Diptychs
Categories
Katherine Martin
Category: Issues
Categories
Stephanie Mark
In Medias Res
“I can’t believe there’s four years of Latin textbooks on the shelves,” she says.
“And you shouldn’t,” I say. “Because there are way more than four years.”
“I thought you did four years with Mrs. Johnson in high school,” she says.
“I did. And then another three years with Professors Donovan and Ray in college.”
After selling the television, the faded armchair, and the clothes I shudder to see, let alone put near my body, I was able to move the shelves my old roommate abandoned into the apartment living room. I thought about the best way to arrange the hundreds of books I would put onto these shelves. These were anything from texts I’d gotten in middle school to recent releases I’d bought the previous month. They spanned genres, and more importantly, dimensions and colors whose contrast could overpower the eye, the mind, the aesthetic appreciation of the arrangement.
I stroll to the shelf on the far left, where she stands. I stretch my hand to point at a series of glossy, hardcover texts when I realize I can’t contort far enough over her body. With a series of exaggerated moans and wails, I shove my body against hers. She mewls and whines, more feline than human, as she stomps to the side.
She pouts. She looks pretty when she does this: I’ve told her to do it in pictures. Then she bends over, boobs thrust forward, ass thrust backward. She looks pretty when she does this too, though I wouldn’t tell her that. I turn back to the books before me so that my eyes don’t linger.
Although she’s reading the names on the spines, she’s also attending to me, because when I now reach toward a book, she flicks my right shoulder with her finger. I do the same to her left shoulder. She tugs at the hem of my dress; I do the same to hers. She recoils.
“Hey now,” she says. “I didn’t get mine at H+M, like yours. I actually spent serious money on this one. Don’t go all Mr. Powell’s tenth grade biology class on me.”
“You totally started it that day.”
“I did not,” she says. “Because you definitely didn’t wear any dresses back then. Let alone fancy ones.”
“But you were giving me shit for reading Latin in my free time. Which, incidentally, I still do.” Finally she turns to the book I’ve indicated. “Grad student friend didn’t want her workbooks on Catullus.”
“And here I thought you spent all these years after high school getting away from what made you miserable. Should’ve considered dumping the declension charts.”
“I should’ve considered starting this process before high school.”
She strolls away from the foreign language shelf and onto the one for classical literature. She doesn’t get past the A section of last names before stopping.
“This is new, though.”
“I had Mrs. Johnson for four years, after all,” I say.
She rolls her eyes. “And she was a caring mentor, who taught you about both Latin and life, and who listened to your problems whenever you both had free lunch periods.” She did, of course. She listened when I raved about some literary classic I’d just finished for the first time. She listened when I cried about my parents banning makeup. She listened when I swore about how I couldn’t share my feelings with the girl I fancied.
“She also inspired me to broaden my horizons. Her giving me Murakami when I graduated is why I started reading the surrealists.”
“The surrealists and Jane Austen?”
“Bitch did love her some Jane Austen. And now so do I.”
“You’re telling me,” she says. “Persuasion and Northanger Abbey. Wow. Many of her fans can’t even name those. I know you like cutesy shit, but this is excessive even for you.”
“It’s not like this happened two weeks ago. It interested me back in high school, before I was okay with myself. But then again, imagine that version of me liking cutesy shit.”
“Yeah,” she says, “people would’ve been shitty to you for liking that. Except for me.”
“You’d be shitty to me for saying your dad’s taste in music was better than yours, right?”
She turns to me, makes an obscene gesture, and smiles. If I weren’t an unnaturally tall, unnaturally broad colossus, onlookers might’ve mistaken us for sisters. We share the dramatic facial expressions, the rich amber eyes, the comfortable combat that both of us knows the other can endure. Nonetheless, I try to think of us as sisters so I don’t think of us any other way.
She pauses, taps her foot, scratches her head. Some memory has wrenched her away from the next part of the bookshelf.
“Jokes aside,” she says, “I’m still really glad you trusted me with that. Especially when I was the only one at the time.”
“Shit,” I say, “you were the only one for a year.”
Nodding at my contentment, at my thanks, and at my lack of offense, she smiles. “Good,” she says, “my opinions are insightful enough you need to think about them for a year before chatting up the riffraff.”
Now freed from this recollection, this concern, this sentiment, she pulls Persuasion from the shelf, looks through it, sees the pencil marking that the used book store put into the edition I purchased.
“Trust me,” I say, “it’s good.”
“Captain of the cheerleading team good?”
“She wasn’t that pretty.”
“Then why’d you ask her to prom?”
I make the obscene gesture this time.
“Because I was too scared to ask you. Was that what you wanted to hear?”
“I mean, I wanted to hear that I was prettier than her. But she got super fat, so I guess I won that.”
She looks from the shelf, to me, to the book she’s extracted. It looks like evidence in a trial now, something a prosecutor has put before me, whose existence I must explain to avoid a conviction. “I guess I’ll read this. You were close enough.”
Rather than stay steady, her tone rises at the end, making this statement interrogative even without the question mark. She’s not asking me to confirm whether she’s read it, she’s asking me the question her statement implies. All the while, she leaves the text bent on the shelf, mostly freed from the aperture that its removal has created as if waiting for orders on what she should do with it.
“You can borrow it,” I say. “Read it, and see for yourself. You don’t have to take my word for it.”
“Are you sure?” she says. This time her question has the appropriate structure, bluntness, punctuation. “You go through years of trouble to get these books, and then more trouble to make your living room into this library that’s all neatly organized. I wouldn’t want to disrupt it.”
Her heart-shaped face is serious now, as if this offense were graver than it was. She’s looked at me this way every breakup I described to her, every girl I dated but didn’t desire, every girl except the one I couldn’t find the courage to ask.
“Why do you think you were the first one I showed it to? I hoped you’d disrupt it.”
“Really?”
“I mean, I don’t want you to knock the shelves over, or throw all my mystery novels out the window. But I’m not going to refuse to lend you a book now that I’ve arranged it nicely.”
She looks at me with her eyes narrowed and head tilted. It’s the expression she’s given whenever I talked about my loathing and despair but before I could identify its cause, before I had the words to describe its cause.
I need to explain more of my rationale before she thinks it disingenuous. “Books can say a lot about what people like and believe, even if they don’t know it. You would never have gotten near cyberpunk unless I’d bought you Snow Crash.”
“Hacker swordsmen and girls on high-tech skateboards are an easier sell than Jane fucking Austen.”
“And once you’ve read Persuasion and taken back all the things you said about Jane fucking Austen, you’ll agree with me that books are meant to be shared. They’re meant to be given.”
Her sigh is as pronounced and protracted as when I’d mention my parents using words like “lifestyle”, “confusion”, and “choice” when describing what I did with my own body.
“You’re going to talk about your Latin teacher again, aren’t you? How Johnson got you Murakami, and you’d never heard of Murakami, and that’s why you read all these incomprehensible books about disaffected Japanese men.”
“For my graduation, I got some clothes I never wore, some money I blew on concerts for hacks I thought were good back then, and an e-reader, which clearly isn’t the way I enjoy reading books. But the only gift I kept, aside from the signed version of The Night Circus you got me that’s on one of these shelves, was the copy of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle that she got me.
“She wrote this wonderful note on one of the cover pages, talking about how she loved having me as a student. It was the only message I got that wasn’t perfunctory, even the ones on cards that friends and family gave to me.”
“So that’s why you wrote the note on the cover page of American Gods when you gave it to me.”
“And Lolita.”
She tilts her head to the other side. This time, both eyes and mouth are open: her expression when I told her who I really was, revealed to her everything I had kept secret, illuminated a dark patch between us that looked irrevocably different.
“Shit, really?” she says. “I thought you just got that for me because I lost my copy.” She flares her nostrils and clenches her fists, seething at the recalled memory she will now describe.
“I’d told that fucker I was dating that I lost it, and that it was my favorite book, and that I wanted a copy, and instead for Christmas he gets me The Alchemist.” She pulls her fists toward her body while stewing about her least favorite book and ex-boyfriend.
“So thank you,” she says, “for getting me an amazing gift, and then writing your own wonderful note on top of it.”
“Calling it ‘wonderful’ would be too kind. But you should read it. And then you should read Persuasion.”
She sighs. “Fine. I’ll take it.” She removes it, places it beneath one of her arms, and moves from the classics section to the science fiction one. I pause when she does. “This is almost like penance. Everything by Jane Austen, but nothing from that violent space marine series you raved about. The one where every man’s rifle and every woman’s breasts got a paragraph of description.”
I shake my head. “People have lots of delusions when they’re in high school,” I say. She nods to acknowledge the breadth of delusions to which I refer.
“Part of that delusion was thinking that stuff like weddings, social engagements, all that shit in Jane Austen novels, were frivolous. I didn’t think there was any literature worth reading that didn’t have plasma cannons and women in jumpsuits. If I didn’t get that copy of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I’d probably only have trite macho shit on these shelves.”
“Well, that explains why you’ve got this feminist sci-fi canon here. The Parable of the Sower, The Left Hand of Darkness–you’re failing at being a good postcolonial reader, though, because I’m not seeing The Fifth Season anywhere.”
“You still have my copy.”
“Allegedly.” The quick laugh that rises plummets into the silence. She tilts her head so that she doesn’t avoid me but refuses to make eye contact. This reaction I could never forget. I saw it when I explained my feelings for her, when I had the confidence to voice them, and when it was too late to do so.
“But more importantly,” she says, “where did you put all those space marine books? Under your mattress?”
“I burned them.”
“Are you serious?”
“No. But I gave them all to my cousin.”
“I thought they didn’t talk to you anymore?”
“None of the first cousins do. But one of my second cousins escaped their Florida conservatism after he ran the gamut of the queer community. Fell in love with a girl who was trans, then a girl who was bi, then–”
“Let me guess,” she interrupts, “a girl who was gay.”
“No,” I say, “a guy who was.”
She shakes her head, chuckles, turns back to the shelf.
She fingers two thick volumes near the bottom of the shelf whose covers are worn enough they look perforated. These versions are next to replicas without the damage, pristine and immaculate, their pages unbent and unsullied because fingers have not yet opened them. I’ve considered sleeves for them, the kind I’ve wrapped around the Ms. Marvel and Spider-Gwen first editions she got me, if only there were sleeves that were large enough.
“Oh god, Book of the New Sun?” she says, pointing at both the damaged and the clean copies. “That’s that tedium with all the obscure words and Latin terms. I’m sure that’s why you and your favorite professor both love it, but has anybody else in the world ever read it?”
“I’ve heard it called the sci-fi Ulysses,” I say, “in that more people have it on their bookshelf than have read it.”
“Is it even really sci-fi, though? I remember reading it, and it was all feudal. They have like guilds and shit. Swords and duels and horse travel. No blaster pistols.”
“You didn’t get far enough into the story.”
“I couldn’t, not with that narrator. Look, I’m sorry if I’m a boring straight girl, but I don’t need to hear about a woman’s breasts every other page.”
“I always interpreted that as the narrator being so warped that boobs were the primary way he could perceive other women. But I suppose you are right.”
“Really?”
“About you being boring at least.”
She makes a different obscene gesture this time.
“All right, joking aside, I will go to bat for the series. But this one is actually really good. Once you get far enough, you realize it’s not the kind of story you think. The truth isn’t what you expect, but it makes sense once you learn it.”
Now she has the simpler smirk, the easier display of cheekiness. “I can understand why you like that kind of story.”
She continues to smirk as I roll my eyes. I put both of the books atop the copy of Persuasion she’s taken. She rises from the ground, turns her eyes, looks at the other shelves.
She pushes her body to one side as she sashays past me. To counterbalance her antics, I shove in the opposite direction. We teeter a bit before she laughs, cheekily and quickly, and then crosses the room to where I’ve stored the modern fiction.
I shouldn’t stare at her from behind, but my eyes linger for a moment. Although my mind knows that we cannot work out, a different organ, an unfortunate vestige I haven’t been able to remove, remembers about when we could have.
That body I thought magnificent most of my classmates found adequate, attractive even, but not stunning. Hers was the figure I wanted but could never attain, much as I tried, much as I begged my female friends to experiment with my hair, makeup, and general style. Even now I’m not much like her. I’m too tall. My figure will always be too straight to have her expansive ass; my body will either be too pudgy, as then, or too toned, as it is now, to have her lithe softness. Though not large enough to turn heads at bars, her boobs are bigger than the ones I’ve managed to grow, which are small enough to elicit pity.
In contrast, hers was the most feminine figure I could imagine–in an archetypal and archaic sense of the word, more about petticoats than pink pastels. Her makeup was subtle and understated rather than extravagant and exaggerated. Pale and brunette, thin but not particularly toned, she looked more appropriate for a nineteenth century painting than a high school. I knew her form was slender, her hips wide, her breasts heavy, from the boudoir photos she’d gotten done and showed me. Hers were the wet lips I imagined kissing on late nights when we’d gotten close to each other while we chatted, teased, drank.
She ends this reverie with a question.
“A Clockwork Orange is good, too, right?”
I nod. She stares at it, expectant but hesitant, like a woman assessing whether the gift her husband gave her at a birthday party is too salacious for her to unwrap in public. I remove it from the shelf.
“Another Johnson recommendation?”
“She thought it was excessive. We argued for a whole lunch period. She made some great points. It is, in fact, a pretty grim book that almost tries to be difficult to read. That’s why I don’t usually recommend it. That, and because too many people like it for creepy reasons. But I really like it, for whatever that’s worth.”
“I’ll take it then.”
I reach forward, extract the sable slip, and deposit it on top of the three books she already has. As if to justify its addition, its physical presence before her, she says:
“I wouldn’t have thought you were creepy. Then again, I didn’t realize you were into me, so perhaps I’m not the best judge.”
“Considering I didn’t realize you were into me, I wasn’t any better.”
After craning her arm up and to the side to examine my copy of White Noise, she wobbles backward with the stack of books. I put my arm around her back to steady her. She puts the books on my couch.
“Do you ever think about what would have happened,” I say, “if we had?”
“I mean, I told you about the sex dreams about you. You back then, of course.”
“Yeah,” I say, “that’s not how the sex would go now.”
“Right,” she says. It’s an assessment and an admission, a partial answer, even if indirectly, to the previous question. It’s a fragment she doesn’t complete, a note she abandons after one paragraph.
As if taking all the focus of her conscious mind, her fingers drift in silence over to the Atwood collection. Her fingers stop on Oryx and Crake. We’ve debated whether it’s science fiction, and could renew that debate, but neither of us speaks. Neither of us can speak. She pulls out Cat’s Eye, stares at the cover, holds it over the books she’s stacked on the couch.
Unable to contemplate a segue, let alone an apropos response, I dash into the kitchen to retrieve a plastic container she can use to ferry her loot back home. When I bring it to her, I consider getting a second one, because she’s added The Blind Assassin, The Robber Bride, and Alias Grace to the pile.
She’s squatting in the corner, near the bottom shelf, looking at the row of books by Murakami. She tells me she read 1Q84 over the course of months. Liking it, but wanting something shorter, she grabs Kakfa on the Shore and throws it on the pile. She does the same with Norwegian Wood. Then she pulls my weather-beaten and dog-eared copy of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle from the shelf.
“No,” I say. She shivers at my sudden loudness, forcefulness, restriction. “I mean, it’s a great book. But I can’t give you my copy.”
As if suspecting blood from a cultic ritual inside it, she begins to open it. “No,” I say again.
“Okay, I get this might have sentimental value, but are you really not going to let me open it?” When I strain my hand toward it, she places it on the nearest shelf, leaning it against works by both Tana French and Gillian Flynn.
“That was the one Mrs. Johnson gave to me,” I say. I see her questions I haven’t answered, the secrets she knows are buried but has yet to deracinate. “It was the one with the message about the years of Latin I took with her. How I was one of her favorite students that year, and that she’d miss having me the next year. Because I’d just graduated high school.”
Her face tilts far enough to the side that I fear her headband will fall to the floor.
“I bet it’s very touching,” she says, “very personal, all that. But is this any more personal than the shit we told each other? The shit we were just talking about?”
“It’s painful,” I say.
“You don’t think it’s fucking painful for me to talk about that memory?”
Shivering with anger, I open the page. With a single finger, I point to that first word, that solitary salutation, that painful memento.
“She addressed it to me. Before she knew who I really was.”
Her eyes, then her brow, then all the lines on her face retract. Then she marches into my kitchen. She extracts from my junk drawer a thick, black Sharpie. I let her open to the page bearing the secret that remains written there, the word she already knows but I wish she didn’t. She scribbles over not only the name but also the space to the left and right, blotting even the length. Someone would guess a longer name, or stranger name, a name not so painfully familiar to me.
It hurts me until I feel her embrace. It’s soothing rather than perfunctory: not the kind we give when greeting each other, but the kind she gave me when my last boyfriend dumped me, the kind I gave her when her grandfather passed away.
She presents the page to me. She’s written my current, legal, feminine name, the talisman against all creeping dysphoria.
“That’s what would’ve happened if we’d gotten together,” she says. “Because that’s who you are.”
I speak through tears.
“That’s a wonderful note.”
Stephanie Marklives in Denver, Colorado. Her work has been published in The Festival Reviewand will be published in Progenitor Art & Literary Journal,and a Thorntree Press anthology. She was also shortlisted for the Into the Void 2018 Fiction Prize. She hosts various creative projects at www.patreon.com/junesayers.
Categories
Shaniece Rattler
Nutritional Yeast
Lane leaves church early Sunday morning. Her heel gets stuck in a patch of gum just between the curb and a pile of dog shit sifted through the grass. Lane hates church. This is the place where she is always likely to get stuck in something smelly, that drags its way through the rest of her day, the rest of her life. Lane’s hair is not thoroughly brushed, and her only decent dress is in the wash, so Lane wears jeans. No one wears jeans to Sunday Mass. Lanes mother would be extremely ashamed. Lane should not attend church to appease her mother. Lane should not not wear jeans to appease her mother. Lane has to remind herself that she is an adult, married woman. But Lane can’t think about that now. She’s in a hurry because if she doesn’t get to Dot soon enough he’ll sell his food stamps to her sister for half the price because Dot has always favored Tracey. Even though he calls Lane the good cousin. Lane doesn’t try to understand Dot.
Lane imagines the kind of horrible person that he is, the kind of deplorable things she’d heard he’d done to his ex-wife (the cheating with teenage strippers, the drinking, the unnerving antics he attributed to his bipolar disorder) before she took the girls and left to another state. Lane wants to displace the feathers coming from the hood of his coat, into a perfect bow around his neck, that she could pull into a choker, and squeeze. She’s concluded that he’s another kind of person that she can just think away. She blinks and he’s gone.
At his apartment, a government funded studio above a convenience store in the wrong part of town, Dot is still standing there with his hand on her shoulder, thinking about how much of a bitch she’s always been to everyone. Constantly keeping her own family at a distance, as if she’s too good for the people that know the real her. He pushes his fingers a little bit to dig into her skin, because everyone knows how Lane is about being touched. He knows the twisted direction her mind will go to no matter what. He wants the unrealness of her hatred for him to be grounded. He’s not some sicko, just because he and her sister have always been closer, just because Tracey is less socially inept. Just because his marriage had turned out to be a joke.
Lane stands waiting. Lane would prefer to sit, but Dot’s only furniture is a pull-out bed that he hasn’t made in days.
She maneuvers herself away and starts stretching like an uncomfortable cat trapped under a dresser. Her voice comes in a mumble, asking about the EBT card. Her cousin responds in a variety of self-affirmed body language expressions. They are not very good with each other. Just noises and movements and a runaway type of feeling filling up the spaces between them.
Lane thinks about her husband Samuel, and how embarrassed he would be by this very stupid transaction if he found out. It’s fraud to sell or buy government issued food stamp cards from your cousin, especially the ones you don’t even like.
“You’re quick. Another minute or two and Tres woulda had em.”
“Yeah, I figured it,” Lane responds with a shrug.
“How ya been”
“Good yeah, just church and Samuel and school, thinking about going back to school.”
“Yeah, that’s what’s up. You always were the smart one”
Lane makes a noise with her throat that’s supposed to be a laugh, but she’s nervous. Even around family she’s terrified of being complimented.
“Sit down, take a load off”
“No, I actually I have to get going, you know”
“That’s too bad”
Dot puts his hand on her shoulder again and squeezes there. The squeeze, at first painful, turns into a massage. Lane’s heart rate elevates. She thinks of a time on the playground when she was younger an older boy pushed her into the pile of wood chips across from the sandbox, just because he was bigger, and he could.
“Dot…”
“yeah…”
“The card?”
Lane turns her neck a bit, does some faux stretches, and taps her foot impatiently.
“It’s just Samuel, yeah you probably can’t see but he’s out, he’s in the car waiting. It’s so fucking cold, you know”
Dot nods, and tilts his head.
“The money?”
“Oh, shit, yeah, hold on,” Lane reaches into her purse and pulls out two twenties and a ten.
“That’s good for a hundred, the pin is my birthday.”
“Okay, cool, great, yeah, yeah good seeing you. We have to do something sometime? Like a cookout or something?”
“Definitely.”
Lane makes her way to the door.
“Wait, Lane you mind dropping me at the spot?”
“Umm, well….. I, ha, ha, yeah, sure, yeah come on.” Lane waves him over and they go down the rickety stairs until they reach the bottom. The sun spits sweat onto her forehead, even through the snow. Lane buckles herself into the seat and starts driving before the car warms up. Neither of them bring up Samuel’s obvious absence. They ride to a local smoke shop five blocks away and Dot gets out to talk to the other alkies. They all huddle together and pitch in dirty quarters and dimes for a few bottles. Dot pulls out half of the money Lane has just given him. He is popular with the crowd every month when he brings in his only earnings, the fruits of trading his EBT for cash. Lane expects him to call her in less than a week after he’s drank himself silly and is finally hunger again.
Lane wants to become vegan. Actually, Lane’s husband wants to become vegan. It’s all he talks to her about. It’s the only thing left that excites him. Lane wants him to stay as excited as possible. Lane will bring him vegan food, but Lane will not pay full price for it, because she knows that by dinnertime he’ll want meat again, and Lane will have budgeted that too.
Lane takes the EBT card to the grocery store and assembles everything Samuel has mentioned on his list from unsweetened coconut chips to some cheese substitute called nutritional yeast (a flakey foodstuff she instantly doesn’t trust) and loads of avocado-avocado everything-into a cart with squeaky wheels. Lane fears Samuel’s diet will be deficient in protein. She sneaks a can of tuna into the cart and hides it under romaine hearts.
Lane imagines Samuel’s excitement over her choice of non-dairy cashew milk. She pictures him kissing her with strands of spaghetti squash still on his lips. There they are in the tv room nibbling on pita chips covered in hummus and artichoke. She wishes that he would eat meat again. That he would curdle her up and smooth her with olive oil until her toes and fingers are slippery and dip her into a chai seed egg wash, until she’s smothered in a crumble of crushed almond flour and bake at four hundred degrees.
In line, Lane stacks all of her items in a neat row and asks that the can of tuna be bagged separately.
“Cash or card?” The lady at the checkout asked between munching on chewing gum and pushing her neon orange colored hair behind one ear.
Lane slides the card. There’s a beeping noise. She stares blankly at the cashier and slides it through again. The screen should have prompted her to enter her pin, but there’s nothing. She swipes for the third time.
“I’m sorry ma’am, this card has insufficient funds.”
Lane lifts her eyes to the people in line, some staring, some waiting impatiently, some just smiling along in long conversation, their carts: props with barely any items, enjoying the heat of being inside out of the cold. Lane returns her eyes to the lady holding her vegan goods hostage. Lane is not surprised at this woman, or Dot. But, Lane wishes she would release them to her out of some goodness in her heart, but Lane knows that people are not good. Dot is not good. Samuel is not good. Lane only tries to be.
Lane wants desperately to believe in change. She wants to believe in her marriage, in Samuel. Samuel is the only thing that makes her feel safe. She wants to believe in the vegans. And although Lane had made it clear to Samuel that his indecision over meat was not something that they could reasonably afford- that to constantly trash perfectly good meat, and then stack up on substitutes that would never measure up (that he would never even eat) was wasteful, and that she would no longer be indebted to his miscalculations- she pulls out the last of her cash from her purse and pays full price.
Shaniece Rattler is a first year graduate student at Columbia College Chicago who is busy writing non-stop. In her free time she likes to read new short stories recommended to her and she daydreams about getting the novel she’s working on published. “Nutritional Yeast” is her first publication.
Categories
Daniel Bartkowiak
Once in Many Blue Moons
Read full story here
Daniel Bartkowiak lives in Chicago. His work has been featured in issues of The Write Launch and Thrice Literary.
Categories
Alexis Bowe
A Mother’s Love
Alice’s mother, Leila, leans in close to her daughter and plucks a stray hair from in between her eyebrows, causing Alice to flinch slightly. She studies Alice’s pale face and finds a few more imperfections to pluck away.
“There,” she says when she’s finished. “Much better.”
Alice lets out a deep sigh as her mother trades out her pair of tweezers for a hairbrush and begins gently brushing out Alice’s glossy golden hair.
This is Leila’s favorite part of the nightly routine that she has with her daughter. She loves Alice’s hair, loves the honey blonde color, one of the few things passed down to her from her father. She’d inherited her mother’s dainty nose, almond-shaped hazel eyes, but her hair was one hundred percent her father’s.
“I can do this myself, you know,” Alice tells her.
“I know,” her mother replies. “But I don’t mind doing it for you. Besides, whenever you brush out your hair, you do it too quick, too hard, and you give yourself split ends. You don’t take your time with it like I do.”
She continues brushing, a small content smile resting on her lips, until Alice’s hair is silky and tangle-free. She runs a hand through her daughter’s hair, letting it waterfall down her nightgown-clad back.
It’s been like this for all of Alice’s life—just her and her mother. She has no siblings and never got the chance to meet her father. He died before Alice was born.
Alice’s mother doesn’t like to talk about her father. She doesn’t like to talk about anything that reminds her of that awful night when that masked man broke into her house and took her husband away from her. She doesn’t like to remember how dark the man’s eyes were—black almost—as they looked at her through those two tiny slits, lying there in bed, trembling hands clasped over her pregnant belly. She knew that if she hadn’t been pregnant, he would have killed her too. She could sense it in the way he stood there, hesitating, before finally turning and walking away, stepping over her husband’s crumpled, bleeding body, laying in the doorway to their bedroom. In a way, Alice had saved her life.
She could hardly believe it when Alice was finally born two months later. A beautiful, healthy baby girl. So soft and pure. She knew she had to keep Alice safe the way that Alice had done for her.
Alice watches as her mother puts the brush and the tweezers back in their designated spots on her vanity.
“Hey, mom,” she says.
“Yes, dear?” Leila replies.
Alice breathes in deeply, her heart fluttering anxiously in her chest, before she begins. “Julie, from school, is having a couple girls sleep over at her house Friday night and she invited me to come.”
The sentence comes out in one single breath. Alice watches as her mother’s back tenses up. For a moment, she says nothing.
“Mom?” Alice says.
Her mother turns around now to face her, an unreadable expression on her face. “Sweetheart, you know how I feel about you spending the night out.”
What little hope Alice had built up drains immediately and is replaced by the sinking feeling she’s become so familiar with. This isn’t the first time Alice’s mother has turned her down. There have been birthday parties, trips to the mall, other sleepovers, and even school field trips that Leila refused to let Alice attend.
It only got harder as she grew older. Every time Alice would go to school on Monday morning and hear all the girls in her classes talking about what they did over the weekend, envy would prickle under skin, constricting her throat and tightening around her chest. All the girls at school got to go to the mall on their own or go see movies on their own. Meanwhile, Alice’s mother didn’t even allow her to have access to cable or the internet. “Too many ugly things out there,” Leila had said when Alice asked why she kept these things from her.
“But mom,” she pleads. “I’m sixteen. Everyone else gets to spend the night out. Why can’t I?”
“Just because other people do things doesn’t mean that you should too,” Leila remarks evenly. “I don’t even know this Julie or her parents. How can I possibly allow you to spend the night in the home of people I’ve never met? What kind of parent would I be then?”
She moves away from the vanity to pick up the cardigan Alice had thrown on her bed. As she moves to the closet to hang it up, Alice rises from her seat and follows her.
“Well what if you meet her parents?” she asks. “Then could I go?”
Leila hangs up the cardigan, avoiding her daughter’s gaze, then turns and walks back towards the vanity, her narrow shoulders squared and rigid.
“Mom?” Alice says, continuing to follow her around the room.
Leila comes to an abrupt halt in front of the vanity, her hands clenched into tight fists at her sides.
“Alice, I am done discussing this with you,” she says firmly. “The answer is no. Do not bring it up again.” She turns on her heel and walks out of the room, shutting the door behind her. Alice hears the clickof her mother locking it from the other side.
Alice’s chest begins to grow tight. Her teeth grit together behind closed lips and angry tears well up behind her eyes. She wants to scream. She’s sick of being stuck in this house with her mother all the time. The only time she ever gets to leave is to go to school or to flute lessons or on her daily walks around the neighborhood, which would be wonderful if they weren’t always accompanied by her mother.
But Leila would never let Alice go out walking alone. She tells her it’s because Alice is a young, beautiful girl and bad things tend to happen to young, beautiful girls like her. She tells her it’s for her own good, for her safety, but Alice doesn’t think that all these rules and restrictions were put in place for her benefit.
When she was younger, she trusted her mother when she told her that going outside alone was too dangerous or when she told her that she kept her door locked so that no bad guys could break in and take her in the middle of the night. She assumed that it was normal to have a lock on the outside of her door, that all little girls’ parents locked their doors to protect them from bad guys. But as she grew older, she began to wonder if the lock was to keep bad guys out or if it was to keep her in.
Once, her freshman year, she met a girl named Haley in her algebra class. Haley had an older brother and he was planning to throw a party one weekend because their parents were going to be out of town. She invited Alice to the party, but Alice declined the invitation, telling her that there was no way her mother would ever allow her to go, so Haley suggested that she sneak out of the house. This was when Alice mentioned the lock that her mother had put on the outside of her bedroom door. Haley stopped talking to Alice after that.
A lot of girls eventually stopped talking to Alice when they realized that she’d never be able to hang out with them outside of school. Julie was different though. She was a transfer student who had just moved here this year, and she didn’t know about Alice yet. She didn’t know her as the weird girl whose mom always drops her off and picks her up from school or the girl who is never seen by any of the students outside of the walls of their high school. To Julie, Alice was just a normal girl. And Alice was determined to keep it that way.
The next day at school, Alice told Julie that her mom wouldn’t let her sleep over unless she talked to her parents, so Julie wrote down her mom’s cell phone number on a piece of paper that she tore out of her notebook and gave it to Alice to take home to her mother.
That night, Alice made sure not to flinch or pull away when her mother plucked a stray hair above her lip. She held her hand out straight and flat while her mother filed her nails so that the tops formed smooth little half-moon shapes, and she sat perfectly still, shoulders back, while her mother ran her brush through her long blonde hair over and over again.
Now, as her mother finishes up with their nightly routine and turns to walk out of Alice’s room, Alice rises from the stool at her vanity.
“Mom,” she says. Leila stops in her tracks, pausing for a moment before turning around.
“Yes, dear?” she replies.
Alice goes over to her backpack and pulls the slip of paper with Julie’s mother’s phone number on it out of the front pocket. She walks over to her mother and holds the paper out in front of her.
“This is Julie’s mom’s phone number. I thought that maybe if you gave her a call and talked to her that you’d be more comfortable letting me spend the night there tomorrow.”
Leila stares down at the piece of paper in her daughter’s hand, her thin lips set into a hard line. She sucks in a deep breath through her nose and snatches the paper up.
“Alice,” she begins, her voice chillingly calm, “I told you last night not to bring this up again. If you don’t want to listen to me then not only will you not be spending the night at Julie’s; you also will not be going to school tomorrow. I’ll call your school to let them know you’re sick and I’ll bring your work home for you to do.”
Alice’s heart sinks like a rock into her stomach. She can’t do this. School is the only time away from her mother that Alice gets. It’s the only time Alice ever really feels free. She can’t take that away from her.
“Mom, no! That’s not fair! I have to go to school!” she cries. Tears begin to well in the back of her throat.
Her mother crumples the piece of paper up into a ball inside her boney hand. “Well maybe next time you will listen to me when I ask you not to bring something up again.”
She turns on her heel, her silky pink robe billowing out behind her, and walks out of the room. “But mom!” Alice shouts, following behind her. Leila slams the door and Alice’s hands fall onto the white painted wood.
Click.
“Mom!” Alice shouts, banging on the door with balled up fists. She jiggles the handle, but it doesn’t budge. “Mom!” she shouts again, louder this time, the words like sandpaper in her throat.
Classical music floats up from downstairs, the volume increasing until it drowns out her screams. She kicks at the door, her bare toe instantly throbbing as she does so. She lets out a guttural cry and turns around, her arms shaking at her sides.
Alice pushes over the stool that sits at her vanity, throws the brush and the tweezers and the lotion and the nail clippers and file all to the carpeted floor. She tears the pink, frilly comforter off of her bed, followed by the pressed white sheets. Takes all of her neatly folded clothes out of the drawers of her dresser and tosses them on the ground. Removes all of the shirts and sweaters and dresses from their hangers.
When she’s finished, she looks around at the mess she’s created, sweat prickling in the pits of her arms, on the back of her neck, causing her nightgown to stick to her skin. It isn’t enough. All of this stuff can be cleaned up, put back in it’s place as if it was never out of place to begin with. It isn’t enough.
Alice walks over to her closet and kneels down, pulling out her box of art supplies from the back corner of it. Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3 fills the pastel pink walls of her room, the walls of the house. She takes the scissors from the box and goes over to the vanity, turning the stool upright and sitting down on it.
She stares at herself in the mirror, at all of her beautiful blonde hair, long and silky and smooth. The hair her mother loves. The hair her mother brushes each night. The hair that’s just like her father’s. She grabs a chunk of it and begins cutting. She cuts and cuts until it falls just below her ears, jagged and ugly.
She stares into the mirror and smiles.
Categories
Maria Hummel
Still Lives
The LA art scene sets an eerie scene for Maria Hummel’s crime novel, Still Lives. This book driven by murder, art, and societal commentary that not only leaves the reader with a good story, but a lot to think about as well.
Maria Hummel tells this story through Maggie Richter. Maggie is the in-house editor for the esteemed but struggling Rocque Museum. As the museum prepares for the impending, provocative show “Still Lives” by artist Kim Lord, Maggie’s narration leaves the reader with a sense of tension: as we soon learn, her long-term ex-boyfriend has been dating Kim Lord. Maggie squeezes into a too-tight dress borrowed from a co-worker and attends the gala anyway, despite her intense desire to flee the scene. Both the notion of seeing her ex, Greg, and Lord’s paintings of female murder victims puts Maggie on edge. Everyone anxiously awaits the artists’ arrival at the party but are eventually let down by her absence. The next day it is discovered that Kim Lord is missing.
Hummel’s poetic language and imperfect narrator propel the story forward, making the reader feel as though they too are solving the sudden disappearance of a notoriously unpredictable artist. One can not help but be suspicious of every character, including Maggie.
Readers of Still Lives will be suspicious as well as a bit unnerved as Hummel expertly describes the paintings of Kim Lord. The artist poses herself in the positions of infamous murder victims. Maggie questions Lord’s work through the book: “I hate this artwork. I hate the powerlessness it projects. I hate it because it reminds me there is an end for women worse than death. I will not look at it again.” Hummel paints a picture even better than the artists of her book, using a language unique to L.A. and the back-of-the-gallery experience, which Hummel knows first hand as a writer and editor for L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art.
Hummel’s examination of society’s reoccurring habit of fetishizing female homicide victims will leave readers questioning the media and themselves.
Reviewed by Jessica Powers.
Counterpoint. 2017.
IBSN: 9781619021112.
277 pages.
Categories
Nina LaCour
We Are Okay
Life is made of transitions; of countless moments that carry us from one point to the next. More often than not, stories focus on these transitions, because transitions incite change, and from change comes tension. In her fifth novel, We Are Okay, author Nina LaCour (Hold Still, You Know Me Well, Everything Leads to You) cultivates a particularly strong sense of tension that ebbs and flows over the course of only 234 pages. This tension is possible because of the state of transition in which LaCour has placed her characters—both mentally and physically. The story is subtle and relatively reserved, allowing those various, emotional states of transition to accentuate the unstoppable nature of change; though there are some constants that even a complete metamorphosis can’t shake.
We Are Okay follows Marin, a Freshman at an unnamed East coast college, as she spends her first winter break alone in the dorms. Though we are in Marin’s point of view, the details as to why she has no one to stay with on Christmas are fuzzy—all we know is that she can’t stay with her grandfather, whom she lived with back home in Los Angeles. She won’t be completely alone, however. Marin’s best friend from California, Mabel, is coming to stay for three days, but Marin’s relationship with Mabel is even more complicated and clouded than her relationship with her grandfather. Over the course of these three short days, we are exposed to the emotional toll that isolation and major changes have on Marin and, through seamless jumps in time, we learn why so much has changed in the first place.
At the novel’s start, Marin finds herself in a classic state of transition: grief.
Moving from a life with something into a life without it. Marin grieves for her home, her relationships, and the way her life used to be. LaCour expresses Marin’s grief through isolation; isolation not only from other people, but from Marin herself. She is in denial, unable to face the things that she grieves. But what has happened to her—the secrets that are kept from us—pulls at Marin constantly, and it forces her to acknowledge her past piece by piece. This isolation and silence allow Lacour to keep valuable information from the reader until it is time for the story—and Marin—to reveal it. The result is an exquisite push and pull of tension. Her readers are tantalized by the dramatics of the story, but we aren’t allowed to actually understand them until the last possible moment.
LaCour uses another classic transitional period to her advantage as the story is developed: going to college. Leaving home, starting a completely new phase of life, is something that everyone can relate to. Nothing creates more tension than taking a character out of their comfort zone and placing them somewhere completely new.
LaCour takes this transition and takes it a few steps further. Following the mysterious events that take place at the end of the summer, Marin drops everything and leaves for college without a single goodbye. She hasn’t even packed her things, arrives at school completely empty handed. Not only does LaCour take Marin out of her comfort zone, she takes away anything and everything that Marin could use for comfort. Additionally, she sends Marin to school on the opposite side of the country. The subsequent transition is jolting and does everything it can to take the readers out of their own comfort zones as well. Which leaves us completely open and susceptible to the profoundly strong variety of emotions that the story provokes.
When I read this book for the first time, I was so overcome with emotion that I didn’t quite know what to do. I found myself sitting on my bathroom floor late at night, crying uncontrollably for seemingly no reason at all. All I knew was that this book had struck every single chord that I could possibly have had. It left me feeling as though I had been violently scrubbed clean; everything in my head came pouring out at once. Months (and several rereads) later, I find it a bit simpler to articulate what this book has done for me. It is real in a way that I’ve never seen before. It perfectly translates the emptiness of depression and the strangeness of transition to the page. It is magnificently written—the pacing, details, and dialogue all working in seamless harmony. It is a million other things that I may not ever be able to write down. We Are Okay is equally striking and soft, simple and surprising; it takes its readers somewhere that I highly doubt they have ever been before.
Reviewed by Katherine Martin
Published by Penguin Random House
ISBN: 9781524749941
234 pages
Categories
Saundra Mitchell
All Out
Saundra Mitchell edits an empowering and inclusive anthology of queer historical fiction in All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens throughout the Ages.
Queer people have always existed, but their stories, lives, and loves are silenced and disregarded in most mainstream history teachings. Due to this erasure, countless queer figures have gone unrecognized. All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens throughout the Ages eases the pain of this loss. Featuring an impressive list of accomplished Young Adult authors from all across the queer spectrum, All Out aims to fill the hole in the hearts of queer youth who see nothing of themselves in history or in literature.
This collection of short stories spans several hundred years and as many continents as it does genres. Varying in content, form, and length, this expansive anthology contains something for any reader of any age. Drawing from medieval witch trials, the death of Kurt Cobain, to the lesbian subculture of fifties Hollywood, All Out leaves no setting unexplored.
Beginning with an interpretation of Little Red Riding Hood, “Roja,” written by YA author Anna-Marie McLemore, All Outreimagines the stories that consumed our childhoods. A trans male character takes the forefront of McLemore’s retelling, as well as in Elliot Wake’s “Every Shade of Red.” In Wake’s contribution, Robin Hood himself is a trans male. One of the most celebrated figures of English folklore is celebrated as a trans boy, giving power to the trans readers who are able to see themselves in the role of a legendarily masculine character.
But not every story in the All Out anthology is a reimagining of fantastical tales. Some are painstakingly accurate. In Mackenzi Lee’s short story “Burnt Umber,” a young boy navigates homophobia as an artist’s apprentice in Amsterdam in 1638. Unable to act on his desires—and nearly outed when his longtime crush models nude for a study in anatomy—Constantjin struggles with the realities of his situation. Lee’s detailed observations of an artist’s environment in seventeenth century Amsterdam must have required extensive research in order to remain historically accurate, a fact which does not go unnoticed. Similarly, Malinda Lo’s “New Year” includes references to a very specific queer subculture outside of Chinatown in San Francisco where “male impersonators” performed. Lo even includes an author’s note, providing her source material and suggestions for further reading and research.
From lesbian chambermaids in eighteenth century London to an asexual roller skater in Maryland in 1976, All Out is an inclusive anthology for any member of the LGBTQ+ community.
The inclusivity and imagination in this anthology is immensely empowering to any queer reader, especially queer youth, who with this collection, can finally see themselves as a part of history. Saundra Mitchell’s masterpiece is a celebration of queer identities and proves the positive power of representation.
Review by Jerakah Greene
Published by Harlequin Teen
ISBN-10: 133547045X
ISBN-13: 978-1335470454
368 Pages
Twitter: @SaundraMitchell @LAAnnaMarie @themackenzilee @malindalo @HarlequinTEEN @HarlequinBooks
Categories
Ottessa Moshfegh
My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Ottessa Moshfegh is one of those writers whose stories stay with you long after you finish reading them. My Year of Rest and Relaxation, her second novel, is no exception.
In this novel, the narrator (she remains unnamed throughout the book) decides to take some time off from life by attempting to go into a year long hibernation aided by the many different pills she gets her psychiatrist to prescribe to her. On the outside, her life seems great. She’s thin, gorgeous, well-educated, and has tons of money thanks to the inheritance she received after her parents passed away. But on the inside, things are pretty dark, and she thinks that taking a year to reset will help her wake up from her hibernation renewed and ready for a fresh start.
“Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I’d slept enough, I’d be okay. I’d be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories.”
This novel is both dark and hilarious, unfiltered and relatable. We all have been at a place in life where we’re just so tired of going through the motions that we want to clock out for a while, to take a week long nap and escape the facileness of our everyday lives. It’s one of those common secrets that everyone experiences, but no one talks about. That’s the type of writer Moshfegh is, the type who is unafraid to talk about the things that no one else dares to shed any light on.
While there is some repetition in this novel (taking pills, blacking out, getting a visit from her envious best friend, Reva, going to see her psychiatrist to see what else she can prescribe her), it never feels monotonous or boring. In fact, the repetitiveness helps put you in the narrator’s state of mind, making it easy to get lost in the hazy world that Moshfegh creates for her.
There are many times in the novel when the narrator is portrayed as cold or crude or unlikable, but no one is pleasant all of the time. Showing this character at her darkest moments, showing how she behaves when no one else is around, is comforting in a strange way. It reminds us that we are all human and it’s okay to not be okay sometimes. Too many stories have a protagonist who is so easily likeable and so undeniably good. It’s refreshing to read about a protagonist who is just as imperfect and fucked up as the rest of us.
This isn’t one of those stories that is necessarily pleasant or lighthearted. However, it is one of those stories that grips you until the very end. It is honest and raw and does not hold back. If you do not want to read something that talks about shit or pubic hair or blowjobs, then this story may not be for you. But if you want to dive into something that does not play it safe or aim to be politically correct, then you should absolutely check this novel out.
Reviewed by Alexis Bowe
Published by A Perigee Book/Penguin Group
ISBN: 0525522115
304 pages
Categories
Joanna Demers
Anatomy of Thought-Fiction
Joanna Demers shows what a fictional future has to say about life in the 21st century with her newest novel, Anatomy of Thought-Fiction.
It has been said a nausea-inducing amount of times that hindsight is 20/20. This cliché is deeply rooted in individual self-reflection, the act of looking back at one’s own life to make some amount of sense of all those years. But what of collective self-reflection? What about the hindsight of society writ large? What does the future have to say about the present? Joanna Demers tackles these questions with her bizarre novel Anatomy of Thought-Fiction.
To fully unpack this piece of academic fiction, one has to first look at its construction. This book consists of a series of academic essays on the nature of popular music sandwiched between an editor’s introduction and a postscript. The editors, anonymous representatives of the Center for Humanistic Study, exist in the year 2214 and have graciously received the unpublished manuscript titled Anatomy of Thought-Fiction from a descendant of its author, Joana Demers. They have published it in its entirety and without editorial as part of their mandate “to study the discourse of the “humanities,” which apparently went extinct sometime around 2040. This information is all laid out in the introduction, while the postscript asks what might be learned from an academic long dead in a field “deemed to be ornamental and irrelevant”.
These two points, the introduction and the postscript, are the only bits of fiction in this work. And all they really do is provide a scant amount of detail to why Demers’ manuscript is being published in the first place. This is what makes Anatomy of Thought-Fiction so brilliant: with a total of five pages, Demers is able to wholly construct an Orwellian and post-apocalyptic future world that seems just as unrelenting, bleak, and harsh as George Miller’s saga of the Road Warrior (that spans four feature-length films) or Koushun Takami’s Battle Royale. Her creation of this world resides solely in what representatives of a clearly totalitarian regime have to say and in the imagination of readers. She offers no long histories of how the present became this future, no long-winded passages about violent upheavals and civil unrest, and most important of all, no heroes riding in to save humanity from this.
There is a complete trust in readers on display in this work to be able to connect dots and extrapolate from very little data, a kind of trust that normally doesn’t show up in a lot of commercial fiction. This trust that Demers fosters between herself as a writer and her readers can be explained by her actual profession as a professor of musicology. She is a professional academic at the University of Southern California and expects readers to be up to the rigors of her research. The essays that make up the bulk of this book are well researched, well argued, and while they stray into philosophical inquiry at times, would no doubt find a good home in journals of musicology. Demers wasn’t trying to write articles in her main field of study, but was attempting to show that what holds up study in the humanities is a thought-fiction.
Demers defines a thought-fiction as a concept that serves a purpose even though it is known to be untrue. She applies to this term to a wide range of beliefs held by many in regards to popular music and how those beliefs, while helpful in some regards, can easily be argued away. She also acknowledges that nobody is immune to thought-fictions; from the get-go, Demers admits that she too believes in ideas she knows to be false, an admission that immediately endears her to readers because she implicitly states that it’s okay to believe these things. This concept of thought-fiction can be applied to so many ideas that are wholly outside of popular music and musicology, disciplines even outside of the humanities. As the editors ask in their postscript, “We, in turn, can ask ourselves by what thought-fictions we govern our lives.”
Joana Demers has done more than just craft engaging fiction or write academically about her own field of study. In Anatomy of Thought-Fiction, she has successfully married the research article with bleak totalitarian fiction in such a way that readers will have a hard time not believing in the future she has created.
Reviewed by Jay C. Mims
Published by Zero Books, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-78535-381-9
138 pages