7 Books About Confinement and the Need to Escape

Posted on by Jo Lou

Many of us are being confined in our apartments and homes due to COVID-19. Social distancing guidelines—depending on your Governor—are being pushed back almost weekly. The initial flattening of the curve made me believe we’d be back to school this semester, still holding commencements, and baseball players would merely miss spring training. But, we have learned that models are only projections, and even though many of us are doing our part, there are people who must work, groceries needing shopping. There is also a small percentage of Americans who feel as though this virus is a hoax, a political move to destroy the president’s chances at reelection. And then there are the people who cannot endure the isolation, foregoing the health of themselves and others so they can escape, succumbing to the innate urge of the ego that they and they alone are the only one that matters.

I don’t pretend to know exactly what our future looks like, but I do know that in fear there lies hope. By us all being confined and distanced, I believe what gets us through this (other than Netflix, booze, and Animal Crossing) is the hope that we will emerge better. What we deem essential to an unmarred democracy pre-COVID may need re-examining. Grocery workers over NBA players. Medical personnel over college football coaches. 

Some of us have also found solace in routine, or a sense of loss at not being able to execute the one we had just weeks ago, one in which many of us loathed, but now mourn, beg to once again ride the elevator to the office, make small talk in the cafeteria line. The characters in my new book, Barker House, are conforming to a routine established by policies and procedures. They man the keys to a private county jail in New Hampshire, routinely disturbed by what their power allows them to do, and what it does not. Many of them struggle with moral injury from their employment, the things they’ve done and seen, and their guilt manifests in consequential ways. 

Here is a list of books that deal with confinement, but also the need to escape. Though the officers in my book get to leave the jail each day, many of them isolate themselves from society. Their release from confinement isn’t always celebrated, because they know they’ll be back the next day, a Sisyphus scenario they themselves can escape whenever they want, but the pension and power keeps the rock going back up the hill. Through each of these seven books, confinement is temporary, as we all hope is the case for us.

Mr. Splitfoot

Mr. Splitfoot by Samantha Hunt

In a dual narrative set in different timelines, this novel follows Ruth as a young girl, and then older and mute as Aunt Ruth. Her confinement, in the beginning, is physical, trapped in upstate New York on The Love of Christ! Foster Home, Farm, and Mission. Most of the children have deformities, including Ruth, who has scar-like constellations on her face, which The Father wants, because damaged children are easily converted to his church. The Father once prepared for the Apocalypse, his go-to teaching to end each lesson, but now he doesn’t want to survive it at all. 

Ruth and Nat channel the dead, and find themselves linked with a salesman, a Comet-sniffing cult, and each other. In the present, Aunt Ruth takes pregnant Cora on a journey through New York state, where, in the end, both timelines converge into a powerful climax. Mr. Splitfoot is a ghost story about motherhood, family, and faith. 

Though, right now, we aren’t on a physical journey, we are traveling through something fantastically unique to our timeline and, like Cora, we will learn more about ourselves and our mission. 

The Transmigration of Bodies by Yuri Herrera, translated by Lisa Dillman

A book about a plague might not seem like one to read right now, but Herrera’s short novel is about more than a mosquito driven disease. (Just like how our lives are more than just a virus.) The Redeemer has been tasked with returning the bodies of family members belonging to two rival gangs who are holding the dead hostage. The streets are empty, stores have signs requiring masks to enter, and the hardest hit places are the “squalid areas.” This noirish book is hilarious and grotesque. There are moments where it reads like a narrative of our current circumstance, like this passage:

“Four days ago their song and dance seemed like a hoax. Like the shock you feel when someone jumps out at you from behind a door and then says Relax, it’s only me. Everyone was sure: if it was anything at all, it was no big shit.”

But don’t shy away because of the difficult, relevant content. Herrera’s Shakespearean novel is brilliant. 

The Mars Room

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner

Romy Hall is serving two life sentences at a women’s prison in California. Through her experiences, we are given a glimpse into the broken criminal justice system. Romy—a former stripper—killed a stalker on her porch with a crowbar. In a just world, Romy’s crime would be considered by a judge or jury with more nuance, her stalker’s actions before the killing would be made admissible, and her past drug addiction and profession wouldn’t be used as evidence.  

In The Mars Room, Romy isn’t the only voice that is living in confinement. There are excerpts from the Unabomber’s diaries, who chose to live as a recluse in a remote cabin. Doc, a prisoner at New Fulsom, is a former dirty cop convicted of a contract killing. And Gordon, who teaches in the GED program, moves to the secluded mountains, much like the Unabomber, and succumbs to his crush on Romy.

It isn’t appropriate to equate social distancing to serving a prison sentence, like Ellen DeGeneres was dragged for doing, because we can choose to leave our homes. We have takeout, TV, and alcohol. But there is an urge to escape, to exercise our freedom, especially when someone is telling us that we can’t. Instead, stay confined, read this book, and root for Romy’s breakout. 

When I Was Five I Killed Myself by Howard Buten

From eight-year-old Burt’s perspective, confined in a children’s residential facility as a patient, the novel illustrates what can happen when a slew of adults fail a child. Burt is in the residence for what he did to Jessica. His treatment, after two months of being held there, isn’t effective, because he is stuck between two different psychiatric philosophies: Dr. Nevele’s and Rudyard’s. Rudyard is young and his approach is experimental (but appears to be working), while Dr. Nevele’s traditional method feels punitive. Burt is autistic, and wants nothing more than to speak with Jessica and know if she is okay, but he cannot. Dr. Nevele withholds Burt’s letters. He frequents the Quiet Room and is prone to violent outbursts. The narration is authentic and original, moves with such a pace the novel can be read in one sitting, and Buten withholds what brought Burt to the residence long enough to build page-turning suspense. 

The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker

Some people have come to think of our social distancing (more like physical distancing, because we are still being social) as a timeout. Much has been put on pause and many of us have had our work suspended, furloughed into a holding pattern. This peculiar situation has caused me to muse about the inessentials in my life: cable, department meetings, paid-for haircuts. Baker’s meditative narrative, The Mezzanine, follows Howie as he spends his lunch break from his office work. Much of the novel is told through digressions, which don’t feel random, but are the meditations of a man who wants to see his digressions through to the end with linearity. 

Howie is confined by his musings, which seem to clutter the narrative and also his life. Told through a plotless narrative and digressive footnotes (later in the book, there are a series of footnotes about footnotes), his attention to his daily experience allows him to think minutely about the things he interacts with: shoelaces, small bags, milk, CVS, straws, escalators. Take when his shoelace snaps, causing him to buy new ones at CVS, which makes him think of small bags, he wonders about his relationship to his memory of learning to tie his shoes: “But I supposed this is often true of moments of life that are remembered as major advances: the discovery is the crucial thing, not its repeated later applications.” 

Howie escapes his office job’s physical confinement during his lunch break only to find himself mentally confined by his tangential thoughts. This plotless novel is the perfect book for when you feel like your days are becoming plotless. 

Sula by Toni Morrison

Sula by Toni Morrison

Morrison’s second novel, published in 1973, opens with a description of the Bottom, which is actually “set up in the hills.” Land was hard to farm, but that was the point. A white farmer gave it to a slave who had completed difficult chores to earn it. A joke. What follows is a story about lifelong friends who come-to-age in the Bottom—Sula and Nel—as they carry a grave secret in different ways: the death of a young boy, Chicken Little. 

There is much confinement in this novel. The only witness to the death, Shadrack, a veteran who lives in a cabin by the riverbacks, is the town drunk and eccentric, and celebrates his made-up holiday, National Suicide Day, every year, ritualisticly. Eva Peace, Sula’s grandmother, who lost a leg, wheels around the third floor of the full house in a “rocking chair top fitted into a large child’s wagon.” Hannah, bound to her sexuality, who “refused to live without the attentions of a man.” Sula is able to escape the Bottom, go to college, live in the city, while Nel stays. Sula returns “accompanied by a plague of robins.” Much in the Bottom is ruffled by her return, especially Nel, who becomes trapped in both parental roles for her children when she catches Jude and Sula together. 

A classic novel of matriarchal families, intense relationships, sex, sorrow, and blackness, Sula is as mournful as it is beautiful. 

Meditations from a Movable Chair by Andre Dubus

Meditations from a Movable Chair by Andre Dubus II

Short story writer and essayist Andre Dubus was hit by a car on the side of the highway in 1986 while helping two broken down motorists. After weeks in the hospital, his right leg was amputated above the knee. An ex-Marine, physicality plays a large role in his fiction. There are stories about baseball players, soldiers, weight lifters, and runners. In his essay collection Meditations from a Movable Chair, written after the accident, Dubus writes while confined to a wheelchair. The essays explore his youth, his relationship with his father, the Marines, being crippled, leading a writers’ group, and spirituality. In “Digging,” Dubus tells of his first job shoveling out trenches and his gratefulness to his father for not rescuing him during a difficult first day. “A Hemingway Story” offers advice to teachers, to “walk into a classroom wondering what I would say, rather than knowing what I would say.” 

The essays alternate between the time Dubus had functioning legs and then when he didn’t. He turns to God, daily Communion, a long distance relationship over the phone, and his memories. The collection is moving and difficult. But it does offer deep contemplation in what one used to have, and what one has now, and to be grateful for experiencing both.  In “A Country Road Song,” Dubus recounts his days of running through Bradford, Massachusetts as the seasons change. He remembers what he wore, the sweat, the trees. Instead of lamenting about not being able to run those wooden paths again, he sings in appreciation of having had those days:

“I mourn this, and I sing in gratitude for loving this, and in gratitude for all the roads I ran on and walked on, for the hills I climbed and descended, for the trees and grass and sky, and for being spared losing running and walking sooner than I did: ten years sooner, or eight seasons, or three; or one day.” 

An Outbreak of Contagious Laughter Threatens to Destroy the World

Posted on by Jo Lou

Cape Town, a major city on the coast of South Africa, owes its existence partly to scurvy. During the age of exploration in the 17th century, sailors traveling on the spice routes were dying of the disease—and so the Dutch East India Company created a pit stop where vegetables could be grown and sailors could be treated. 

The Down Days

That pit stop is today the home of writer Ilze Hugo, whose new novel, The Down Days, takes place in a version of Cape Town that has been overtaken by a laughter epidemic. The novel follows a wide cast of characters—a woman who collects corpses and freelances as a detective, a trader obsessed with a mysterious sighting, and an orphan looking for her may-not-actually-exist brother—over the course of a week as they try to navigate life amidst suspicion and uncertainty. 

Hugo first had the idea for The Down Days about a decade ago, when she visited “this very obscure little medical museum you’d never hear of, tucked away behind a hospital.” The Cape Medical Museum was then featuring an exhibit on how disease shapes culture, showing how the same themes show up again and again: misinformation, fear, prejudice. “Every time there’s an epidemic, it gives society and those in charge an excuse to live out those prejudices without realizing what they’re doing,” Hugo says, and of course they’re happening now too, during COVID-19. I sat down with Ilze Hugo to ask her about what she learned from a decade researching pandemics and why her novel isn’t the typical bleak, apocalyptic tale. 

Angela Chen: In The Down Days, laughter is a contagious disease. Why laughter? 

A society under chronic stress is more susceptible to mass hysteria. And South Africa hasn’t recovered from the injustices of apartheid.

Ilze Hugo: Originally, it was going to be something more simple. I was looking at tuberculosis and Ebola, and then I came across this piece of information about laughter disease in Tanganyika, in what is now Tanzania, in 1962. That just resonated with me. I did more research on mass hysteria, and a lot of scientists are saying that it’s due to chronic stress. A society under chronic stress is more susceptible to mass hysteria. And I feel like South Africa is a society under chronic stress. We haven’t recovered from the inequalities and the injustices of apartheid. Plus, there’s something really ominous about laughter, like how a lot of people are afraid of clowns. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense as a fantastic metaphor for society in collapse. 

AC: You say that, in your research, you found the same thing happening again and again all over the world in pandemics, and yet you wanted a very specific South African story. How did you make sure that the story used those enduring themes while still being local? 

IH: When I was writing, someone said, “do you realize this is just going to be another post-apocalyptic pandemic novel?” and I saw that as a challenge. I decided, let’s really unpack how Cape Town is different and what would happen specifically in our city. 

For example, I liked the idea of focusing on a city because you don’t see a lot of these novels set in a city; usually, people flee to the country. Cape Town geographically is still very much unequal because we had the Group Areas Act under apartheid and so a lot of people were sent out of the city to live in the flats. I liked the idea of my pandemic novel bringing these people back into the city. You have a lot of rich people moving out of the city, some are going overseas, and I liked the idea of bringing people back to the city and righting that sense of injustice in a very, very small way. 

If you’re talking about serious things, sometimes it’s hard to look at straight on and if you look at them from an angle you almost see more because you’re not focusing on the reality too much. It’s almost an easier pill to swallow, especially in South Africa. I find that, growing up, a lot of people telling me that the country doesn’t talk about apartheid because it’s too depressing. And then you have writers like [South African sci-fi novelist] Lauren Beukes showing that if you write about anything traumatic or serious through that lens of science fiction, people find it easier to understand. They don’t take it as personally. 

AC: I find the role of misinformation and truth in The Down Days really interesting. There’s a journalist character who has a slippery attitude toward facts and people are always saying not to trust various publications, or debating what truth really is. Where did that come from?

IL: The more I researched, it came up again and again and again. Periods of great uncertainty and crisis have always been the perfect breeding ground for myths and conspiracies to spread. People seem to gravitate towards conspiracy theories and alternative facts when they feel powerless and out of control, and all the historic epidemics I looked at showed examples of this, which I found fascinating.

Periods of great uncertainty have always been the perfect breeding ground for myths and conspiracies to spread.

Another thing is that we have an unusual relationship with myth and magic in South Africa. We’re very culturally diverse and, in the book, I tried to incorporate how different cultures would react to the situation. We have these beliefs and they’re not magic or magical realism, they’re very real beliefs. That makes the city a unique place to talk about fake news and conspiracy. It’s not as black and white as it would be in a Western country and it’s not so easy to say, “listen, this is the science, so I’m going to disregard the way that you think about this situation.” 

In the novel, one character used to be a member of the occult police, and that was a real thing. We did have an occult unit in the police force. Another plot point has to do with spirit possession, and that was inspired by a real paper on Amakhosi possession. At the same time, some of the tech parts of the novel that sound crazy are real too. For instance, I got the idea for the data dealer character from an article on real data smugglers. 

AC: The Down Days is, and others have noted this too, fundamentally an optimistic novel. There’s a pandemic going on, but there’s no true villain and a lot of resilience. Why did you want to buck the trope of the pandemic that reveals the cracks in humanity’s foundation?

IH: When we read these pandemic novels, we think people are inherently cruel, but they’re also inherently good and I wanted to showcase that part of society. As humans, we have an incredible ability to adapt. 

When I was writing, Cape Town had a water crisis. We could only use 13 gallons of water a day, which is quite a small amount. It sounded very apocalyptic and like a problem we would need to deal with for a long time, but that too passed. I also read a memoir called The Last Resort and the author is very worried about his parents not surviving land invasions in Zimbabwe. He went back to Zimbabwe and found that his parents were actually totally fine. They found new ways to adapt. They were growing pot in their garden. It’s such a funny, humorous memoir. 

It really made me about how people learn new things about themselves and how strong they really can be in a situation like this. I wanted to focu on that more than I wanted to focus on the negative. Hopeful pandemic novels have an important message to tell. 

We Need To Talk About First Person Plural

Posted on by Erin Bartnett

Welcome to Read Like a Writer, a new series that examines a different element of the craft of fiction writing in each installment, using examples from the Recommended Reading archives. Each month, the editors of Recommended Reading—Halimah Marcus, Brandon Taylor, and Erin Bartnett—will select a few stories that illustrate a specific technique, style, or writing challenge such as how to write a story with only one character, use dramatic irony to create suspense, or write an ending that is surprising yet inevitable.

The Greek chorus—originally a performance of 50 men singing and dancing a dithyramb for Dionysus in the 6th century CE—evolved into a mostly passive group of tellers, offering moral and social commentary on the action of a play from the sidelines. Their role was to connect what was happening to larger historical themes, or other plays, but they generally did not engage directly with the actors. Overtime, the chorus has been adopted and adapted in contemporary fiction, sometimes being pushed right into the action of the short story. 

John Gardner, author of The Art of Fiction, calls the first person plural point of view (the “we” voice) the “town POV.” Citing “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner, in which the townspeople of Jefferson, Mississippi investigate the life and death of a reclusive woman. Gardner suggests that these kinds of stories often foreground a secret. There’s something or someone “we” don’t know and “we” will get to the bottom of it. In this kind of story the choral POV is both the witness and the judge.  The townspeople, speaking as one body, have their own motivations, and manipulate the story to their advantage. Because they are separated from the action of the story, their telling necessitates a lot of guesswork. This dynamic puts the writer in a tricky place: if the townspeople can only speculate on what is going on, how can the reader trust this narrative mob to tell the story? 

They can’t really, and that’s part of the fun. Part of what builds tension in the first person plural story is that the reader can’t really trust the narrators—it’s an inherently uneasy perspective. A common pitfall in these stories occurs when the author constructs the “we” as an unknowable, omniscient teller. By making them anonymous, they absolve them of responsibility. Stories that pull off the narrative “we” shape the narrators as they would any other character. They engage with the limits of what the group can do and can know. 

We the editors of Recommended Reading (Halimah, Brandon, and Erin) have selected three stories from the archives with first person plural narrators. From a pair of siblings, to a nosy neighborhood, to a production crew, they show, in different ways, how collective voices can create belonging and strength as well as alienation and conflict. 

“Neighbors” by Anthony Tognazzini

As Halimah Marcus states in her intro, “Anthony Tognazzini’s ‘Neighbors’ is a story of watching. A group of undistinguished townspeople stalk a woman whose great sins are that she is unmarried and lives on the outskirts of town. Her base offenses are compounded by further peculiarities: Sheila does not work for a company (she freelances!), she has a cat (‘we are dog people’), and, according to the police, ‘she might be a lesbian.’”

One of the pleasures of a plural first person story in a story like “Neighbors” is that it creates an immediate tension. As in all stories of surveillance, there is a voyeur and there is the observed. What heightens this dynamic is that the voyeur is not one set of eyes, but an entire town of eyeballs tracking and judging the movements of one woman, an outcast. The story is relayed by this collective consciousness, giving it a sense of irony and menace because the reader has access to the blindspots and biases of the collective. We understand the information as relayed to be skewed, unreliable.  This comes through via Tognazzini’s skillful use of tone and detail. For example, when the police confront the neighbors outside of Sheila’s house, they relay their plan and reflect, “We thought of ourselves as scientists, analyzing Sheila from a clinical distance, looking through her window as if through a microscope. We thought of ourselves as operatives, collecting intelligence for the sake of national security.” It’s a wonderful trick of a point of view, one that is active rather than passive. —BT

“A Tiger Fighter Is Hard to Find” by Ha Jin

In Ha Jin’s “A Tiger Fighter Is Hard to Find,” a TV crew has received praise from the government for their TV series Wu Song Fought the Tiger. If they can respond to one small criticism (“the tiger looked fake, and didn’t present an authentic challenge to the hero”), the show will be sent to Beijing to compete for a national prize. The TV crew—our collective narrator—is tasked first with finding a tiger. As the title suggests, finding an authentic tiger is easy. The authentic hero is the harder one to find. The actor, Huping Wang, looks like a great tiger fighter, but is actually a pretty wimpy one. 

Perspective is doing so much work in “Tiger Fighter.” The charm of the story, in part, is what this crew, and thereby the reader, focuses on—where to sell tiger testicles, how much alcohol is enough alcohol to get a man to forget his fear, and what to do with a schizophrenic actor who looks the part but can’t play it. Told in first person plural POV, the themes of the story harmonize with the reality of the story. The yawning gap between collective artistic ideals and flawed human actors becomes a literal problem for the crew adapting a novel for TV: “In private, some of us — clerks, assistants, actors — complained about the classic novel that contains the tiger-fighting episode. Why did the author write such a difficult scene? It’s impossible for any man to ride a tiger and then beat it to death bare-handed. The story is a pure fabrication that has misled readers for hundreds of years. It may have been easy for the writer to describe it on paper, but in reality, how could we create such a hero?” 

There’s a wink in that line. Ha Jin has written another great literary scene resistant to adaptation. And while Ha Jin might make it look easy to describe such a scene, he’s let the whole crew show us just how impossible it can be to get it right. —EB

“Rope” by Joshua Harmon

In Joshua Harmon’s haunting story, “Rope,” two siblings believe their older brother Jaime keeps a girl tied to a tree in the woods: “When we first found out that our brother keeps a girl tied to a tree in the woods, we did not think to tell anyone.” They speculate about his behaviors, his methods, and motivations, but they do not question their underlying assumption that there is a girl tied to a tree in the woods. Nor does the reader learn how they “found out,” that moment when their murky inferences crystalized into a belief. 

An uncareful reader might take the siblings’ speculation as fact—might miss the hearsay, the lake of visual confirmation, the invention of detail—and misunderstand this story for one of violence rather than imagination. Harmon understands that it’s easier for young children to invent a fantasy than it is for them to come up with logical explanations. If their older brother sneaks out of the house to see a girl, the carnal mystery at the center of that action must be explained without carnal knowledge. 

My favorite sentence in the story reveals the depth of the siblings’ compassion and longing to understand. It also exemplifies the layers of perspective at work here: “We think, sometimes, Mindy and I, that we would know the answers to all of our questions about the girl our brother keeps tied to a tree if only we could know her name.” The individual narrator of “Rope,” whose name and gender we do not know, is hidden within the “we,” the narrator and their sister Mindy. The way the “we” envelopes the “I”—the way the pair subsumes the individual—shows how integral groups, even small ones, are to entrenching misconceptions. —HM

Why Did a Closeted Gay Republican Receive A Taxidermied Aardvark?

Posted on by Jo Lou

At the beginning of Enter the Aardvark, Alexander Paine Wilson (R), a congressman so obsessed with Ronald Wilson Reagan that he purchases the same denim cowboy shirt and canary-yellow couch as the former president, is thinking about how he needs to “Find A Wife” in order to win his reelection campaign. The doorbell rings over and over again, interrupting Wilson’s reverie, and FedEx man drops off a large box on his porch. Inside is an enormous taxidermied aardvark.

The aardvark itself––a strange and somehow beguiling creature––serves as connective tissue for alternating storylines set in present-day Washington DC and 19th century England. In incisive and entertaining prose, Jessica Anthony satirizes wildly egotistical, hypocritical politicians, explores the ways in which repressing our true desires can cause harm, and illuminates the danger that stems from a dearth of empathy. 

In 2015, while writing the first draft of this novel in a feverish six-week period, Anthony couldn’t have known just how prescient her work would be in our current climate, one in which we are isolated from one another physically, one in which politicians are limiting essential services like abortion, and one in which the president of the United States, when asked during a press conference what he would say to Americans scared of COVID-19, would respond, “I say you’re a terrible reporter.”  

From our separate social isolation spaces, I spoke with Jessica Anthony on Zoom about engaging politically through writing, the strangeness of writing (and reading) satire in our current climate, and the ways in which isolation has fostered unexpected connection. 

Jacqueline Danielle Alnes: I have to ask why the aardvark? 

Jessica Anthony: The founder of surrealism, André Breton, has a concept called the “waking sentence,” just a gathering of words which can awaken in a writer or artist a sense of the dream that you want to pursue. Back in 2012, I had this phrase, “enter the aardvark,” that felt somehow weirdly alive. I sat with it for about three years. Finally, in 2015, in the run-up to the election, I thought I might write some kind of political fiction. I started with this scrap of poetry, this little waking sentence. So that’s how the novel began to be born––purely through language.

JDA: I love that. I had my own suspicions––or maybe not suspicions, more like curiosities––about how you chose the aardvark. Within the book itself, there are hints as to why. The aardvark is a funny animal and the prose itself is absurd in some ways. The language you spoke about of course makes sense, but as you were writing into it, what sort of things did the aardvark lend itself to? 

JA: The aardvark, the animal, is one of the most evolutionary distinct creatures on earth. Their physiognomy really hasn’t changed that much since the Miocene. There’s something that felt quite eternal about this beast, the more I read about them. But it was really just their irrational visage that I became interested in. They’re very sweet looking. I don’t know if you’ve ever really looked at aardvarks ––

JDA: I did. After reading the book, I couldn’t stop scrolling through pictures.

JA: They have wonderful elongated snouts and those rabbity or donkey ears, and long whiskers underneath their eyes. There’s something truly marvelous about the irrationality of their appearance that just began to lend itself metaphorically to a fiction that was examining the everlasting irrational politician. There are, in my mind, elephants, and there are donkeys, and then there are aardvarks, these men who walk among us who vote one way in public and live another way in private. They’ve been part of our political sphere for as long as America has been around. 

JDA: I have to admit, it was strange to read this book during these past few weeks. I feel like everything has been so heightened and surreal, that to read satire in the midst of it was like “Oh my god, this is actually happening.” I had to remind myself of where I was, and then also where the book was. 

JA: Yes, yes.

JDA: The main character Alexander Paine Wilson, who is highly hypocritical in his political policies versus personal practices, almost rang too true to reality to feel like satire. Of course you wrote this, like you mentioned, in 2016, but what is it like releasing this book in our current climate? 

It’s a real problem that Americans are not communicating with one another as human beings, but as political entities.

JA: I began writing in a time when it was still assumed that Hillary Clinton would be president. That’s when the first draft of the novel was written––I wrote it in six weeks. I was paying attention to a number of different aspects of the political sphere but also spheres of media that felt new to me and which I wanted to open the fiction up to –– cancel culture, for example, and the way that we are managing huge influxes of information through phone technology, emails, etc., and this constant sense of building and racing. Now, under the coronavirus, we’re all on pause. 

But the novel does investigate the psyche of the contemporary GOP. Alex Paine Wilson is in many ways endemic of the young, modern, ambitious, and vain, fairly radicalized, GOP politician. He exists on Earth to please Mitch McConnell. When you think of that psyche in this particular moment, I’m seeing it play out in all kinds of terrifying ways. We just saw one of Trump’s press conferences where he used the chilling language “goals of community mitigation” to announce the likely death of over a hundred thousand Americans. I’m reminded of George Orwell: “The enemy of clarity is insincerity.” There’s something woefully muddled and threatening about political speech already, but when it’s used to communicate about the loss of human life, the threat of insincerity feels worse.

These subterranean dangers of the insincere GOP psyche that I was investigating in the novel really have risen to the surface during the coronavirus. I’m seeing all kinds of ways in which this particular mentality is destructive, not only to the people who live it, but to the rest of us. 

JDA: Alexander Paine Wilson runs for reelection for the First Congressional District in Virginia on a platform of “DIVIDE TO UNITE.”

JA: Yes.

JDA: Other characters he encounters are severely divided by political party. These oppositions, ultimately, seem harmful to everyone in the novel, and stymie people both personally and politically. What interests you about these divisions? 

JA: It bothers me because I’m paying attention. Most people I know are paying attention. I want fiction to pay attention. It’s a real problem that Americans are not communicating with one another as human beings, but as political entities. We are making assumptions about our neighbors based on whatever ridiculous ephemera we are coming up with about their possible political representation. This is the toxicity that the novel engages with.  Political affiliation is the major defining personal characteristic for most Americans nowadays. If novelists aren’t interested in creatively engaging that divisiveness then what we aren’t writing about in the United States is going to be felt by the writer as much as what we are. 

JDA: You guarded the Maria Valeria Bridge between Štúrovo, Slovakia and Eztergom, Hungary and that allowed you to “escape U.S. politics.” I wondered –– this novel is steeped in politics; how did getting away from the U.S. help you to find your way in the writing of it? 

JA: The bridge guarding was particularly timely, because this was the summer of 2017. I think all of us were feeling the heavy weight of all kinds of nonsensical, threatening and/or dangerous rhetoric. You reach a point as a novelist where you really do need to disappear into the dream of your story. You need vast stretches of silence. The bridge guarding was a residency for three months on the Danube River that was filled with long, slow days where everyone around me either spoke Slovak or Hungarian. I rarely went online. So it was this marvelous quiet time to drop myself into the book and to ask myself the tougher questions you have to ask yourself when you’re finishing a novel.

JDA: Early in the book, Titus Downing, a taxidermist who believes that “the art of the taxidermist if not all that different from the art of a magician,” says, “The secret lies only in displaying beauty truthfully to life. The beauty must be recognized for its own sake, even by the unscientific.” 

After reading that line, I couldn’t help but think about the idea of writing fiction –– that there are truths, sometimes uncomfortable, that emerge from artifice. In this current political climate, one that you satirize in this novel, what do you hope fiction can do?

These subterranean dangers of the insincere GOP psyche have risen to the surface during the coronavirus.

JA: James Baldwin has a great quote about this, that only poets can tell the truth. And by poets he means all writers and artists. I don’t think any of us sits down to write a novel for the purpose of being didactic or polemic.  A novel is not a lesson in how to be. It’s not so polite. But there is some investigation into human desire that I think unites all of us as writers and readers, an investigation that is maybe unique to novelists. It’s oddly through the act of immersing yourself in another person’s psyche, or the psyches of a number of characters who create community, that you are creating a discourse, a way of communicating to your readers’ subconscious without perhaps even realizing what the “message” is. Maybe you will never know, as how the reader feels and understands your fiction is wholly dependent upon them, and their own relationships with their memories, what they know of this shared world.

I’m not interested in delivering a lesson to my reader. I’m interested in entertainment. Primarily my love of fiction comes from my need to be an entertainer and to share with my reader a little of my own sense of how I see the truth of our everyday life. It’s my own helpless desire to tell the truth as I see it, which I’ve found most comfortable through the veil of fiction. I feel much more at ease when I feel like I’m speaking to the reader dreaming, to what they maybe don’t even realize they know. The subconscious has always been more logical to me.

JDA: In Enter the Aardvark, we have these two plot lines that run parallel to one another. As the novel goes on, there are these moments that echo each other ––

JA: Yes.

JDA: Everything is repeating or slowly unraveling in ways you didn’t see or mirroring one another or juxtaposing one another in ways that help illuminate what is different and what remains the same. I wondered how you reckon with history –– or histories –– as ways of understanding the present.

JA: What I’m interested in the ways the contemporary post-modern, post-humanist, however you want to define it –– our modern moment –– how that psychology butts up against who we used to be. Which is to say, writing history is possible for me through the sense of an exaggerated, contemporary voice. When I’m writing history, it’s largely farcical: revised, reimagined stories that are blown up and hyperbolized. Writing history this way gives me a sense of the universal. 

So Titus Downing, the taxidermist who stuffs the aardvark, he is in voice like Henry James, Jane Austen, but he is also kind of like Don DeLillo a little bit. There’s a kind of modern cynicism in there, a modern attitude as you follow Titus Downing. I think for me as a novelist it’s rewarding to place this contemporary doubt upon historical fictions. Some funny and profound truths emerge. 

JDA: There are ways where either of these plot lines without the other would just flounder a little bit or not be as poignant or funny with the relief that they give each other.

JA: There’s something about the emotional resonance that occurs reading Alex Wilson which actually comes through Titus Downing’s passages, and his stuffing of the aardvark and his love for the aardvark. When we read Titus Downing, there’s an earnestness to his character that, arguably, you could say is the heart that Alex Wilson. Potentially. If he were a little kinder, a little bit more forgiving, and a little more accepting of the diversity of human experience, which he isn’t.

But also these men all share some pretty radical and profound struggles with their sexual identities. The fact that Alex Wilson belongs to a party that doesn’t support his sexual preference is a cruelty imposed upon this character, and it’s one that hasn’t changed since 1875, Downing’s time. There’s quite a lot that binds these characters in my mind beyond their sexual identity: notions of reincarnation and rebirth and reimagining life through taxidermy are there. The aardvark, of course, is there. 

JDA: These kind of surprising connections between characters has me thinking again about the current situation we are in, one where we are all isolated but forging connections in new ways. I’m sorry that your book tour has been cancelled like so many others right now. I wondered if in some way, you’ve found unexpected sources of community during all of this. 

JA: At first, I was pretty nervous about losing the book tour. It was quite devastating. I’ve been likening it to finishing a five-year marathon and then you’re tackled by a surprise football team that comes out of nowhere ten feet before the finish line. Full confession: I’ve spent the last ten years trash talking social media, and I’m not sure that my general attitude towards it has dramatically changed. I’ve never been inspired by a text message. But it’s rather amazing that we are able to communicate through these technologies in the way that we are, when the chips are down. All the junk that I was really cynical about, like the little hearts that trickle up on the side of the screen on Instagram, I find myself now thinking, “Aw, that’s really nice.” 

I find myself in this makeshift TV station in my office having all kinds of marvelous conversations with people who maybe I wouldn’t have been able to connect to otherwise. My first couple of book events, we have seen a hundred people or more joining in. I’ve seen bookstores really rallying behind authors. It’s like we are all realizing the degree to which we rely upon each other. Readers, booksellers, publishers, and writers –– we all occupy the same collective space. 

Grandmother Is Gone but at Least She’s a Bird Now

Posted on by Erin Bartnett

“What Is the Internet?” excerpted from Parakeet
by Marie Helene Bertino

One week before my wedding day, upon returning to my hotel room with a tube of borrowed toothpaste, I find a small bird waiting inside the area called the antechamber and know within moments it is my grandmother. I recognize the glittering, hematite eyes, the expression of cunning disapproval. The odor of a gym at close of day encircles her.

What is the Internet? the bird says, does not say.

Her head is the color of warning: sharp curve, yield-yellow. The eyes on either side of the Cro-Magnon crown are lined the way hers were in shoddy cornflower pencil as if to say, Really look, here. Her hair, that had throughout her life hurled silvery messages skyward, has been replaced by orderly, navy stripes that emanate down her pate like ripples in silk. Under the beak where her unpronounced chin would have been, four regal feathers pose, each marked by an ebony dot. She hovers inches above the sofa’s back, chastened and restless by her new form.

The toothpaste lands with a dull thud on the carpet. I’m silent when stunned. No getting me to talk.

What is the Internet? my grandmother the bird insists, speaking as if we are in the middle of a conversation, which, in a way, we are.

She had called to ask this question ten years before. At the time I considered explaining the technological phenomenon, but she was so old. What would be the point, I reasoned, of telling her about the show priming to begin after her exit? There have been many times in my life when, encountering an opportunity to do good, for reasons of shyness or shock, an unwillingness to leave a safe perch has made me balk. I told my grandmother the Internet was solely for engineers and that its effect on society would be nominal.

The following day she climbed a ladder poised against her house, meaning to hammer a warped shingle. Something like a phone call—we were never certain—summoned her. She misremembered the ladder, fell from the roof, and lay unconscious until a neighbor found her. For a month we attempted to will her out of a coma with the music of Lawrence Welk. She preferred to stay asleep.

After she was gone, every room was a nothing room.

I don’t regret letting others rush forward to care for strangers in need. I don’t regret calling my brother a shit on his wedding day. However, lying to my grandmother about the Internet placed a painful pebble at the bottom of my stomach that would not go away. Now, my second chance claws the rim of a water glass in present, Internet-rich day, as alive as the rest of us, trying to sip through her beak and failing.

“It turned out to be more influential than I led you to believe,” I say.

No shit.

Tasked with explaining it, I realize how little I know about the Internet. “It began as numbers on a screen.” I make a blurping sound to signify dial up and explain that it grew from a device only a few people had, to Wi-Fi, which I think is in the air? I gesture to indicate: exploding. Network names showcase a defining feature of the user. Biscottiworshipper. Sadoboegirl. “People use it to promote themselves like brands.” This is deep and rich information. My cheeks heat, I’m proud of myself. I extrapolate: “Because everyone is famous, no one is.” I deepen, reverse: “Which is, like everything else, a good and bad thing.” I say, “Link, blog, router, spam.”

Even as a bird my grandmother’s dubiousness is unmistakable. The cocked avian focus, doubting me. When she was alive, she preferred staying in her slippers all day and the term “shove it up your ass” to anything, maybe even to my grandfather who over time became a scudding, booted shadow in the house’s secondary rooms. In the garage, winding a clock. In the spare bedroom, repairing an outlet. Shove the clock. Shove the outlet. If my grandmother ever regretted slicing into another’s feelings like fondant, she never admitted it. Any room containing her was merry. This was a big deal for me, since most of my childhood felt panicked and serious. She’d listen and move her eyebrows in a way that corrected my perspective. With a gaze, she could lift me older.

Offended on behalf of the product I’ve just begun to understand, I sell. “There’s almost no living being you can’t connect with.”

At “no living being” I think of her, legs tucked into her plumage, “sitting” above the cushions. How does it feel to be connected to every living thing?

“Sad,” I admit, and she says, Sad?

“When you can see anyone at any hour, it collapses perspective and time. Add to that the isolation and distance from which most people observe, and the Internet gives the impression that one person is simultaneously having a party, turning fifty, scuba diving, baking with a great aunt.”

Sounds like a giant panic attack.

“That’s not technology’s fault,” I say. “The Internet is indifferent. It’s the people who ruin it, posting only highlights, like every night is Saturday night. But most of life is Wednesday afternoon, and no one thinks that’s meaningful. They omit loneliness and tedium. The people who do post honestly are considered whiners.” The bird huffs, nods. No one should bother anyone else with their problems. This had been a phrase she used in life and one of the fueling philosophies of our family. What a waste of time.

“It is, but there are beautiful aspects to it.” I press a few buttons on my phone to conjure a picture.

Goodie, she says. A wall.

“The Great Wall of China,” I correct her. “Everyone can visit faraway places. Kind of. It’s a grand leveler in terms of class.”

If you can afford a phone, I guess.

I change the screen option and a grid of photographs appears. “People have their own page on their preferred platform.” I scroll so she can see:

A frosted cake. Dog on a forest path. Woman smiling over macaroni. Page of a book. Pulled taffy. Boy mussed from a nap. Lit pool. Selfie of a woman balancing a cat on either shoulder. A dog eats Cheez-Its off pink linoleum. A sign: DO NOT SHELVE ITEMS IN AISLE THREE WITHOUT ASKING JOANNA. Bunting in a desert town. Aproned gelato server hovering over delicate, pastel vats.

“A good way to connect with what are called ‘friends,’” I say. “Not regular friends, usually it’s like the guy who plays softball with your coworker.”

Who wants to be more connected? the bird says, does not say.

Everyone is friends now?

“I think people dislike other people at the ratio they did before you—”

We’re not going to get very far if you can’t say died.

“It’s called virtual.” I frown. “I’m not describing this correctly.”

You’re describing it fine.

“How would you know?” I say at the same time as she says,

But how would I know?

I’ve come a week early to this inn on the shaft of Long Island to prepare for the transition from woman to wife, to do what the groom calls “decompress” because “of late” I’ve become a bit of a “nightmare.” To break apart if necessary, but to do so properly, amid slatted pool chairs and conference coffee. I’m thirty-six, ethnically ambiguous, and hold an intense job I do not like, biographer of people with traumatic brain injury. I present their lives in court, using storyboards and dioramas. Everyone is thrilled I’m getting married. No one can believe I’ve found such a sweet man. Everyone adores the treats sold in this town that are hybrids of bagels and flatbread. Flagels.

The Inn’s website boasts a recent remodel, yet the old design has only been reinforced with fresh paint so it looks newly out of date. Above the mud-colored carpets, wallpaper vines strangle the walls, here and there resulting in a salmon-colored tulip. There are fleets of staircases and elevators and floors large enough to simultaneously host several cathartic events. In another banquet hall, another wedding will run alongside ours. The plural of catharsis is catharses. The turnover is quick. Already, a lobby poster welcomes attendees of the following week’s conference that seems to be about technology and clouds.

The Inn is buckled to a famous lake that features prominently on the town’s signage. None of my people are from this area so the lake is not famous to us. It is akin to pointing to an actor and saying, That’s so and so, from a show we’ve never watched. A gazebo sits in an exultation of cattails. A ruffle of trash by the edge of one of the lake’s many inlets. I prefer the ocean because it is ugly and secretive and moody and can growl. Mind you, I’m “awful” and “rarely satisfied.”

So far, my relaxation has manifested in inventing needs so I can have lingering conversations with the staff. I was finishing the place cards earlier when I thought, toothpaste, and wandered downstairs to inquire about the photograph taped to the concierge’s computer screen.

“I’m not sure if you’re aware what day you’ve landed on.” I speak to the bird in the grated voice you employ for a guest who’s arrived too early. “It’s Sunday. I’m getting married in six days.” I gesture to the migration of folded cards that cover the carpet in ecru Vs, anointed with all I can recall from high school calligraphy. “I have a work appointment tomorrow, a meeting with the florist, then I host our families for the groom’s dinner. Mom, stepfather, friends arrive later this week. Et cetera. Have you come to wish me well?” I say, but knowing her, my tone contains no hope.

Of course I know you’re getting married. The edges of her projection spit and haw. Do you think I’m here to ask about wires in a box? She goes transparent and her skeleton shows blinding bright, then whatever debatably divine force is conjuring her regains composure and she is opaque again. There’s something I want you to do.

A rap on the door startles me and the bird, who fwips from the glass to the table like traveling from one thought to the next.

Through the peephole, I see a bellboy standing above a rolling table holding a metal-covered plate. “Ma’am?”

“I didn’t order anything,” I say.

Several feet behind him, the elevator dings. He says, “It’s a surprise.”

My grandmother warbles.

“Surprise!” He is faux cheerful.

I open the door. He glides in, activates the brakes on each table leg, flips the plate’s cover to reveal a cake that says, Congrat­ulations! bats a napkin he pulls from an unseen compartment against the air then folds it into a triangle. His expression grows concerned, echoing mine.

I have what people call an out-loud face, one that others mimic without realizing. It may be the generous, peat-colored eyebrows, or the phrase they make with my conversation-piece nose. Strangers ask, Are you confused? Or, comment: You’re having fun. What they mean is, I’m less good than others at hiding.

The bellboy follows my gaze to the grandmother now roosted on the pillow and shrieks, drops the napkin. “A bird!” He heads to the door. “I’ll get the manager.”

“No need to call anyone,” I say. “It’s handled.”

“I hate birds,” he says. “Like, really hate.”

My grandmother’s feathers shiver with laughter.

“She’s very small,” I bargain.

“Doesn’t matter,” he says. “Small, big. Hate them and always have.”

My grandmother flies across the room and clings to the frame of a painting with one mirthful claw. This enjoyment of other people’s discomfort was true in life. She is at once wholly grandmother and wholly bird, as she produces a multigarble that sounds like bland women kvetching. Louder, then louder.

“Oh god,” he says. “What’s it doing?” His fear is so antic it must be a put-on. He cowers in a crescent shape against the wall.

Tack, tack, my grandmother threatens cheerfully.

“I’m calling the concierge,” he whispers.

“Stop,” I tell her. Then to him, “We don’t need the concierge. This is my bird. We were talking.”

“‘My’?” he says. “‘Talking’?”

“Birds talk,” I say.

My grandmother seems to chitchat with herself then produces a showy, wooden, Hello.

I imagine the room from his perspective. Bride talking to bird. He looks like a kid who muscles through situations in which women want him to leave with what he thinks is charm. But he’s probably never met women like us. Critical, exuding a very taken vibe, hawkish (on certain evenings literally). Even in bird form my grandmother is all of these things, you can tell by the way she’s needling him with gleeful, haughty eyes.

“Money.” I hand him a twenty. “Don’t tell the concierge I have a bird in here.”

He winces, consults the bill in his hand.

“Secret,” I say. And, in case it’s the kind of thing that matters to him: “I’m the bride.”

I guide him out. “Thank you for the surprise,” I say. “I do like sweets.”

“Raspberry.” His voice is sad.

I want to seal the transaction with a compliment. “This is one of the nicest places I’ve ever stayed in Long Island.” Not technically a lie. I’ve never stayed anywhere else.

“On.” He snaps to attention. “Long Island. We say on.”

“On Long Island?” I test. “Does that make sense?”

He nods. “On.”

I close the door and return to the antechamber where the bird is sitting mid-cake. Give an old lady a break, she says, does not say. I can’t have any fun?

She tries for a raspberry but neither berry nor beak will allow her to eat. She exists in this world but can exert no physical influence, which is news to someone like her.

Her mother, my great-grandmother, was banished from the Basque Country for getting pregnant with a Romany’s child.

She missed the banishing ship she was supposed to take from France to America. I like to think it was because she lost track of time while doing her hair. You never know what worse luck your bad luck saved you from. It was 1912. The ship she was supposed to take was the Titanic. Fig, I missed my ship. Sound of ship hitting an iceberg. Sound of ship cracking in half. Sound of cello. The scuffle of drowning. Safely on another vessel two days behind the Titanic, my great-grandmother gazed across the icy churn, my grandmother growing in her like an amniotic orchid, an accidental immigrant. My grandmother was tormented in her white neighborhood for her dark skin, and carried that pain into adulthood, where it bloomed into benevolent disgust. She gave birth to an ice chip, my mother.

Years later on the pale disk of Lake Champlain, my mother missed a ferry. In the hour she spent waiting for the next one she drank a Seven and Seven and met my father, a dockworker from the mountains who was the first in his family to cross a state line. He died of heart failure when my brother and I were young, leaving us alone with her temper, a line of crystal in igneous rock. A secret to everyone except those who lived with her.

Missing boats is a family trait.

Fun with the bellboy abandoned, the bird turns to business.

Is he tall?

I know she means the groom. “No.”

Does he have all his hair?

“It is in fact his distinguishing characteristic.” I tell her he is an elementary school principal who coaches basketball, plays guitar, and sings to second graders about the solar system. Everyone loves the planet song.

Show me a picture.

I scroll down my personal web page, but there is only one picture of a tree at dusk. “I keep meaning to add more.” Searching my phone, I find a picture of him holding three basketballs, the straps of several duffels hoisted over his shoulder. Oh, she says. He’s white.

“We’re white,” I say.

She says, Kind of.

“We’re considered white now,” I say, insulted that she hasn’t mentioned his clear green eyes, or, like, his ability to carry several things at once. “. . . the world is run by computers, and you’re a bird. Not to beat a dead horse.”

She is frustrated with me but will say what she has come to say. More of an understanding with space than movement, she intuits from table edge to sofa back. She lifts her beak as to achieve a silent auditorium a composer raises his wand.

What I want you to do is find your brother.

Of course, I already know. Knew before she asked about the Internet, knew before rounding the corner to the antechamber and finding a judgmental budgie, perhaps even before, when I— balancing my room key, wallet, phone, and toothpaste—reached the door and realized I had no way of opening it and had to place each item on the ground, turn the knob, collect them again, all the while a turbulence spreading beneath my breastplate, which contained the maddening carbonation that could signal only one person. Tom. The thrilling dread that precedes his presence perhaps his only reliable quality. As kids, we slept pressed together like deer. The type of brother who will be your plus one to the play party or log roll, extol the virtues of heroin so lovingly you cry, clear dawn’s crust from your windshield, but will not have brunch with you, or meet your best friend, or join you on the errand, or even answer his phone. The image I summon when thinking of him is akin to a certain laughing trouble. Any conflict I’ve ever encountered—and any alchemy—the tendency the world has to upend: unexpected money, a pretty line of stray cats, a bird-shaped grandmother, holds him as an ingredient.

Even the bird’s timing is pure brother, right before a wedding, what most people would regard as a joyful event. This is typical for my family, who treat happiness with suspicion. That very morning, I congratulated myself on completing the transition into normalcy without their destruction.

The bird and I both know he has been the silent member of our conversation all along.

If it helps, she says, you won’t find him.

“I won’t find him,” I agree. “Because I’m not going to look.”

Do you know where he is?

“I assume in the city somewhere, hiding in a theater.”

How long has it been since you’ve seen him?

“Seven years?”

The last time I saw Tom was at his own wedding, where he lay bloody on a gurney, asking me to hold his hand. It’s just that I’m so deeply unhappy, he says, in memory. I remember the taste of vanilla and his anemic, furtive fiancée, Sara Something.

You’re not going to find him, but it’s important that you try, she says. You’ll do it.

“I won’t.”

Her narrow eyes narrow further, narrow more. Where are we?

What’s this murky room with only a couch? It’s like we’re in a stew.

“It’s called an antechamber. A room before a room.”

A room before a room, she says in that way she has, that cuts through our tense and familiar squalls. And what is your job? The non sequitur means to stall until she can figure out another way to get what she wants.

“I work with people who have traumatic brain injury. Normally they’ve been hurt in car accidents or on the job. I tell their life stories in court. Like my client Danny. He drove a big-rig dessert truck and was injured while filling it with gas.”

I guess somebody doesn’t like Sara Lee. The room’s grip releases. She performs inventory of what on her hurts. Pain is different now, she concludes. It’s more like sound in another part of the house. But I still hate my ass. Asses like ours never leave, even in the afterlife.

“You don’t have an ass,” I remind her. “You’re a bird.”

A bird today. Myself again tomorrow. We could disagree for eternity but there’s no one I’d rather sit with. I spread jam onto a scone and hold it out for her. Where does it come from—beat a dead horse?

“Probably from people who like horses.”

Or hate them. Her beak cannot find purchase on the pastry. The afterlife is truly cruel. Being a bird is exhausting. I’m obsessed with cleaning these. She runs her beak through her tail feathers.

I ask what she’s learned about humans by being dead and she says, They ask for signs a lot. They’re always looking for proof like, If you exist, rattle the mailboxes. But you never asked for a sign. She quiets. You never reached out. Why?

“I asked once and it didn’t happen.”

And you never asked again. It’s like a song.

“A song,” I say, and she says, A sad one.

“What is it like?” I say. “To age and die?”

A sigh flutters through her corduroy belly. Aging is easy, like falling down a hill. No choice involved. It’s reconciling yourself to loss that’s hard. I was eighty­five when I died. But I felt nineteen. I used to forget how old I was. I’d talk to you for long enough I’d think I was you. Then I’d look in the mirror and think, ack, who’s that old woman? A burst of shivering compels her from one cushion to another. Had I been anything other than a sheltered fool I wouldn’t have worried at all. I had the slut gene. I should have used it more. It’s in the family. You walk across the room, people pay attention. It’s not because we’re beauti­ful. We’re gnarled things who look like we’ve been pulled from the earth. Root vegetables: potatoes or turnips. Half of us miserable, the other half deluded. You’ve seen pictures of your cousins. However, we are possessed of the self. All arrows point toward us. A blessing and a curse. Not your mother, she was born complaining. Believe me, I was there. No fun at all. That will always be her fault because I made life nice for her. She married a man who couldn’t summon up enough juice to break a glass and lives her life doing cross­stitch, the only thing she’s ever liked. She’s rich enough now that she can afford to be good at only one thing. You kids don’t like your mother and I can’t blame you. But it’s a mistake to assume she doesn’t feel pain.

The bird warbles, a mournful sound. As a girl, I liked to press her supple lavender cigarette case against my cheek. She was a real bummer, your mother.

“She still is,” I say.

How’d we get talking about her? Let’s get back to the main event. Me. And how I didn’t use my body enough. Those of us with able bodies have a responsibility to use them as much as we can. Given another chance, you wouldn’t believe how I’d use it. Threesomes. Foursomes. More­ somes. Smoking is a joy of life. Good lord, why did I ever give it up? My teachers called me disruptive. I should have disrupted more. In 1975 the most stunning man I’d seen up close approached me at a convenience store and asked if I’d go to his hotel room to make love. I’m holding a soup can and a bag of oranges and am not a woman men cross streets for. I say no, because I was married. What a waste of a waistline. What a disappointment life is most of the time. Divinity opened itself up to me in aisle four and I said, nah, I’ll just be taking these oranges. If it came around again, boy, I’d meet it. And I’d smoke like a house on fire. Disrupt! Disrupt! What fucking else are we here for?

She is a rueful bird endowed with death’s clarity, but she is misremembering her life. It is my mother no one crosses streets for. My grandmother caused car accidents.

In short, the bird concludes. With regard to aging. Compared to the alternative, I recommend it. But you! Thin eyebrows. Pressed hair. You’ve been trimming yourself like a hedge. Do you realize you’re still alive? Would you recognize yourself if you met you on the street? She flits from cushion to cushion as in life she’d shift from foot to foot. So! You’re getting married! Et cetera! Blood-colored sparks flare from her tufted neck and fade. She burns and spits. You’re thinking there’s no harm to it. There’s no philosophical right or wrong about making bad decisions. You’re correct. Lie, be a shitty friend. No one’s keeping score. Be as much of a dick as you like. Shitheads get as far as the nice. You can wait for justice. She pauses as a hack of shivering overtakes her. It’s not coming. Where it lands is your ability to hear music. You can’t tame yourself over and over and expect your self­worth to keep its shape.

Her rebukes hammer a tender place only she can access.  “Stop,” I say.

Morning sun emerges through the curtains. Outside, an Inn worker shakes a trash bag into a breeze. I can’t imagine searching for my tornado brother during a regular week, let alone the one in which I marry.

“I’ve made my choices, Granny. And I’m grateful you’re here,” I say. “Have you ever missed someone so much that the missing gains form, becomes an extra thing welded to you, like a cumbersome limb you must carry?”

She tacks. Dramatic.

“I can’t do what you’re asking.”

Do it, she says, and I say, “I’m sorry. Anything else.”

She rises from her perch into an eruption of flapping feathers. The commotion grows violent. A loud, clutching whistle. The outline of the beak and feathers wobbles and expands.

The bird disappears.

Replacing it is my grandmother-shaped grandmother, frowning with a human mouth, legs crossed at the ankles. Her skin is dewy and hair neat, as if instead of being interred for ten years she’s been at the salon having her hair reaffirmed metal gray. Death has not been a good diet. She is still barrel-shaped due to a lifetime of keeping a chocolate drawer in the refrigerator where others store cold cuts. However, her affectation is gentler, out of focus, as if whatever light is illuminating her is losing wattage. Like the bird, her eyes are lined in blue. Zaftig from sweets. Except for the sour smell, it’s her, undeniably.

I understand the reasoning of whatever force sent her as a flying thing because when I see the unmistakable thickness of her thighs, the ashiness of her November calves, her herness overwhelms the strand tethering me to calm. Now that she is present I miss her intensely. My throat constricts and issues a sorrowful coughing spasm.

Emotionless, she waits for me to settle.

There is no anything else, she says. If you can’t respect a dead woman’s wishes you’re a disgrace. Mark my words. If you defy me, shit’s going to get fucked up. After it gets fucked up, it’s gonna stay fucked up. And after you can no longer bear it, it’s gonna get more fucked up. The things you do to make it less fucked up are going to fuck it up even more.

She dims. I hold out my hand. She doesn’t accept but clucks (still bird) in disappointment. Affection, like crying, is a bother and a waste of time. I don’t want you to suffer. Find your brother. Her body vanishes, her neck fades. Dress short or long?

“Long,” I croak.

I would have gone short. You have my gams. I always got com­pliments.

Her hairline rewinds over her scalp. The painting behind her comes in and out of focus. A pastoral scene of a carriage in a field of corn.

“Don’t leave,” I say.

She’s gone. I experience her death a second time. The birdless room carries on with the climbing sun, Band-Aid-colored carpet, carriage and the corn, seeming so undisturbed even I wouldn’t believe there’s been a specter sitting in it. The woman brightening the world has left it again, without ceremony or sound. Not one feather remains. Even the stench is gone.

Rose doesn’t answer her phone. I consult my face in the mirror to see if it has registered any change but see only the flat cheeks of a woman late for an appointment. I dress. My suitcase is still packed because the honeymoon suite is currently being occupied by another bride and groom. The Inn overbooked and regrets the error in the form of a free bottle of champagne and occasional check-in phone calls that please no one.

In the main room, I find my wedding dress, strewn across the tablelette, covered in bird dirt. That troublemaker grandmother bird has disseminated her business evenly from its sweetheart neckline to its hem. The piles of gauze are thick with shit, the destruction so complete I marvel. When did she do it? I was with her every moment. No dry cleaner would be able to re- pair it in time.

I take the elevator but when I reach the lobby, the doors do not open. The lit panel near the ceiling confirms: lobby. I check the panel, the door again. Stuck. I call the front desk.

“This has been happening since the renovation,” the concierge says. “Still a few kinks. The new generator doesn’t have the same lid. A bird flew into it. James said it was fixed, but then.”

James, I think. I think, Joyce, Stewart, Baldwin. “A bird?”

“Like it had a death wish,” she says. “The weirdest thing.”

The elevator’s walls are composed of mirrors. I watch myself wait. The box makes a triumphant ding! The doors fly open as if the issue had been only mine.

In the lobby, the concierge notices my grief-stricken pallor and apologizes. “Getting stuck in an elevator can be so scary.”

“It’s not that,” I say. “My grandmother died.”

“I’m so sorry.” She is immediately sorrowful. “When?”

“Ten years ago.” I cling to the banister for support. The landing knob comes off in my grip. I hand it to her.

She slides it into her cardigan pocket. “We’re falling apart,” she says. There are still good people living on the Earth. She bears witness to my tears, rests her hand near mine on the banister I’m positive in a month will be garlanded in tinsel because it’s a perfect banister for that. I remember dancing with my brother to the Cars in our socks and one of my clients who was hit by a truck while walking and now doesn’t understand the idea of a face.

The concierge’s kindness emboldens me to confess. “And she shit on my wedding dress.”

“Yes.” She whispers, like it’s a password: “Family.”

Meredith Talusan Has Seen White Male Privilege From Both Sides

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

Meredith Talusan’s coming-of-age memoir, Fairest, is about her life as an albino Filipino child assigned male at birth. Talusan grows up in a rural village, then immigrates to America where she’s perceived as white. In America, she is able to navigate spaces like Harvard and the queer community with privilege. After reflecting on her ability to navigate life with ease and realizing she no longer wants to be restricted to a prescribed role of a man, Talusan embarks on a gender transition, with the threat of losing her lover looming. Fairest interrogates what it means to live honestly in the shadows of privilege, and what it means to let that all go. 

Meredith Talusan is an award-winning author and journalist. She has received awards from GLAAD, the Society of Professional Journalists, and the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. She is also the founding executive editor and a contributing editor of them—and, full disclosure, a board member of Electric Literature.

I chatted with Talusan about imagining herself into being, navigating complicated family dynamics, and her relationship to the idea of desirability. 

Arriel Vinson: At the beginning of Fairest, you’re reckoning with your appearance as a woman—how others say you haven’t changed much. You also discuss being fair-skinned in your Filipino family and how you’re noticed in your hometown. When did you realize your skin gave you privilege?

Meredith Talusan: The privilege of having white skin is so embedded in my consciousness that it feels like I knew about its effects even before I had any concrete memories. My awareness that I was favored, that my family considered me special, that people in my village paid a lot more attention to me than other kids, precedes any specific incident or event. But my first absolutely clear memory of how special I was perceived was when I went to the village haircutter as a really young child, maybe 4 or 5, and I remember her finding an envelope afterward and putting my blond hair inside, then hugging the envelope against her chest like it was a valued keepsake. Somehow I’ll always remember that, how where I’m from, something that just grows out of my head is precious to other people.

AV: Mirrors appear in Fairest as a portal to the self, used for talking about your blurry vision in relation to your albinism, as well as your skin tone and body. Tell me more about that. 

It was important for me to write a book that shows the entire span of my life, not just the period where I’m in transition.

MT: I had some hesitations about relying too much on the mirror because of the stereotype that trans women are always looking at ourselves, but as I came to investigate the role mirrors have played in my life, I came to realize that the problem wasn’t that trans women are looking at mirrors all the time, because it’s entirely understandable that we look at mirrors a lot while we’re undergoing major changes in our appearance and self-perception. The real problem is that mainstream media at least until very recently only represented us as we’re transitioning, and just to shout out that HBO’s Euphoria does an amazing job of not doing that, aside from the fact that Hunter Schafer is brilliant. That’s why it was important for me to write a book that shows the entire span of my life, not just the period where I’m in transition, which really only occupies a third of the book, if that. Fairest also discusses how I went through a similar process of looking at myself in the mirror a lot as a kid, during a period when I was trying to reconcile how different I looked compared to other people with my family’s anticipation that we would live in the States someday and that I would be perceived as white. So I hope that people who read Fairest can come to understand that the mirror isn’t just an object vanity, but one of deep self-reflection.

AV: Fairest touches on imagination often, such as imagining that you were a white American. Why was the theme of imagination so important?

MT: Imagination is a key part of my emotional makeup because I am literally a product of my imagination, someone who no one would have anticipated becoming who I am except that I imagined myself into being, whether as a trans woman or a person who came from poverty and ended up graduating from America’s most prestigious school then becoming successful in the eyes of others. But what I also challenge readers of my book to imagine are the many sacrifices it took to bring myself into being, and what I’ve lost along the way, because as much as I’ve gained having imagined then actualized my current existence, that experience also entailed a lot more loss than someone who didn’t have to engage the deepest resources of their imagination to become who they wanted to be.

AV: You’re interrogating your privilege in Fairest–how you learned English, were a childhood celebrity, attended Harvard, had access to dating an upper-class white man. Tell me about your decision to work through your own privilege, and how Fairest became a vehicle for that.

I am literally a product of my imagination. I imagined myself into being.

MT: It wasn’t really a conscious decision as much as an outgrowth of my need to be completely honest with myself about my life as I rendered it on the page. As hero’s journeys go, I wasn’t interested in turning myself into someone who doesn’t have major flaws or got to where I am purely because of my personal qualities. I may be a constitutionally hardworking (some would say obsessive) person who has a certain amount of innate intelligence, which, by the way, is also assigned through birth lottery. So it’s not like so it’s not something I deserve as much as something I’m just lucky enough to have, but it’s self-evident that I would have run into many more obstacles had I been born dark and if I wasn’t consistently mistaken for cisgender after I transitioned. To somehow avoid the extent of my privilege would have just meant being dishonest about my life in a fundamental way, and maybe there are memoirists who have done that but I cannot imagine it for myself.

AV: We see the differences in the relationships between you and your grandmother and you  with your mother, who was abusive and struggled with addiction. Why was it important to showcase these two relationships side by side?

MT: So many narratives both fictional and nonfictional feature singular parental figures and cast them as either good or bad. In part because we as people often end up thinking of our parents as summations of the many actions they’ve performed throughout our lives. As a person who is estranged from both my parents I have certainly done that in my lived experience. But on the page, it was important for me to be precise and honest with myself in terms of the ways my grandmother’s unconditional love ballasted me as a child, and how much having an abusive and addicted mother damaged me, but that both of those people were complicated figures. As good as my grandmother was, I knew she was better to me than her other grandchildren because she was brainwashed by colorism, and she became obsessed with money as a way of symbolizing her power. And as terrible as my mom was, she was forced to have me when she didn’t want to in a country where divorce is illegal even now. So I wanted to portray the complications of having such wildly divergent parental influences, but also the further complication that the “good” one wasn’t as good as I had initially thought as a child, just as the “bad” one had understandable reasons for why she couldn’t be a mother to me.

AV: During your time at Harvard, you learn more about your sexuality and gender, both inside and outside of the classroom. How did learning about desirability help you understand yourself and who you’d be most happy being?

MT: Desirability is so fascinating to me because I so rarely see people, whether in life or art, being really frank about their degree of desirability unless they’re being (often falsely) modest, because it risks them being accused of arrogance and vanity, which people have accused me of both in life and in reader reviews of the book. And yes, maybe I’m being vain when I say that I discovered I was desirable as a young gay man, or that seeing myself as a beautiful woman catalyzed and propelled my transition. But maybe in part because I also spent time at an MIT cognitive science lab studying physical beauty, I just think it’s important to query one’s own relationship to desirability because it is such a fundamental part of so many of our interactions, whether or not we want to admit it. It’s clear to me that I wouldn’t have transitioned if I hadn’t been beautiful, and it’s important to say and unpack that because it’s just true even if it’s an inconvenient thing to say. I’m tired of having to sanitize my life according to cisgender expectations of the kind of person a trans person should be, someone who felt trapped in her body, which I never have, and someone who is ugly and unhappy either before or after transition, or both, which I was not and am not, even if I’ve gone through periods of crisis like every other human being.

I’m tired of having to sanitize my life according to cisgender expectations of the kind of person a trans person should be.

AV: After going to your hometown in the Philippines once more, you notice that you spent a lot of your time as a “white, gay man.” How did interrogating your privilege in the queer community make you more honest with yourself in Fairest?

MT: I just feel like intersectional queer experience is so rarely represented whether in memoir or fiction. In terms of gay male writers, for every Samuel Delany or Alexander Chee, then more recently Ocean Vuong and Brandon Taylor and Matt Ortile, you have a slew of white gay authors and characters, which is not the fault of the authors themselves but is perhaps the fault of a publishing industry and American public that still prioritizes white experience over others. I feel like my own experiences around being seen as a white gay man even though I wasn’t actually white (or a man, as it turned out) can illuminate how stratified the gay community is. The “gay experience” looks vastly different if you’re not white, even though I’ve been in so many situations where “gay man” is used as a marker for opulence, sophistication, and excess wealth. This is so much more likely to be true if you’re white, while I as the queer Filipino first-gen immigrant gay man only got access to those cultural circles because of my proximity to whiteness.

AV: In Fairest, you’re also navigating what you want as far as your gender and gender expression are concerned. There’s a moment where you ask yourself what you want here. Tell me more about that. 

MT: One of the hardest parts about being trans is that for the most part, no one in your life actively wants you to be trans even if that’s what you want. They might tolerate you being trans but it’s rare for me to see families and friends be actively happy when someone transitions, except maybe for the trans person’s queer and trans friends. So as a result, transition is so often framed as selfishness, as you prioritizing your wants over [others]. But gender is such a fundamental part of how we move through the world, which I wish weren’t true but it unfortunately is, so I realized over time that even if I didn’t need to be a woman in the sense that I wasn’t suicidal or I couldn’t envision the possibility of me not transitioning, I realized how unfair it would be to me to sacrifice myself and my desires over other people’s expectations, even the people in the world I love most. And yes, I still agonize over that decision because human consciousness is dynamic and ever-changing, but an overwhelming amount of the time, I know that sacrificing a special relationship with someone I deeply loved was what I needed to do so that I could grow to more fully love myself.

9 Books About the Burden of Female Beauty Standards

Posted on by Jo Lou

We believe that beauty for women is a source of power and privilege. A kind of currency. But is it truly attainable? What is the flip side of beauty—when does beauty cause suffering? What happens when someone who identifies as beautiful gets stripped of it, whether by age or accident? And in the end, who decides what—and more to the point, who—is beautiful? 

My debut novel Beauty is about Amy Wong, a Chinese American woman who goes into the fashion industry. She’s a gifted, up-and-coming designer; she’s young, beautiful, and seemingly has it all. And yet, life circumstances not unlike what many women face—chauvinism, prejudice, marriage, motherhood—result in a deep loss of self. The narrative arc of Beauty encompasses most of Amy’s life. Her ideas around beauty, family, and power evolve throughout the course of the novel. In Maya Angelou’s memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, we see how “the caged bird” is kept from flying and freedom. Societal conventions about beauty are like cages. They often keep women from reaching their full potential. In literature and books, we see a range of characters. Some buck and transcend expectations. Others remain stuck.

Here is a list of books that speak to questions about beauty, identity, and the impossible standards for which women are expected to live to this day.

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

This novel made me realize I could be a writer; that I, a Chinese American woman, had something to say. It is the story of an 11-year-old girl named Pecola. She’s black, growing up in an America that worships blond hair and blue eyes, and so, wishing she could be beautiful and that her life could be different, she does too. Morrison revealed how race factors into identity and how racism can distort one’s self-perception.

The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf

Published in 2002, this nonfiction book revolutionized how we think about beauty and its effect on women’s identity. Her point is that despite the women’s movement and the power women have gained in terms of professional success and legal recognition, societal ideas about beauty keep women trapped in a cycle of reaching for ideals that are, in fact, unattainable.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

A lot rides on beauty for the Bennet sisters, as their mother makes it her mission in life to see her two older daughters married to men of both means and class. Beauty is the road that she knows will get them there. Mrs. Bennet is an irritating nag, and yet, considering the circumstances, she’s being reasonable and practical. She has five daughters, none of whom can inherit their father’s estate by law. If beauty can’t catch a husband, the girls face poverty and homelessness. (Mrs. Bennet seems to exist in many mothers, and perhaps for the same reason: they desire economic security for their daughters.)

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Similar to The Bluest Eye, but written as an epistolary, the protagonist, a teen named Celie, has grown up poor in rural Georgia. As a poor black girl, she is despised both inside and outside her home, and is sexually abused by her father. Later, she is physically abused by her much older husband she calls “Mister.” No one considers Celie beautiful and neither does she. In fact, she’s told she’s worthless and ugly and she believes it; her journey to self-discovery starts after meeting several strong women. She becomes friendly with Shug Avery, her husband’s mistress, and their relationship develops into something more.

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay

What happens when beauty is dangerous for a young girl? In this searing memoir, Gay speaks honestly about her relationship with food, weight, self-image, and beauty. As a girl, she’d been sexually assaulted. She blamed herself, and as a result, turned her pain inward, hiding the truth and feeling self-loathing for herself. She buried the young girl she’d been with food, feeling that she would be safe if she made herself invisible to boys like the ones who attacked her.

Americanah

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Ifemelu is a beautiful, confident Nigerian woman, but when she immigrates to America, she finds herself questioning and redefining what beauty means for a black woman, and in particular, how it plays out with her hair.  Back home, she had her hair braided. Her hair was celebrated. Here, to be beautiful and professional, she is suddenly expected to have her hair straightened to be more “white” and acceptable. After doing so, and reaching this kind of “beauty,” however, Ifemelu is overcome by a deeper sense of loss. 

The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger

Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger

Hired as the personal assistant to one of the most powerful fashion editors, a young woman finds herself in the most unglamorous position of hop-skip-and-jumping to the beat of her tyrannical, unpredictable, and impossible boss. In this work environment, appearances mean everything, and for this particular protagonist, it requires a total makeover. She trades in her hiking boots for four-inch Manolos, $100 skirts for Armani, and her briefcase for Prada. Welcome to a world in which “trivial” matters like manicure and pedicures, hair, and the evenness of one’s tan, are not so trivial anymore. Beauty can determine one’s future and fate in the industry. It’s a job a million girls would die for. But is it worth selling one’s soul? 

The Age of Innocence

Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

The novel is set during the late 1800s, a period of American prosperity and growth referred to as the Gilded Age. The protagonist, Newland Archer (a name that pretty much says it all), is a lawyer from one of the most prominent “old money” families in New York City. Newland is ready to marry the perfectly beautiful and well-bred May Welland and is unhappy when his fiancé’s cousin arrives from abroad, shrouded in scandal, thus threatening to tarnish his nuptials. But Newland soon discovers that as beautiful as May may be, she is innocent and ignorant. Newland’s idea of beauty begins to shift and he soon finds himself in love with the Countess Olenska. Age of Innocence won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, making Edith Wharton the first woman to win the award. A truly beautiful thing.

Look at Me by Jennifer Egan

Look at Me by Jennifer Egan

This story opens with a Manhattan-based model, Charlotte, who is only 35, but struggling to look younger in an industry in which she is already considered past her prime. Charlotte is in a car crash that crushes her face, and though it is totally reconstructed, she doesn’t look the same. What is it like to be a recognized beauty that people look at to becoming virtually a stranger to everyone? 

Choose Your Own Dystopia

Posted on by Jo Lou

Outrageous, intelligent, and darkly hilarious, You Will Never Be Forgotten includes characters who are harvested for their body parts, cloned, and surveilled, existing in worlds not-too-distant, or perhaps already identical, to our own.

You Will Never Be Forgotten

Mary South’s debut collection draws upon the genre of dystopia (think: Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and TV shows like Black Mirror) in order to defamiliarize received notions about the world we live in—specifically relating to capitalism, technology, and gender—as well as pointing to the absurdity that lies at the heart of many of these accepted beliefs. But don’t be fooled: beneath each of South’s seemingly absurd premises are characters who struggle to move past trauma, all the while grappling with shame, despair, and sadness, in order to heal. 

This spring, we spoke about the origin of her stories, the effects of using humor and surrealism in one’s work, and art’s powerful ability to help “deprogram” destructive ways of thinking and existing in today’s troubled times. 

Daphne Palasi Andreades: Many of the stories in You Will Never Be Forgotten feature premises that feel wildly imaginative and, yet, not far off from our own reality: for instance, a camp dedicated to rehabilitating teenage cyberbullies in “Camp Jabberwocky for Recovering Internet Trolls,” a mother who “rebirths” a clone of her deceased daughter in “Not Setsuko,” assisted living patients who call sex hotlines in “The Age of Love,” and so on. How did these stories begin for you?

Mary South: I often begin by linking an emotion to a strong image. I got the idea for “Not Setsuko,” for example, by thinking a lot on grief and what it is that finally allows someone who is intensely grieving to move on. It’s actually rather mysterious. How do our minds and our bodies allow us to let go of excruciating pain? At one point, I asked myself the question, “What if someone who is grieving simply refused to move on?” That immediately prompted the image of a mother whose daughter has tragically died, and she just can’t bring herself to feel the loss. She believes it might destroy her. Around that image I was able to build the story of a mother who is trying to exactly duplicate her deceased daughter’s memories for her second daughter so she can live in the illusion that she had never really passed away. Her daughter, Setsuko, has just been “absent” for a while.

 Other stories began similarly. “Architecture for Monsters” began from imagining buildings that were designed to not just emulate the human form but to emulate the ruptured or damaged human form. I had so much fun coming up with imaginary designs; that was perhaps the most fun I had while drafting the collection. “Keith Prime” came almost fully realized at once, pairing grief again with late capitalism and a woman doing her best to survive in a job that values people only for how it can profit off them—literally, for their parts. I had this image of rows and rows of identical men sleeping in a warehouse.

DPA: I can’t help but admire the absurdist underpinnings to your work. I was reminded of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, as well as work by contemporary writers like Aimee Bender and Yukiko Motoya, where outrageous events are unquestioningly accepted as “the norm” within the world of their stories. And yet, beneath the absurd premises in your work, are characters who long for connection or are trying to heal from a trauma. Why begin a piece with a seemingly absurd, outlandish, or surreal proposition?

MS: A novel that I love and that’s been incredibly influential for me is Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. “Keith Prime” owes a lot to that novel, in that I wanted to explore another side of Never Let Me Go—the logistical or bureaucratic side and what it’s like for those who are doing the actual harvesting of clones and their body parts. One of the aspects of Ishiguro’s novel that so fascinates me is how, despite its outlandish premise, none of the characters question the validity of their basic reality. They never say, “It’s unfair that we’re raised for parts. We need to completely change the system.” They say, “I wonder if it’s possible for us to get an extended leave of absence before our donations.” We’re all indoctrinated into reality, and in the process of living we have to figure out the ways in which that indoctrination was for our benefit and survival and the ways in which that indoctrination was harmful or for someone else’s benefit. I think life is often a deep deprogramming in this manner. But by starting with an absurd premise that the characters just take for granted as “this is what life is like,” it strikingly reveals this kind of reality indoctrination that we all experience.

We’re all indoctrinated into reality, and we have to figure out the ways in which that indoctrination was for our benefit or for someone else’s.

Starting with an absurd or outlandish premise also allows me to get at genuine feeling more easily. I find “The Age of Love,” for example, to be a deeply sad story; the elderly men dialing phone sex hotlines often say humorously uncomfortable things, but there’s some weird catalyst in the laughter that makes their loneliness more palpable and affecting. My characters are also often unwilling to fully reckon with their trauma, which is what’s required to heal or become a better person. Humor lets them hide for a while but also ultimately exposes their wounds. The neurosurgeon recovering from her husband’s suicide in “Frequently Asked Questions About Your Craniotomy” can often be quite witty, yet that wit won’t soothe her sorrow. Only feeling her sorrow can do that. But I need to show them hiding first, eliding and making light of their pain through jokes, before I can break them open.

DPA: Simultaneously, your collection and its absurdist stories also made me think of events happening in today’s world that are indeed outrageous, but accepted by some as “the norm:” children in cages, the destruction of the earth, our current president who “grabs women by the pussy.” What, in your opinion, is the role of fiction and art in today’s social and political climate, if any?

MS: I was going to say in my last answer that I don’t feel like I have to invent much or stretch the world too far past recognition in my stories—our current reality is often a horrifying dystopia. When a family can lose their house due to an unexpected medical crisis, that is a nightmare reality. My bitterness over the injustice of the state of health care in this country incited me to write “Keith Prime.” And the traumatizing content moderation jobs featured in the title story are also upsettingly real.

It’s difficult—nigh impossible—to measure what effect fiction has on the human psyche, regardless of the studies that have attempted to quantify how it influences our capacity for empathy. And I don’t think anyone would posit that fiction in and of itself is able to mobilize policy change. I do know that art, fiction in particular, has always been what I’ve turned to in order to make sense the world and the people in it. Nowhere else have I found that same kind of deep, almost cellular-level understanding. After I read Mrs. Dalloway for the first time as a teenager in college, I felt I had gleaned something essential and true about life, despite not being able to articulate exactly what that was. I could spend my whole life trying to articulate what is essential and true about Mrs. Dalloway. The same goes for so many books.

Once, I heard therapy described as “releasing into the conscious mind what is unconscious.” The goal—or hope—is that revelation, of habits and traumas both major and minor, will over time fundamentally alter the self. I think fiction is capable of this, too, on both the individual and the collective level. 

DPA: An aspect of your work that I found extremely impressive was how you balanced the ostensibly dark subject matter of each story—suicide, rape, and other traumas, as well the despair, loneliness, and grief that the characters feel—with humor. I found myself laughing, and my jaw-dropping: Did Mary just write that!? Humor added levity, while also drawing attention to characters’ very human contradictions and inconsistencies, or the ridiculous worlds that they inhabit. Why use humor in your work?

MS: One of the strange things about devastating emotional pain is that while you’re experiencing the worst of it, you can also, surprisingly, have a completely unrelated thought—even one that is very funny. We all contain multiple voices, internal ways of talking to ourselves, voices that are snarky, tender, resentful, forgiving, etc. It can almost feel like a betrayal to the original feeling if, in the throes of grief, for example, you randomly recall a memory that is really humorous about a lost loved one. But that’s not a betrayal, that’s your mind’s way of letting light in through the darkness of loss, of helping you to heal.

So humor is a great provider of relief, but it’s also revealing of pain, as I mentioned earlier; at some point, you can no longer use humor to mitigate your less-than-pleasant feelings. In that sense, once the laughter subsides, I think it allows me, at least, to see these worlds and these characters even more clearly than I would otherwise—and for the characters to see themselves. It’s also just fun! I think the writer should have fun. If the writing is enjoyable and interesting to you, writer, then chances are it will be enjoyable and interesting to readers. 

DPA: If I’m remembering correctly, you mentioned to me once that you don’t begin writing a piece until you have a general idea of the end. This surprised me greatly, perhaps because I work the opposite way: unplanned, blindly feeling my way through. Can you speak more about your writing process; do you have any routines? What was the most challenging part of writing this collection?

The funny thing about writing a book is that you’ll likely become a different person by the time you’ve finished it.

MS: I have worked that way until now—knowing the general arc of a story from beginning to end before starting to write. That process will likely remain the same for me when working on short fiction. There’s a lot of pleasure in just having an idea for a story and developing it, slowly, with no urgency to begin until there’s a sensation of fullness about it. I enjoy taking long meditative walks, outlining, journaling about the plot, characters, themes etc. However, I’ve begun working on a novel as my next project, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to know as much about the overall arc as I do with stories just because there’s so much more information to hold inside one’s mind. I’m doing my best to let it be looser than I’m usually comfortable with, to be more a process of discovery.

The funny thing about writing a book is that you’ll likely become a different person by the time you’ve finished it. As much as I am still proud of all of the stories in my collection, I’m not sure I could sit down and draft some of them anymore. Yet that’s also liberating—who knows what this next book will be like? Or my next after that?

DPA: What writing advice has fueled or challenged you?

MS: There should be no moment in a story where the author is just laying out information. Information should always be filtered through point of view. If it’s really important that we know a character is tall or rich, you have to find a way to communicate that through voice.

In studying with Gordon Lish and working at NOON, I’ve also become preoccupied with the sonic qualities of the sentence. Can I end the sentence with the strongest, most interesting word? And if I’m not doing that, why not? How can I carry an initial set of sounds forward through the prose, from the beginning of the first line to the next and the next after that? Perhaps I want to work in short, staccato sentences. Or perhaps I want to luxuriate in parataxis, to list and digress and embellish coordinating conjunction upon coordinating conjunction.

I also think it’s fun to voice hop—to have a story that’s incredibly ribald and then to switch registers and have one that’s deeply mournful or in denial. Or one that’s a combination of all of those. You can then write in wildly different types of sentences in order to reflect the interior realities of those characters. It’s been absolutely fascinating to learn how to accomplish those turns of consciousness in fiction.

Creating a World in Which Everything That Dies Is Mourned

Posted on by Jo Lou

Victoria Chang’s Obit grapples with grief while recognizing how grief grapples us, how grief exceeds our grasp. It is a state that won’t stay still. As the end of one poem puts it, “memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking.” Or the end of another: “I always knew that grief was something I could smell. But I didn’t know that it’s not actually a noun but a verb. That it moves.”

Indeed, in grieving, the endings are endless. Yet, the book is not despairing. There’s play here and not exactly happiness but an openness to living’s ongoing mess—the ways in which life happens, alongside all the unhappening. 

When I talked with Victoria Chang over Zoom, her background was outer space—or more precisely, a view of the Earth from space. The planet looked shiny and beautiful from that distance. Our conversation, meanwhile, refused a beautifying distance in favor of a sometimes disorienting up-closeness. We talked about loss, family, the American ideals of self-improvement and moving on quickly, and the need for deeper engagement with the work of writers of color. 

Chen Chen: There’s such a range of people and things and concepts that die in this book, that receive obits. It starts with the core, the family—father’s frontal lobe, mother, and daughter/speaker who is a mother herself—and then moves to voicemail, language, the future, logic, memory, the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, as well as other body parts or bodily functions of the parents and the speaker. The book feels expansive when building a world of grief, or transforming the world into one where everything must be grieved. How did you come to this series of transformations?

Victoria Chang: It’s always hard to talk about how one’s brain works. But I think the book is a lot like my brain—fragmented, disorganized, sloppy. In the depths of grief, I noticed how little things were dying every single day. Once I started writing about that, I couldn’t stop (at least for a few weeks). In terms of the order, I like to print things out and lay them on the ground like a lot of writers. I then read the first and last lines to see how a book might be made with some kind of arc, even if that arc is almost a flat line.

How I picked up these subjects was very much based on daily living. Sometimes they were objects, like the blue dress which is actually the dress I selected for my mother’s funeral. Other times, my mind went to more existential things and even I die because in some ways when someone dies, your whole relationship with them is gone, even the language you shared with them, the looks. There’s actually another poem, on Brigit Pegeen Kelly who died during this time but that never made it in the book.

CC: That makes me think about something Céline Sciamma, the director of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, says about relationships:

“A relationship is about inventing your own language… You’ve got the jokes, you’ve got the songs… It’s this language that you build. That’s what you mourn for when you’re losing someone you love. This language you’re not going to speak with anybody else.”

What did that Brigit Pegeen Kelly poem involve and why didn’t it make it into the book?

VC: That poem was about meeting her at Bread Loaf [Writers’ Conference] and for five minutes getting to talk to her all by myself when no one else was around. It was a dream to just spend that time with someone like that. As an Asian American writer, to this day, I don’t know a lot of older white poets I admire. I just don’t have that kind of relationship with people like that. I always envy one of my friends who gets emails from older white famous poets all the time. I treasure those few minutes I had with her. She was so humble.

CC: What would you like to see happen when it comes to engagement with the work of marginalized writers, maybe in particular Asian American writers?

VC: What I see currently sometimes is a kind of false engagement or engagement “lite” in the work of Asian American writers or marginalized writers. Tokenization has always been a problem. One Asian for this or that. But now, things have improved, but I still don’t see that kind of deep engagement that I often see with critics, for example, of white writers. It’s as if people are still checking off a box and then patting themselves on the back, versus really embodying the work of the Other. That also means getting to know the Other as real people, really engaging with us, befriending us, talking to us, socializing with us.

CC: Yes. Friendship. Conversation over transaction. I think of white writers and white editors who’re basically extracting resources from us—like, “send us work, teach this workshop” and then I never hear from them again. I’m rarely asked about my actual life. 

Back to the book—were there aspects of grief that you felt needed to be investigated that weren’t, that were missing in poetry, in art? On the back cover, it says you didn’t want to write elegies at first, because you wanted to avoid cliché. I’m struck by how the voice in these poems refuses a nostalgic view when it comes to grieving the parents. The poems treat them not as figures redeemed by deaths of various kinds, but further revealed—and compassionately—in all their complexities. Their aliveness as messy people has not died. 

VC: I’ve read a lot of poems and other works that were elegies and elegiac. I think that in American culture, there can be an idea of entrepreneurialism and self-help that permeates everything, even poetry. In some ways, I couldn’t relate to the elegy and found many of them to be unrelatable to my experience. So looking back, I think I just went my own way and did my own thing. If that meant being honest about how difficult my mother was after my father had a stroke and how much they argued, then so be it. There was/is nothing redeeming about death in my work. A lot of what I experienced and still do are negative and uglier emotions. Because dying, at least in my mother’s case, wasn’t pretty.

CC: I really appreciate how you allow for the uglier emotions in this work. When I was growing up, my parents often talked about things that couldn’t be fixed—which seems antithetical to an American mindset that demands everything have a solution and not only that, but everything be bettered, optimized. My parents insisted on what couldn’t be solved, which saddened me and I saw them as passive, but now that I’m older, I see their perspective as a sort of antidote to the hyper-optimism in the U.S. that can actually be crushing. 

Could you talk about how you experience/define agency or freedom and how your thinking on the extent to which control is possible—as a person and as a writer—informed the shaping of this book?

VC: My mother was always talking about “fate.” She used to tell me that my sister’s nose is big, therefore, she would be rich. I think about writing as freedom, the only thing I can have any say in. Which is interesting, because this whole book seems to be about the loss of control, of what’s familiar. The process of writing it was very freeing though. And once I started working on these poems, I felt the freedom of saying whatever I wanted however I wanted. When I finally sat down, I was ready to be honest, to be real.

CC: I’m noticing some thematic and formal commonalities with your previous book, Barbie Chang. The parents also appear there, though the grief seems more an anticipatory grief; there’s more dying than death, maybe. There’s a similar questioning of what it means to be losing one’s parents while parenting one’s own children. Could you talk about how you see Obit developing post-Barbie Chang? Or how the two books might be in dialogue, both thematically and formally? 

What I see sometimes is a false engagement or engagement ‘lite’ in the work of Asian American writers or marginalized writers.

VC: I think that books are artificial objects, meaning we as writers just write. And when they are supposed to be turned in, we turn them in, and then they go out into the world (if we’re lucky). But feelings, emotions, concerns, themes, our daily lives, don’t start and stop like that. My mother is still dead. I still grieve her every single day. My father still has dementia. I still have children and worry about them and the world. So I think I’m okay with the bleeding over that happens naturally. 

But I do think that transitioning from one work to the next, say from book to book is also a conscious part of being an artist. What is going to be different because you, the artist, has changed or grown? That change has to occur (for me) to maintain interest as an artist, to really engage in what I’m making. So for me, I have to let enough time pass so that I can grow as a person and as a writer.

CC: What are you interested in, in terms of growth as a writer?

VC: For me, I’m always attracted to inventive writers, artists, sculptors. I’m very enamored with the next new shiny thing and have a very slim attention span. This is how I imagine my work develops too. But once I am attracted to something, I’m all in, meaning my mind can work both expansively/horizontally, and also very vertically, which is the obsessive part of my personality that can be very annoying to be around personally, but actually allows me to focus very intensely on something.

CC: It was a fantastic surprise, to see the tankas between the obits. They look and sound very different from the obits, while sharing many themes and concerns. What made you decide to write, then include both of these kinds of poems? 

VC: I’m glad you used the word “surprise” because I think every single OBIT had been published in a literary journal by the time the book came out (to my surprise—people would ask for poems, I would send them, and they would take the whole batch a lot) or I would send five out, and they would take all of them. That cycle kept going and I was horrified that they were all out in the world. I was writing formal poems for fun, sonnets, sestinas, ghazals, and started writing tankas. 

I started adding some of these into the manuscript as a way for the reader to take a breath because all that grieving in the OBITs seemed a lot to take, almost suffocating. My friend told me to intersperse them throughout so I did. I also didn’t tell anyone that they were in the book for that reason, maybe to leave something new for the reader of the book to experience. Same for the middle sonnet sequence which was from an older manuscript that I pulled into this one.

The Tankas were written for all children and my children too. They seemed more hopeful, about the future, rather than about the past, which the OBITs are. They are shorter in line, they are more breathy to read, less like a coffin which the OBITs can seem like. They have a lot of air in them on the page physically too. The book seemed like it needed that; otherwise, it would be too heavy.

It’s so weird to feed children to help them grow, and also help someone die.

CC: How does “hope,” as a feeling and a concept, change for you, with being a poet with children? 

VC: I think I’ve become more hopeful but also less hopeful. Being someone who likes to make things (which takes a lot of space and time), it’s been challenging. I think of a block of 10 years as all black. I don’t recall anything when my children were young. I’ve also become more of a depressive since having children, punctuated with moments of unbelievable joy and laughter. It’s a hard thing being a poet and a mother simultaneously.

CC: One of my favorite poems in this collection is “The Blue Dress,” which ends with these stunning lines: “Imagination is having to live in a dead person’s future. Grief is wearing a dead person’s dress forever.” How did this poem start, then develop? And how does grief transform one’s definitions, understandings of everything else? 

Grief just happens to us. We can’t change it or fix it. There’s also a very American idea of ‘getting over it’ and I just couldn’t and can’t.

VC: My mother was a hoarder so I had a lot of cleaning to do when she died. She had lost a lot of weight before she died (which ironically she had always been trying to do her whole life). I had gone deep into the depths of her closet to find an old dress that seemed smaller, that might fit her. That dress had little blue flowers. I wanted that dress back and it only occurred to me after that I had to ask for it back. That they might have thrown it out or burned it. That was where the poem started, with that dress. And it just went from there. 

Something that happens a lot with me when writing (particularly with these poems) was that I had a nagging question in my mind, “who cares?” Why would anyone care an iota about me and my experiences? I imagined this while writing too at certain points and when that thought popped into my head, I tended to go larger, more philosophical, more existential, which is where the ending of this poem went.

In many ways, grief just happens to us. We can’t change it or fix it. There’s also a very American idea of “getting over it” and I just couldn’t and can’t.

CC: Language’s relationship to grief is central to this book’s movement, which tends to be cyclical, restlessly circling back to the parents, to the speaker’s own mortality. In some poems, language becomes physical and has an agency of its own—for example, “I got on all fours, tried to pick up the letters like a child at an egg hunt with a basket.” I’m also thinking of what John Yau wondered aloud in a review of Muriel Leung’s Bone Confetti, “Does grief exceed words, or is it the other way around?” In this book, is language found to be inadequate or too adequate for grief? Or how would you describe the relationship between language and grief here? 

VC: Interesting question and quote from Yau. The easy and more common response is that language is inadequate to describe anything, including grief. But thinking more about Yau’s quote, I wonder if language and grief are incompatible? The idea that language could even be too adequate for grief is really fascinating too. Maybe language and grief are like night and day, they pass each other mostly and if you can just get close so that the tips of morning and night touch even for a second, that would be incredible.

She’s Got the Whole World in Her Uterus

Posted on by Halimah Marcus

The Reveal Party

Goldust is a complicated woman.

On a Saturday morning, as we slipped coffee down our throats and listened to NPR, Goldust declared, “There will be crustless sandwiches and when we get bored, we can alphabetize their medicine cabinets and choose one item to take home with us.”

Goldust often started in the middle of sentences. I’ve learned to latch on and ask less questions, trusting that I’ll learn all I needed to know eventually. 

“You mean steal?” I asked.

“I mean, like an adult goody bag.”

“Where will we be?”

“Another reveal party,” she answered. “Can’t really escape them, can we? Walking outside, a reveal of weather. Food delivered to you, a reveal of whether or not it is good. Overpriced haircut and the mirror—because I like to close my eyes the whole time, don’t you?” 

“Not really, but… What’s being revealed?”

“Species,” she said, spitting each syllable into the air.

I stared at Goldust as though her entire mouth had been replaced with gold teeth, rather than just her bottom ones. 

“You mean, like boy or gi—”

Goldust exhaled loudly. Her lungs were opera singers. “We are way beyond pink and blue now. How boring. How patriarchal. How twenty-first century. How pre-feminist. No. What she is having. Like genus.”

“Are there other kinds of baby?”

Goldust looked at me as though I had cut a trap door into her body and hid stolen goods.

I tried to redeem myself. “I… I… I know there are other identities than boy or girl. I just… I just mean what else can it be other than human?” 

I stuffed a second triangle of crust-less sandwich into my mouth and even as I was chewing the first. I couldn’t really decipher what it was. Tuna? Chicken salad? Chopped liver? I drowned it with wine and attached imaginary strings to both sides of my mouth to smile my way across the room. Goldust sat beside me, sharing a story of her backpacking trip in Peru. Though I had heard this story at least twelve times, it never ended the same way twice.

When Goldust went to the bathroom—perhaps to choose an item for her adult goody bag—she left an imprint of glitter on the couch. I tried to angle my body to cover it up, but in doing so, spilled my glass of red wine, which left a far louder stain than the glitter. No one seemed to notice because the cake had been brought out and what else is there to look forward to at a party such as this.

“Well, I’d rather just not know,” said one guest whose hair matched the color of my underpants. 

“But how do you prepare? How do you decide what color to paint the room? How do you decide what clothes, what size of toe-nail clippers, the strength of diaper.”

To build anticipation, we played games:

Guess the texture of skin!

Guess the shape of teeth and how many elements they can bite through!

Guess their risk of endangerment!

Goldust emerged with a slurred walk. Her eyelids looked fatigued.

“You okay?” I whispered against her earlobe.

“Twisting the knob, I walked into the room. I thought I’d live a life where I only pronounced pomegranates but never ate one and then I did. It was bloody,” she garbled.

I grabbed her hand and squeezed. When Goldust drank or consumed drugs of any sort, she narrated her thoughts. Sometimes, of course, she narrated mine.

While Goldust waxed on in no particular order or point of view, I leaned over to Clancey, the soon-to-be mother of some soon-to-be-revealed species.

Clancey resembled a balloon: large head and gaunt body just dangling, swaying from side to side. I would not have known she was pregnant. 

“Great sandwiches,” I said to her.

“Oh, uh, thanks,” she said, sucking on the polish of her fingernails, which could not have been very good for the baby. “Ordered from the internet. You can really get anything from that place.”

“So, um, what do you… what do you think you’re having. Or what do you want? Or…” “We should cut the cake!” she announced, jumping to her feet.

“You think it’s vegan?” Goldust asked me. “If it’s not buttercream, we are leaving.”

“Don’t you want to know what she is having?”

“Oh, I already know. I peeked.”

“You… peeked? Into the cake?”

Goldust lifted her finger toward her eye and tapped. “I can see. Into her. Like X-ray vision. It’s from complications with an MRI I had when I was fifteen. I told you this. She’s having a—”

Clancey promenaded around her living room, touching each piece of furniture (couch, piano, arm chair, coffee table, wedding photo hung on wall, lamp). 

“We never stopped using protection,” Clancey said. “And of course, I am still on birth control. You know, they don’t talk about the double-pregnancy risk, but it’s there. The overlap, I like to call it. My good friend who moved to Montauk or Montana—I don’t remember—it happened to her. Twice. Two overlaps onto the first. It wasn’t triplets. No, that’s what the doctors wanted her to believe. But they were many months apart. So Brick and I… well, we certainly can’t be expected to abstain, but we’ve been ‘careful.’” She curled her fingers  into quotation marks. 

“Maybe Brick wants an overlap,” Clancey continued. “Maybe he wants to set some record. I read about a woman who had a squatter. Have you heard this? A squatter just stays in there. Some women don’t even know they are in there and then all of a sudden, all this liquid pours out and they learn it’s the amniotic fluid! A seventy-nine-year-old woman in Florence or Florida gave birth to a fifty-six-year-old… something or other. It made the news. All the shows, I think. I could have a squatter in me now. I refused an ultrasound. I was afraid to know, to tell you the truth. This pregnancy thing isn’t what it used to be. We can blame it on the milk or the acid rain or infomercials, but whatever, it’s real.”

Goldust was snoring against my shoulder to the tune of a Dolly Parton song. 

“Anyway, are we ready to learn what this is?” Clancey motioned to her belly, which looked so flat, I worried she was housing the baby somewhere else in her body.

Clancey grabbed the serrated knife that laid beside the cake. I licked my lips because it definitely looked like buttercream. 

I watched the knife sluggishly rise into the air, clutched by Clancey’s long fingers. The cake glistened. My belly crackled. What was in those sandwiches? Goldust fluttered her eyes open. Each lady, decorating the room with their poses of curiosity, gasped as the knife split open the cake. A guessing game of possible species rolodexed in my head. I could feel Goldust peel herself off of me. She looked around the room.

“You okay?” I whispered. “She’s about to announce what she’s—”

I watched as Goldust stood up and walked toward Clancey, who had her hands inside the cake, rummaging around for the piece of paper. “Where the fuck is it?” she kept mumbling.

Goldust grabbed the knife and began to saw away at Clancey’s belly. Clancey did not stop her, too focused on finding the answer baked inside the cake. I tried to lift my body off the couch, but I couldn’t move. All the other women sat with their ankles crossed, in their coordinated outfits, just staring. It was as if my tongue had been cut out, all our tongues, and they were flapping on the carpet, mocking our silence. What were in those sandwiches?

Back and forth and back and forth, blood covered the knife like human jelly. Thick, raspberry jam oozing out. Back and forth and back and forth, layers of skin peeling away. Clancey’s eviscerated belly was the earth, shedding layers flooding the room: water, wind, salt, organs, an overdue History of Western Civilization textbook, a fountain pen, a fountain, a library card, a bundle of index cards. I no longer worried about the stain of Goldust’s glitter and my spilt wine. Clancey was grunting and howling and I wondered if someone should call the police or grab a towel or put away the sandwiches before they spoiled. But all I could do—and all the women beside me—was stare. And wonder, what was she having?