell—“the Oprah shot.” It’s their last chance to make some money and preserve the legacy too many have tried to steal.
Key to Nope is that OJ and Emerald are not naive and trusting victims. They’re savvy and smart, and know the best way to handle a situation. The Oprah shot is not a harebrained money-making scheme: it’s their only recourse to save what’s left of their father’s ranch and they need to move quickly. If someone else finds out about Jean Jacket, they’ll get the shot and steal their glory. OJ and Emerald will be forgotten just like Alistair was.
Fittingly, there is never a discussion of calling the authorities. It would be too easy to make a joke where Angel suggests calling the police, and OJ and Emerald guffaw about being Black people who don’t trust the cops. That’s the type of low-hanging fruit Peele’s imitators might go for. In Nope, authorities simply don’t exist. Otis Sr.’s bizarre death by Jean Jacket is dismissed. Only OJ seems to think it’s strange that a low-flying airplane would have dropped a bunch of metal objects on a remote farm at a velocity strong enough to pierce his father’s eye and his horse’s haunch. All he has is the coin that killed his father, which he keeps in the medical bag in his room. It’s a reminder both of human fragility and the utter apathy of a system that was never going to protect us. Nope is playing by Western rules. There’s no stranger who’s going to step in and secure justice for a wronged party. You’re alone on the prairie, and no one is ever coming to help you.
In January of 2020, four senators sold stock after a classified briefing on the then-mysterious COVID-19 outbreak. Three of those four senators are career politicians who remain in office. Dozens more senators and representatives profited during the early days of the pandemic through trading. Their response to learning about an incoming, unprecedented global pandemic and the magnitude of death that would ensue was to find a way to make more money off of it. Some of this trading is likely illegal under the STOCK Act, which comes with the devastating punishment of a $200 fine. It was a concrete example of what too many of us knew, what I’ve always known as a Black woman–that most politicians view their responsibility to the people as secondary to their own interests. When asked to choose between their own interests or the interests of their constituents, they choose themselves. Every time.
When asked to choose between their own interests or the interests of their constituents, they choose themselves.
Nope feels perfectly attuned to the Wild West of the American government, which has repeatedly failed to protect us in far too many ways. The Biden administration has struggled to create comprehensive policy dealing with COVID-19, school shootings, climate change, and reproductive justice. It’s become a Twitter meme to respond to a politician’s milquetoast call to action with “DO SOMETHING.” Instead we’re told that we need to vote, wear a mask, reduce our emissions, call our senators. These are individual actions that don’t actually create systemic change or address the problems we’re facing. Recycling a plastic water bottle or buying an electric vehicle does not counteract the 100 million barrels of oil used by the US military every year. Moving to a city that has protected abortion rights does not secure reproductive freedom for the millions of people unable to “just pick up and leave” their state.
Individual choice has been sanctified as the ultimate freedom, and the easiest way politicians kill bills is to claim socialism and invent scenarios where a policy could theoretically infringe on an individual’s rights. Making it harder for domestic terrorists to have guns they’ll use to shoot up churches, nightclubs, and schools infringes on my scared right to have an arsenal of military grade weaponry. Requiring masks to be worn in public spaces during a pandemic infringes on my God-given right to cough, sneeze, and mouth-breathe on the elderly and immunocompromised. Never mind their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of whatever. What about my needs?
As lawmakers waffled on the jurisdiction of mask mandates in the summer of 2020, my then-employer decided that they’d had enough of people working from home. The central office of the company, which was thousands of miles away, instituted a plan to return staff to in-person work while still maintaining six-foot boundaries and bans on conference room gatherings. The obvious impracticality revealed itself quickly: I sat in a cubicle next to coworkers I would only be allowed to talk to over Zoom. When I said that having an online staff meeting of several people in a semi-open office would result in an unlistenable mess of feedback and echoes, I was reminded, “Headphones exist.” My boss insisted that since we were responsible adults, we could trust each other (and each other’s households) not to go somewhere we could become infected and potentially bring the virus back to the office. The plan would be rendered null when cases skyrocketed but the damage to morale was irreparable. Our company was not just apathetic, it was actively hostile to our health and safety. The lawmakers who batted stay-at-home measures back and forth felt the same way.
Our company was not just apathetic, it was actively hostile to our health and safety.
The only avenue OJ, Emerald, and Jupe have for survival is quick profit. They do what so many desperate westerners have and try to get ahead of a potential gold rush. Jupe’s plan to create a rodeo show with Jean Jacket is informed by his background as a child star and his relationship with the chimpanzee who played Gordy. Whether desperation or delusion, Jupe misinterprets his survival as proof that he can partner with a wild animal and control its actions. He’s purchased an amusement park downwindfrom a horse farm after a series of failed enterprises, banking on the nostalgic capital of a character he played decades ago on a sitcom. The rodeo show is his syndicated reinterpretation of trauma, his chance to recreate the horrific experience of filming Gordy’s Home as an adult with agency.
The violent incident on the set of Gordy’s Home eerily reflects the epidemic of violence against children, especially in how Jupe has compartmentalized his trauma in order to survive it. Seeing a young Jupe cowering alone reminded me specifically of the stories we heard from Uvalde, where nineteen students and two adults were shot while police lingered outside. When we see the massacre, it’s unclear how much time has passed but the set is empty. The audience, the crew, the cast are all gone as Jupe’s young co-star is repeatedly pummeled by the chimpanzee. Presumably security would have been required on set during a live taping of a sitcom but they’re nowhere to be seen. When an adult descends down the stairs, we think he might be coming to help the girl who has been attacked by Gordy, or distract the chimp to give Jupe an opportunity to escape. Of course not—he thinks of himself and tries to run, only to be made another casualty of the rampage. As the chimp approaches Jupe, its intentions unclear, an unseen gunman shoots Gordy in the head, ending the carnage.
It’s also unclear what took so long. Maybe the set flouted the site’s security restrictions and there was no one immediately present to help: they clearly weren’t following best practices by allowing balloons on set that would antagonize the chimp. Or maybe, like in Uvalde, the authorities were worried about themselves, placing their individual safety above their duty to protect our most vulnerable. They let little Jupe be the bait, let at least two people get horrifically attacked, before someone stepped in. If you didn’t want to be ripped apart by a chimpanzee, you should’ve thought about that before going to a live taping. You should’ve run faster than the others who escaped. And we can’t restrict the use of animal actors on sets because that infringes on a studio’s right to sell toys and print money.
Or maybe, like in Uvalde, the authorities were worried about themselves, placing their individual safety above their duty.
By the end of the film—Jean Jacket’s last stand—there are no police or FBI or Agent Mulder types coming out to see what’s wrong. TMZ has arrived first, threatening to capture and monetize OJ’s ride the same way Haywood’s ride was. Knowing Peele’s work, it’s not a coincidence that OJ shares his moniker with OJ Simpson, possibly the most notorious person to ever be in a televised car chase. When the dust has settled, it’s only more media that has arrived, hoping to capture some of the bizarre spectacle laid out before them and throw it into an unrelenting content mill.
I caught a mild case of COVID-19 in July of 2022. I’d worn a mask and washed my hands, but was I the safest I could’ve been? I’d been vaccinated, but I also ate at restaurants and went to the movies. I took the subway. I didn’t require that everyone I interacted with show me their rapid test results. So it’s my fault. If I didn’t want to get a disease in an unprecedented global pandemic, I should have made the individual decisions that would keep me safe no matter how improbable. It’s the flip side of the conservative bootstraps myth that proclaims all success as deserved: if bad things happen, it’s your fault. As we are reminded every day by the federal government, you are not entitled to any protections or kept promises. If you didn’t want to get sucked up into an alien or struck down by the detritus it dislodges, you shouldn’t have been there. A monster is coming to kill you and nobody is riding out to help. You’ve got to do something about it yourself.
In Emi Yagi’s Diary of a Void, Shibata, a Japanese woman in her thirties, has had enough of making coffee, doing menial tasks, and enduring sexual harrasment at her workplace and declares that she is pregnant. This announcement results in an immediate turn of affairs, namely her being treated much better by her co-workers since she is now with child.
In the novel, her diary, we see her keep up the ruse for the entire nine months of her pregnancy. Her dry meditations on her fake pregnant life offer an insight into what it means to be a woman in our time—in all its variations, and the picture is absurdist, real, and grim. Shibata swims, rather calmly with all the pregnancy care she’s doing, in the swampy loneliness of contemporary life and the grinding dullness of office work. There is little community, save the brief one of the Mommy Aerobics group she joins; her own friends and family are checked out, and unaware of her pregnancy. The ruse is purely for her work colleagues. As a mode of resistance, Shibata’s trick is perfect but alas it does not assuage the alienation she feels.
Yagi, a women’s magazine editor, published the novel, her debut, in 2020 to great acclaim in Japan. We spoke via email and her translators David Boyd and Lucy North, about keeping up lies, the Virgin Mary, the significance of a Turkish kilim, and places of one’s own.
J.R. Ramakrishnan: I really expected Shibata to give up the lie but she goes all the way with the pregnancy ruse. Did you know this from the minute you started the book?
Emi Yagi: I really just started writing out of curiosity. I didn’t know how it would end, but I wanted to explore what would happen if somebody lied about being pregnant. I guess I realized early on that Shibata would have to go all the way—she couldn’t give up. After a few pages, I started to feel like Shibata and I were in this together, like we were running side by side. She was lying about being pregnant, an imaginary baby growing inside her, and I had something growing inside me too—a story. Shibata starts going home early thanks to this pregnancy she’s made up, and I found myself winding up my work earlier too, so I could stop by the library and write a little more before heading home. I couldn’t have her give up. If she gave up, I’d have to give up on my writing too.
JRR: You wrote this novel before the pandemic and before (at least, in America) many have decided to quit their jobs in the Great Resignation. I wonder what you think of this rebellion of workers who are rebelling against the grind of the workplace, a bit like Shibata is in your book?
EY: The Great Resignation. I’ve never heard that expression before. Yes, Shibata’s definitely rebelling against something, so there is some overlap. Work isn’t what defines a person. It’s one element among a whole lot of things. But in Japan, women have it particularly bad. When a woman works at a company, she’ll often be required to act in a certain way, and needless to say not everybody’s comfortable with that.
In this novel, we see a woman who tries to put distance between herself and the office where she works because she’s become aware of the fact that her workplace is shameless and deceitful. They consistently assume that she’ll do more than she’s paid to do, and take for granted that she won’t object. In a way, they’re attempting to control every aspect of who she is. In that sense, I think Shibata does share something with those who quit in the Great Resignation.
JRR: You have really cataloged all the ways in which women are maligned—whether they are single, married with children, and not—by patriarchy. By “becoming” pregnant, Emi gets a break from making coffee and is treated nicely by her co-workers for a while but then we have Hosono complaining about being a mother later on. I wonder after thinking so much about all the issues of patriarchy, where have you landed on this issue of being a mother vs. not being a mother? Perhaps another way to ask this: Does Shibata win in the end?
EY: I’m not sure if this really addresses what you’re asking, but in a sense Shibata bypasses the whole issue—the question of being a mother or not. Both Shibata and Hosono are women who have to deal with life in a patriarchal society, so there’s a way in which they’re not all that different. The very question of “becoming a mother” or “not becoming a mother” arises out of a patriarchal ideology that seeks to maternalize women. Shibata’s lie is a form of resistance to that ideology in that it blurs the line between being and not being a mother—and I’d like to think it goes even further than that, turning that patriarchal logic on its head.
JRR: Would you talk a little about the characters of The Witch from Shibata’s childhood, as well as the Virgin Mary? She seems to have a (sort-of) admiration for this woman, and indeed compares her to an image of the Virgin Mary, who she also seems to identify with earlier on.
They consistently assume that she’ll do more than she’s paid to do, and take for granted that she won’t object.
EY: One of the main themes in this novel is “having a place of one’s own.” By “place,” I’m not really talking about a physical space, like a building or anything like that, or even the feeling of having a particular group to belong to. I’m not sure how to explain it in just a couple of sentences, but it’s kind of like an emotional space, something nobody else has access to. For me, both the Witch and the Virgin Mary symbolize the idea of “having a place of one’s own.”
The Witch, a character from Shibata’s childhood, was seen as a curmudgeonly old woman and the local children found her terrifying. But she also had a kinder side. Early one morning, when no one else was around, Shibata saw her setting out milk for some kittens. Then there’s the Virgin Mary, a woman known throughout the world as the mother of Jesus, and yet it seems to me that we actually know very little about who she was. What did she like to do? What was her favorite food? Did she ever feel overwhelmed spending her life known as the Holy Mother? On one level, the Witch and the Virgin Mary seem like polar opposites, but they’re actually very similar, not only because they end up labeled in certain ways (because of how they act or what they do), but also because both of them have a place of their own (at least I hope Mary had such a thing).
JRR:I was very intrigued about the Turkish kilim Shibata has in her apartment. I imagine it is a symbol of home and stability for her, perhaps? I know that kilims often have symbols of femininity on them but Shibata’s has “a garden known to no one.” This reminded me of The Witch’s garden.
EY: Yes, I think that’s exactly right. The kilim Shibata buys is her version of the Witch’s Garden. It’s a visible expression of a place of her own. At the same time, for Shibata, the kilim doesn’t serve as a symbol of femininity or the home. It’s something she discovers while on a trip to Turkey between jobs. She’s just quit her old job, where she was overworked and sexually harassed. When she first finds the kilim in the shop, she resists buying it—because it’d be too expensive. Then she gets a call from a friend who convinces her that she ought to buy the things she wants. In that sense, I think Shibata sees her kilim as a form of self-care, something she’d been denying herself up until that point.
JRR: I very much enjoyed Shibata’s dry humor, and I think also many can relate to dragging loneliness and perhaps dream of pulling off such a trick in the workplace. I wonder if you could tell us how the women in your life (mother, friends, work colleagues, etc.) have reacted to the book?
The very question of ‘becoming a mother’ or ‘not becoming a mother’ arises out of a patriarchal ideology that seeks to maternalize women.
EY: Most of my women friends said they could relate, especially the ones who are having babies, or raising children. My colleagues at work enjoyed the story too, but some were surprised by the dryness of my writing. I guess they were expecting something warmer. For my part, I was surprised to find that these people actually believed that I was the person I presented myself to be at work.
JRR:Would you give us a preview of what you are working on right now? What can we expect of your next novel?
EY: I’m writing about a woman who has a part-time job talking to a statue of Venus. I have no idea what’s going to happen at this point, but I’m looking forward to finding out!
God Joins a Writing Workshop and the Old Testament Critique Doesn’t Go Well
Jason (workshop leader): God, do you want to start by reading a few pages? Maybe get to Wednesday or Thursday of creation and stop there.
God clears Their throat, reads.
Jason: Thanks, God. By the way, do you prefer God or Yaweh? Of course, during the discussion we’ll just call you The Author.
God: My friends call me Ya.
Jason: Ya it is. Okay, folks, so what did we think of the Old Testament?
Levi, flipping through pages: The beginning was a quite a slog. Does anyone honestly care about the firmament? (Workshop participants shake their heads no.) Maybe just start with the apple incident and give us information about the rest of creation when we need it.
Selena, looking up from her laptop: Is the book supposed to be nonfiction? Because I don’t get how a couple like Adam and Eve who are just starting out can afford to live in Eden when I can’t even make the rent on my Jackson Heights studio.
God: Can I just—
Jason: Sorry, Ya. The Author doesn’t get to talk during the discussion. You’ll have a chance later.
God: I could smite you.
Jason: You could, but then you’d never get to hear what I think of your work.
God tugs Their beard, appears frustrated.
Alexa, cradling her kombucha: Why does Eve get blamed for everything? She didn’t force Adam to eat the apple for God’s sake—nothing personal, Ya. Where’s Adam’s agency? And I think the term “helpmeet” is offensive. I’m guessing The Author is a Philip Roth fan.
Jason: Moving on, what did people think of the flood?
Selena, sighing deeply: I found Noah pretty unlikeable. I mean, the whole planet’s getting wiped out and the guy just sails into the sunset with his pets. Also, the market for eco-fiction is saturated.
Amar, opening a bag of chips: I wasn’t sure if the dove carrying an olive branch worked. What if you had the bird return with something else, like a waterlogged mouse or a rusted sled from Noah’s childhood or—
God: If I could just—
Jason: Please, Ya. You’ll have your chance. Levi, did you have something you wanted to say? You have the pained look of a writer who isn’t the center of attention.
Levi, flipping pages: I’m not sure what point The Author is trying to make with the Tower of Babel. Do They have something against construction workers? It’s really classist.
Rina: And the way it’s described as “a tower whose top may reach unto heaven.” Freudian much?
Jason: Anybody notice any similarities between the building of the Ark and the building of the Tower? No one? Okay, then. Let’s move on to Egypt.
Selena: The parting of the red sea was great. Very cinematic. Nice work, Ya.
God blushes. Pretends to take notes.
Jason: How did people feel about the plagues?
Amar, eating a chip: Having ten is redundant. Do you really need more than one insect? Have locusts or flies, but not both.
Alexa, shaking her head: Making blood a plague is anti-woman. We all know who bleeds. Sips her kombucha. I’m guessing The Author is a Norman Mailer fan.
Levi, flipping to the front of the manuscript: Can we talk about the title? I’m assuming Old Testament is just a working title. How about something more exciting, like Secrets of the Israelites Revealed?
Amar: Or Camel Ride to Destiny. And what if The Author told the story from the point of view of the camel or, even better, one of the humps?
Jason: Oooooh, I like that. Leaving the title for a minute, what did folks think about the begats?
Alexa, Rina, Selena, Amar, Levi groan.
Jason: That’s what I thought, too. Kind of slow. Can anyone think of a reason why The Author might have included them?
God: Could I please just say one thing?
Jason extracts pencil from his man bun, taps it on his pad.
Jason: Absolutely not.
Rina: Maybe They included the begats because They were hoping to get paid by the word.
Selena and Rina snicker.
God rummages in a backpack, pulls out a lightning bolt.
Jason, smirking: Any other parts of the book that you liked?
Rina: I like where Cain murders Abel, but I think Cain’s character should have been developed a little more. I mean, what do we really know about him other than that he was a husbandmen? And what the hell is a “husbandmen,” anyway?
Jason: It’s a farmer.
Rina: Why not just say that then?
Alexa: I thought the whole book was gratuitously violent, like The Author was hoping HBO would pick it up.
Jason: That’ll do it. Great discussion. Ya, I hope it was helpful. Do you have questions? Thoughts? Comments?
A bolt of lightning takes out the workshop.
God, on Their throne, talking to angels: Maybe I should try poetry.
Before my online life orbited around Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, my imaginative play centered on being Mary-Kate and Ashley. The twins were girls like me, except cuter and blonde. A bit older. Certainly smaller, but still, larger than life. They were influencers before the advent of social media. Their empire was built upon their ability to successfully monetize the self.
“Do you want to be Mary-Kate or Ashley?” I’d ask my neighbor, Megan, as we waded through the creek by her house. Megan always wanted to be Mary-Kate. That’s why I’d given her a choice.
Mary-Kate was marketed as sporty and adventurous. Ashley was stylish and demure. Who you chose aligned with the girl you hoped to be—and for me, that was the most feminine girl, the most perfect of girls, everything I’d been told a girl should be.
Everything the twins marketed was rooted in a reality that could theoretically be replicated.
We divvied up the twins and mimicked plot lines from their direct-to-video mystery and You’re Invited! series, pretending to solve crimes in our neighborhood cul-de-sac, planning occasion-less parties in the garden. Everything the twins marketed was rooted in a reality that could theoretically be replicated—a reality more exciting and beautiful than the mundane life of a rural West Virginia girl.
By the time the Olsens were in elementary school, their manager, Robert Thorne, began the work that would lead to their jaw dropping fortune. No longer just child actresses, they became a brand. Their faces appeared all over Walmart, one of the only places to shop in our small town. As my mom filled up her grocery cart, I strolled the dimly lit makeup aisles where I spotted the Mary-Kate and Ashley line: jelly lip glosses and creamy eye shadows in a variety of catching colors. Their makeup boasted no specific cosmetic improvement. Not longer lashes or brighter skin or stronger nails. The only brag was the association.
I walked to the middle of the store, to their girls’ clothing line targeted to tweens, those in-between childhood and adolescence. There, I picked out one of their tank tops to purchase with my allowance money, a flimsy piece of fabric in aquamarine, its back a maze of strings.
“I don’t know,” my mom said as I held the shirt up in the freezer section of the grocery store, harsh lighting barely illuminating the small rhinestones sewn into the fabric for embellishment. “You wouldn’t be able to wear a bra with that.”
“I don’t need a bra,” I argued, though my mother and I both knew that I certainly did. I could tell she was about to say this, though she stopped herself, perhaps for fear that my response to being punished for breasts would be continued attempts to starve them away.
“You can only wear it around the house,” she said.
“In the neighborhood?”
“I don’t know. Certainly not out.”
I knew that simply owning the shirt would bring me closer to being the type of girl I longed to become.
And I agreed to this. I knew that simply owning the shirt would bring me closer to being the type of girl I longed to become.
It was around this time, at the age of 11, that I created a fan page for the Olsen twins. It was the turn of the millennium. The internet was still novel, and logging on required tying up the family phone line. My Mary-Kate and Ashley website served as my entrance into online performance.
I didn’t know a website could be built by a girl my age until I read an article in a teen magazine that suggested ways for me to become more well-rounded.
On the floor of my carpeted bedroom, I read this article about ways to improve myself between sets of sit ups. 50 sit ups, then another article. 50 sit ups, then another article. As I read, I held a blue pen, marking ideas I could implement in my life. I drew a big, crooked star beside “build a website.” There were several suggestions of places I could go to get started. Expage. Angelfire. Chickpages. Geocities.
I titled my corner of the internet, The Olsen Twins All That Hangout. To promote my website, I sought community with like minded, faceless individuals on a popular message board devoted to the twins.
Like today’s body positive influencers, we were learning that we could leverage our insecurities into likeability.
I connected with Rose from Northern Ireland after participating in a thread where we were all asked to physically evaluate ourselves. “I’ve been told I have pretty eyes,” the original post said, “but my upper arms make me so self-conscious. Tell us—what do you like most and least about yourself? And share a pic!” Like today’s body positive influencers, we were learning that we could leverage our insecurities into likeability.
Rose replied with her photo: emerald eyes, straight blonde hair from a box, pale skin from too much time indoors. No makeup. Sad but friendly expression. “I’m self-conscious about being so short,” she responded.
“I’m embarrassed about being so tall,” I replied.
Then Rose looked me up on AOL Instant Messenger with the information provided in my signature (or, siggy), username OldNavyBaby with a string of numbers.
“Want to join a group chat?” she asked in a private message.
“That’d be great!” I said. Months before, I would have used the “b” for “be” and a “gr8” for “great,” but had since realized that was not the sort of person I hoped to become.
There were four of us in the chat. Rose, Andy from London, and Jessica from Indiana. One day, Andy shared a link to his personal website, which featured a satirical medical article— complete with passive voice, nominalized verbs, and imagined case studies. His article explored a pathology plaguing young girls, a disease he identified as “Olsenomnia.”
I scrolled the page, nervously laughing to myself as I read his cutting description of the case study: adolescent girl, obsessional, spending excessive time and allowance money on the Mary-Kate and Ashley brand.
I needed to pivot my online presence. To speak about liking the twins sincerely felt childish and immature.
And suddenly, after reading this critique, I realized I needed to pivot my online presence. To speak about liking the twins sincerely felt childish and immature. But I could still keep my interest if I discussed it ironically.
The four of us used the term “Olsenomniac” to describe anyone we’d decided to dislike on the main message board. We became pretentious. We targeted the person who used too many exclamation points. Another with an affinity for all caps. A girl who kept mixing up “their” and “there.” Anyone who seemed to take the twins too seriously. In short, those who could not see the humor in spending their lives talking about the lives of others.
“Lila’s already watched Holiday in the Sun five times—and it just came out on Tuesday,” I said to our small group.
“She’s such an Olsenomniac,” Jessica replied.
I’d watched the movie twice, but it had been background noise, something to pass the time as I jumped rope to burn off the calories from dinner.
“Do you think Olsenomnia is a disease of genetics or the environment?” Jessica said during a lull in our chat. We’d extended the joke well past its initial, mediocre humor. The term became an invitation to mock others: faceless, bodiless others, others so similar to ourselves, and yet, somehow inferior. The cattiness we engaged in online could not be replicated in real life because we had no sphere of influence there. Here, we were insiders.
In high school, I quit updating my fan site. I began watching movies that were films, reading books that were literature. I continued to visit the message board multiple times a day—as a lurker—to keep up with news about the twins, but there was no engagement on my part.
The message board participated in a countdown to the Olsen twins’ eighteenth birthdays. Some devoted fans planned real life parties. A handful of lecherous adult males included time clock countdowns in their siggies. Rose, Jessica, Andy, and I made fun of them all.
Shortly after the twins’ eighteenth birthdays, a tabloid outed Mary-Kate for having an eating disorder. The cover caught my eye in the checkout line at Walmart: anorexia in large letters beside an image of Mary-Kate receiving her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
She was pale, made over with cosmetics. Her lips were thin and dry.
She wore a strappy, violet silk dress. Her stringy, long hair was dyed a honey brown. I evaluated her arms. And her breasts, which were no longer visible. The skin of her chest appeared to be covering a xylophone. She was pale, made over with cosmetics. Her lips were thin and dry.
And Ashley was beside her. She still had bright blonde hair. Her cheeks looked authentically rosy. She was thin, too, but not painfully so. The good thin. The kind that required work, maybe even obsession, but still received praise. Mary-Kate, though, had crossed over. The difference between them was maybe five to ten pounds.
When I returned home, I logged onto the message board. There were dozens of posts about Mary-Kate. Some called the reporting into question, others knew it all along. Some referenced a recent article where Mary-Kate claimed a particular love for Krispy Kreme. Which could be true? The anorexia or the affinity for donuts? One post compared photos of Ashley’s body with images of Mary-Kate’s. Responders observed differences between the twins in the presence of bones or the absence of fat stores.
As we filed out the door, I saw another tabloid on the newsstand, a photo zoomed in on Mary-Kate’s skeletal bare back.
Shortly after this, I attended an outing with my church youth group. We stopped by a gas station Subway for lunch. I sat quietly in a booth, tearing the bread of my veggie sub to pieces while others ate their foot-longs and chips and chocolate chip cookies. As we filed out the door, I saw another tabloid on the newsstand, a photo zoomed in on Mary-Kate’s skeletal bare back.
“What a selfish little girl,” one of our chaperones said as she noticed the image.
“She’s not selfish. She’s sick,” I said, a fleeting moment of vulnerability.
“She’s not sick. People with cancer are sick—not her. She’s just vain.”
Quietly, I nodded my head. I did not agree, but I understood. I realized that no good girl would want to identify with Mary-Kate.
Mary-Kate and Ashley did not disappear in adulthood. Their fashion line, The Row, is regularly included in New York Fashion Week. Still, they are rarely visible. They do not use their faces to market their notoriously minimalist clothing. Though The Row is on social media, the twins are not. The supposed story of their lives is no longer subject to public consumption.
Unlike the twins, I have not outgrown my desire to craft my online twin. I’m still drawn to the exciting, beautiful lives of influencers on social media, and I have a compulsion to contribute curation, as well. On Instagram, I post carefully curated pictures in times when my reality feels like the exact opposite. An image of my baby, freshly diapered and dressed, the light of the afternoon sun creating the image of a halo around his head captured moments before rushing to the emergency room for postpartum complications. A snapshot of an idyllic angle of my brick Tudor home, minutes after my husband and I conclude a tense fight.
Sometimes this duality feels duplicitous. More often, though, it feels like storytelling. Like hope. In composing a tale of what could be, I’m narrating a version of what actually is. I learned it from Mary-Kate and Ashley.
Winner of the Red Hen Press Novella Award, Thea Prieto’s From the Caves, portrays a nightmarish future, where a dwindling number of humans reside naked in caves, trapped between a wasteland and a boiling sea. Every moment, they struggle against suffocating heat, thirst, and starvation. To ease their suffering, they tell each other stories of how their world began: with a hungry sun, a great war, a flood, and a poisoned sea. Sky, the youngest of the group, holds words as precious as drops of water, scouring each for the meaning in his pleasure-less existence.
This novella grapples with definitive questions about what it means to be human, including how to derive purpose from the act of living. In so doing, the text traces the line between truth and myth, story and identity: “[…] Sky shuts his eyes. He shuts out Teller and the empty drum and Mark is there, screaming Waste and Save it, the walls of Sky’s mind swirling with shadow writing and the dead and the past and we are alone–the darkness cares nothing for us.”
Making this booktail requires some care and patience, as befits a novella about the struggle to survive an inhospitable climate. Apple-infused vodka serves as the base, for the apple in the Garden of the Gods, a place from the survivors’ reimagined story of Eden. The remaining ingredients are each tied to an element of the myth of the world’s beginning: beet shrub represents Blood. Beets are also a root vegetable, a nod to the protagonists’ measly diet of boiled roots. The sweet, purple-red hibiscus syrup–a reminder of the flower, streaked with red, that sprouts in the moment the divine Moon meets Bear—represents Love. Finally, liquid gold honey liqueur is a symbol of the Light.
This booktail is presented against a layered backdrop of black and red, colors symbolic of darkness and fire. Both are covered in an iridescent veil whose facets create a rock-like effect, like the walls of a cave. The mirrored base reflects streams of color, transforming the flames on the book’s cover into liquid fire. Meanwhile, the drink stands before it all: a dark, purple-red elixir that appears tempting, yet possibly poisonous, a triangle of beet-infused apple perched on its lip.
0.5 oz honey liqueur (like Drambuie) for golden light
Garnish: a slice, square, or triangle of green apple
Instructions
First, prepare the apple vodka: wash, core, and slice two Granny Smith apples into roughly eight pieces. Add them to a large jar or other lidded container, along with 2 cups of vodka. Seal and set in a cool, dark place. Allow the vodka to marinate from 5 days to up to 2 weeks, shaking the container once daily. The vodka will turn a brown-gold color, similar to apple juice. Once the desired level of infusion is achieved, strain into a clean bottle or jar and discard the fruit. Meanwhile, prepare the shrub, then the syrup. Keep both refrigerated. Once the shrub and vodka are ready, add them to a shaker, along with a large cube or chunk of ice. Pour in the syrup and liqueur. Agitate vigorously for about 15 seconds, then strain into a small stemmed glass. Garnish with a wedge of green apple, if desired.
Beet Shrub
Ingredients
1 cup red beet, peeled and roughly chopped
½ cup water
1 sprig rosemary
½ cup sugar
¼ cup apple cider vinegar
¼ cup lemon juice
1 Tablespoon ginger paste
Zest of one lemon
Instructions
Peel and chop the beets, then add to a blender, along with ½ cup water and the de-stemmed sprig of rosemary. Blend til smooth, then pour through a strainer into a lidded plastic or glass storage container, stirring as needed to extract all the liquid. Discard solids. Zest the lemon and add to the beet mixture, then juice the zested fruit and add the liquid as well. Stir in the sugar, apple cider vinegar, and ginger paste. Apply the lid and set in the fridge for 3 days, shaking the container once a day.
Hibiscus Syrup
Ingredients
2 cups water
½ cup white sugar
⅓ cup dried hibiscus flowers (available at your local tea shop, or at a variety of online retailers, like Etsy)
¼ cup brown sugar
1 (1/2 inch) piece fresh ginger root, thinly sliced or a teaspoon ginger paste
1 lemon or lime, zested
Additional ingredients (optional): 1-2 cinnamon sticks or ½ tsp cinnamon powder; 5-10 whole cloves; 1/4 teaspoon lemongrass; 1 Tablespoon dried rose petals
Instructions
Stir together all ingredients in a medium pot then cover and bring to a boil. Uncover, reduce heat, and let simmer until sugars dissolve and the flowers soften, 20-25 minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove from heat and let stand for another 15 minutes. Strain the syrup and discard the solids. Allow the syrup to cool completely, then store in a bottle or jar and keep refrigerated. Enjoy the syrup in cocktails, sodas, baked goods, or to flavor sauces and marinades.
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