Fiction

WOMAN OF STEEL by Valerie Hegarty

Yesterday in ceramics class Prof Woodstock did a demo of red glazes while telling us an old Chinese legend.  Once there was an emperor who demanded a red glazed pot.  The royal potter fired pot after pot, but could not get any of them to fire red.  So the emperor sentenced him to death.  The potter’s daughter was so upset she jumped in the fired kiln, and when they opened it all the pots were glazed red with her blood. Prof Woodstock said as a feminist she wasn’t thrilled with the story, but it showed the difficulty of producing a red glaze wasn’t just specific to dumb Americans.  I was sipping vodka from my water bottle and swooned a bit over the open kiln, my face flushed red from my buzz and the heat.  Prof Woodstock sent me home to sleep it off; she was cool like that, which was fine because my main focus in school was to make metal art.  Prof Steelhead told me making metal art was not recommended as it appeared I did not have the disposition to withstand working close to the fire for extended periods of time and lifting welded metal sculpture was challenging for even the most vigorous athletic builds. Prof  Steelhead made work similar in style to Richard Serra, and since Richard Serra was famous, no one cared about Steelhead’s art. It wasn’t shown in blue chip galleries in Chelsea, or at International Art Fairs like the Venice Biennale. Instead Steelhead’s rusted walls of steel littered meadows in Vermont, where cows were forced to walk the long way around these industrial barriers when looking for a lost calf.Of course I didn’t listen to Steelhead.  He should have gone West and bought a depressed town to reconstruct if he wanted to be a dictator like Heizer or Judd, but since he was slowly creaking out his tenure at a liberal Arts College in New England, no one listened to Steelhead.  Plus the college had the metal workshop outfitted with cranes and there were techs and other students to assist, so I don’t know why he was picking on me, aside from my slight build and nervous disposition.  Truthfully I was terrified of fire, but that was exactly why I wanted to make metal art to begin with—not to face my fears—but for the surges of Norepinephrine that coursed through my body when I thought I was on the precipice of death. I finished a twelve-pack of Bud cans before class, crushing the tin cans in my fist each time I polished one off just to psych myself up. Although it calmed my anxiety, I was now staggering when I walked. I told myself not to walk in front of Steelhead and to stay on the other side of the fire from him when the techs did the demo of the molten steel pour.  Ten of us arrived at class and Steelhead gave us shovels to dig out trenches as molds that would be filled with the molten steel during the demo.  I dug a hole the shape of my body, like the artist Ana Mendieta who performed in the landscape—lying naked on sand, against trees, in gardens, then covering herself with earth—but mine was a hole. No body. It was a hollow, like the voids in the lava post-Vesuvius.  Maybe it could be a memorial to Ana Mendieta, who was now without a body as her body broke and died when she was pushed out the window by her drunk lover, the artist Carl Andre. Without witnesses, he claimed it wasn’t him, and I know from drunken blackouts that maybe he did it and didn’t remember. Maybe it was psychic survival to keep that night dark.  Now I was feeling sad about Ana Mendieta. What a fucking way to die, drunk and fighting with your drunken lover, soon to be your murderer, whose work would still be going to Venice and Paris and every MOMA retrospective in every country around the world, while your body decayed and disappeared, leaving a void deep in the ground where you were buried.  It’s all very poetic except for the part where she was pushed.When I finished digging my body-shaped hole, I was dizzy from the exertion in the sun. I leaned on my shovel to prop me up.  Steelhead took my shovel out from under me and gave me an “I told you so” look and I glared at him, batting my eyelashes to confuse him.  My sweat smelled like barley and hops as it poured out under my armpits. I didn’t care if he smelled it, he was a drinker too; I could see it in his watery eyes in the morning class. He was blurred and hung over and pissed about Richard Serra.Steelhead told us all to stand back from our holes. Multiple techs in heavy Kevlar suits with helmets like they were headed to Mars picked up a trough that glowed fiery red with molten steel. They carried the trough to the holes and one by one filled the horse shoe shaped hole, the hole shaped like a pitchfork, the hole shaped like Carl Andre’s steel floor tiles. They carried the red molten metal to me, its liquid silver sloshing, and started to fill the hole shaped like my body. The heat from the molten steel overtook me. I was drunk and hot. If only I could sit down for a minute. I’ll just sit on my heels, I thought, and staggered backward. As I pitched forward, I tried to catch my balance. I could hear screaming as I fell into the  molten metal.I was at a party and it was late.  Someone was shooting up in the corner and nodding out with the needle still in his arm.  A couple was fighting about art and finances, and being a bad lover, and being a drunk, and you are a drunk, and the woman said she was leaving and leaving for good, and she was looking out the window shouting to her friend to wait, and the man ran to her. He was enraged. He almost had his hands on her, and I was right there, right in between them. I stuck out my foot.The man fell and hit his head on the iron baseboard heater. He was knocked unconscious.  Maybe he was dead.  The woman screamed. She checked his pulse.  “He’s dead!” she yelled, “Call an ambulance! He’s dead!”  You’re welcome, I thought.  I saw there was a fire in the kitchen sink, so I ran to put it out.  I turned on the water, but whiskey flowed out, accelerating the flames.  I grabbed a bottle of water and threw it on the growing fire, but it was vodka. Now the flames were consuming the cabinets and the stove. The utensil drawer dripped silver, the toaster melted, the refrigerator buckled in on itself.  I ran from the room, but I was drunk and lurching.  The man wasn’t dead. He was back on his feet and his face was so red it looked like he was going to pop.  He was coming for me.  “No! No! Get away from me!” I yelled as I ran out of the apartment, down the stairwell, into the street.  He was chasing me, he had one of his steel floor tiles in his hands raised over his head. He was going to pummel me with his metal art. He was gaining on me, and I was tired of running. I stopped and turned to him.  “Go ahead, kill me fast, I have a weak stomach for this type of thing,” and he raised the steel plate and crashed it down on my head.  There was the clanging boing of a gong. Two men were dragging me by my elbows up to a Chinese emperor sitting on his throne.  The emperor was drinking from a jug and I could smell the alcohol on his breath.  At his feet was a pile of ceramic shards from broken jugs.  My hands were tied behind my back and I was dragging my legs.   Next to the emperor was the biggest kiln I’d ever seen in my life, with a bonfire of stacked wood burning underneath.  Under the lid I could see rows of jugs waiting to be glazed and fired. “Get in if you want to save your father,” said the emperor, pointing behind me.  I turned around and my father was nodding his head.  “They will kill me if you don’t get in,” said my father, his eyes locking on mine.  “My blood will be on your hands,” he said.I nodded my head as if I understood, and the two men released my arms.  I stepped forward toward the kiln. “Save your motherfucking self!” I screamed as I ran out the door to the right of the kiln. I was running back and forth. I was in some inner courtyard and couldn’t find my way out.  The two men cornered me and one of them raised his double-edged sword, the edges glinting, and I stuck out my neck, “Fine, do it, it’s better than burning to death,” I said as I heard the swish of the sword cut the air in half.I was outside my childhood home and I heard my mother’s voice.  I thought my mother died two years ago of cancer, but she was in the kitchen calling my name. I ran to the kitchen. I couldn’t believe she was there, washing dessert spoons in the sink.  “Sweetie, you need to stop drinking. It’s killing you.  I love you and I don’t want you to die. I should have protected you more as kid.” She handed me a spoon and a bowl of ice cream. I fell into her skirt. It was my mother and I started to cry.  I was crying and the bowl of ice cream was melting and I was crying and melting and crying and melting and they were pulling me out of the body shaped hole.  I was still alive but all my clothes had burned off. My skin shone silver.  I had a coating of steel. I looked like the tin man’s wife.  Steelhead fell in love with me on the spot. He tried to hand me a can of beer to cool me off, but I deflected it with my wrist like Wonder Woman, and when the can touched my skin it instantly turned to liquid metal and poured into a puddle by my feet. Steelhead said we could make beautiful art together but I told him he was too old for me and I had a whole life to lead.  He wouldn’t be able to keep up and I couldn’t be with a drinker. It would be a risk to my newly sober self.  As I walked away the noon sun was so bright it glared off every side of my metal body. I heated up to the temperature of the sun itself. I was walking radiance. I could feel Steelhead’s watery eyes on me as I poured into the light.
Fiction

KNIVES by Sean Hayes

I was gonna be a salesman. I took an elevator up to the third floor and followed signs taped to the walls with directional arrows and Trajectory Marketing Demo printed on them. They led to an office with an open door. There were guys with hair gelled, cut, buzzed, or combed into all different shapes wearing oversized suits and ties, the kind that’d only been worn to funerals. My hair was shaggy again and I was wearing my beat-up Christmas slippers, Nike sweatpants, and my Arc’teryx fleece riddled with cigarette burns like I was some weird spotted animal. I just wanted to make Dad and my stepmom Paula proud since I got put on academic suspension from college for the semester and was back living at home. That was why I found and circled an ad in the paper for a demonstration with Trajectory Marketing at 7PM Wednesday. It said I could make a grand a week. If I made a grand a week I wouldn’t have to steal or borrow money from Dad ever again.So I was at the office building in SoNo. I didn’t get high before because I wanted to do right. Be good. Get a job. Turn my life around. I walked to a table. There were two dozen boxes of donuts from Dunk’s. I chose a double chocolate frosted donut, took a seat, and ate the donut. The windows of the office looked out onto The Sound. The sunset was Pepto Bismal pink and DayQuil orange. A beautiful omen. I swear to God the Gladiator soundtrack was playing softly from somewhere. Donuts, over-the-counter omen sunsets, the prospect of fortune. Sometimes life spoils us.The guy in charge had a chinstrap that looked like it was holding his hair on his head. Chinstrap Man told everyone to take a seat. We sat down and got quiet. He pushed a button on the stereo on his desk. The Gladiator soundtrack stopped playing softly in the background, confirming that it really was playing. Chinstrap Man smiled. He shook a set of keys in front of us once we all sat down and he smiled some more.“Do you know what these are?” Chinstrap Man asked us.“Keys?” someone said.“Not just any keys.” Chinstrap Man jingled them around like we were a bunch of babies fascinated by them. “Keys, to an M3.”I couldn’t tell what kind of keys they were. They were definitely keys though.“They could be yours,” he told to us. “If you hustle the way I hustle, you can have keys to an M3 too.”Some of the guys sitting around smiled and whispered to each other, excited about the possibility of M3s.“What do you fellas know about knives?” Chinstrap Man asked us.“They cut stuff,” someone said.“Not all knives cut stuff with surgical precision though.” Chinstrap Man clasped his hands together.The kid next to me was picking his nose. He picked it and smiled when he was supposed to smile while Chinstrap Man said things we were supposed to smile at. I smiled at the things we were supposed to smile at too, but also watched the guy picking his nose until Chinstrap Man took a cutting board out from under a tableclothed table. He dumped a bunch of quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies on the table. He took out a knife block full of knives and a Stop & Shop bag full of fruits and vegetables.“What do you know about SliceWorks knives?” he asked us.“They’re the best around,” someone said.“Ding, ding, ding. What’s your name, young man?” Chinstrap Man asked him.“Michael,” the guy said.“Michael, you’re a smart man.” Chinstrap Man threw Michael a quarter. Then he threw Michael a penny and motioned for him to go up there.“Take these scissors and cut that penny in half. Put the quarter in your pocket. Consider it a down payment on that M3 you’re gonna be driving.” Chinstrap Man handed Michael a pair of scissors from the knife block.Michael smiled a nervous smile while he was trying to do it, but the scissors cut the penny right in half. Did that shit for him. Michael even said it. “They did that shit for me.”Chinstrap Man high-fived Michael. Some people clapped. I clapped a little too. I watched the dude picking his nose again until he finally got what he was digging for. He tasted it and it must’ve not tasted the way it was supposed to taste because he made a frown and pushed the booger onto the back of the seat in front of him. At that point, I figured it might be okay to be high in the Trajectory Marketing demo. I walked to the bathroom, took the green time-release coating off the OC 80 so all the time was mine, crushed the bone white pill and a little piece of a Xanax bar up on the toilet paper dispenser, snorted it, and walked back into the demo. It was the last 80 I was gonna do. It was always the last 80. All of them. The first. Second. Hundredth. However many. They were all the last. In the twelve step meetings I quit going to, they say one is too many and a thousand is never enough and they say addiction is a progressive disease. It eats me up inside to know they might know me better than I know myself.I sat back down in the demo and I smiled. Everything was gonna be alright. Chinstrap Man was telling us how we’d be selling knives to family and friends on commission. No hourly rate. I pictured myself in Aunt Deb’s apartment in Cornwall, sitting at her dining room table with the knife block on display and a pile of change I’d cut to smithereens while she chain-smoked Marlboro Lights and ashed into a carnival glass ashtray filled with hundreds of butts and she’d tell me in her cigarette-carved voice I didn’t need to do any of that sales pitch bullshit and she’d buy whatever her dear nephew was selling.I thought about all the Oxys I’d be doing in my M3. The last Oxys. I picked at this scab that had once been a pimple long ago, but had scabbed over a few times. I picked at it and smiled and chuckled when everyone smiled and chuckled at Chinstrap Man even though I wasn’t listening to a word he was saying anymore. Chinstrap Man hit play on a stereo. The song by “Bodies” by Drowning Pool started. The lead singer screamed and heavy metal guitars screeched. Chinstrap Man sliced tomatoes, celery stalks, and heads of lettuce with incredible speed. Debris flew everywhere. The chain from his chain wallet swung back and forth against his dress slacks as he chopped. People cheered. I smiled and laughed, enjoying it like everyone else. I must’ve nodded because when I came to, Chinstrap Man was standing in front of me with a meat cleaver in his hand. Drowning Pool had been turned down so it was only playing lightly. Everyone was turned around staring at me.“Are we boring you?” Chinstrap Man said to me. “Buddy, your face is bleeding.”He held the shiny meat cleaver up to my face so I could see myself. I was bleeding a long thin streak of blood from my forehead down to my chin from the opened scab. I also had chocolate frosting on the corners of my mouth.“Why don’t you go get cleaned up and catch us at the next demo in April?” He gave me a little pat on the shoulder and left his hand there with a tightening grip like he was ready to escort me out if needed.Everyone stared at me. The guy who had been picking his nose was back to picking his nose while staring at me too. I got up and walked to the door. Chinstrap Man restarted the Drowning Pool song as I walked out.On the drive home, I pretended I was Chinstrap Man. I morphed into him like it was The Matrix. His chinstrap became mine. Dad’s Subaru Forrester became a BMW M3 with a forest of New Car Scent Little Trees dangling from the rearview. Standard turned to stick. I suddenly knew how to drive stick. The chain from my chain wallet rested on the driver’s seat. I hit a hundred on a straightaway on I-95 until the steering wheel shook and I remembered I was in the Forrester. I took my hands off the wheel, outstretching my arms like I was Jesus on the cross. In April, I would rise from the dead. In April, I’d turn my life around. In April, I’d call Mom and  my stepmom Pat who kicked me out of their house senior year of high school and I’d tell them I had a business proposition for them and crunch across their shell driveway with the knife block cradled in my arms. In April, I’d show them my M3, my chinstrap, my chain wallet full of cash. In April, I’d show them the surgical precision of the blades. The ease at which I could cut up a big old pile of change.
Fiction

FLORIDA MAN by Bridget Adams

THE MAN SITTING ON MY COUCH HAS OBTAINED HIS ALLIGATOR HARVEST PERMITYes, it’s true! We haven’t fucked yet but soon you’ll be crouched in the greased dark of a velvet panhandle midnight, your rifle pointed squarely in the center of an alligator’s long flat head, between the ridges of its eyes. The animal’s body looks like a topographic map, bone-hard hills and valleys laid over with skin too tough for bullets at anything but close range. “Alligators are really hard to kill,” you say, and I want to give the curve of your ear one long lick as you turn your face from mine. We might need this to stay metaphorical. Someone could get hurt. But look at your baby face. There’s something else there, soft, like a creamy reptilian underbelly, sweetly speckled. It’s alligators all the way down, isn’t it? So, it’s too easy but I’ll say it anyway—this is an old story, the oldest, and maybe I’ve run out of ways to describe it with something lighter than brute force: Pull out my insides, stuff me, hang me up on your wall. I’ll be your prize carcass. MY FIRST PAINTING!I seduced you the first time with an erotic cartoon of Fred Flintstone and I’m not ready to stop. An Epstein documentary played soft and low on the TV, and I used red crayon on an envelope from the hospital. Fred’s penis was deformed because I’m not a very good artist. You didn’t mind. Here, now, acrylics have been splashed, washed out with water, the blue of the sky and the sea erratic and changing as I ran out of paint on my brush. I say this is you and me and you look hard and say, “I see it! I see us!” And you do. Two tiny flecks of paint, dark spots in the vast, uneven ocean. What you can’t see is us touching each other under the water in the painting, like we did in real life. A storm was coming in from the east that day, fat slate clouds on a mission, steady and sure. CHANCEL LAMPWe are on Floor Bed, which is all of the pillows on the couch dragged to the floor so we can really stretch out, roll around, get lazy for hours. On Floor Bed, we do everything—we make each other laugh there, we fuck there, we wipe taco innards from each other’s lips there. “Thank you for letting me be myself,” you say. No one has ever said a sentence like that to me in my life–trimeter, lilting—is it dactylic, even, in gratitude? I think about the light at church that couldn’t go out and how I am in love with you and I don’t need to tell you. I’m lit up whether anyone can see it or not.  OKAY, BUT—BUT,I do tell you I love you. You say it back. Nothing like this has ever happened to me. I’m way too old for this! It’s always been: what else do you call having a lot of sex and struggling with the ugly little tumor your personalities make together and going out to dinner most nights? But I didn’t know the tenderness I could feel like a toothache when I watch you do ordinary things, like imperfectly wrap the perfect, longed-for gift or run your fingers through your hair as you introduce your mother or crouch down in the weeds and spray something illegal to fry the roaches, thick as thumbs, that pool at the stone base of my apartment—and how long are we happy? By which I mean: how long are we walking through the pines with sunlight on our shoulders, how long are we frying potatoes in olive oil and rosemary and putting on mud masks from the same tub before bed, how long are we knotted together at the knees and reading books in that little apartment, Spanish Moss blowing greenly and slick against the window? NOT LONG ENOUGHWe sit crying on a park bench. A woman stops in front of us. She has short white hair and complex lines of embroidery run around the collar of her electric blue tunic. A cross, starkly bodiless, hangs heavy and wooden between her breasts. She tells us to open our hands. Dumb and obedient in our suffering, we do, and she throws her fist back, then pitches it forward, over and over. “I’m throwing blessings,” she says. My heart is yelping like a kicked dog! HOW IS THE PIECE OF MY HEART?Is she in your pocket, is she in your wallet, do you leave her on a shelf when you go out? Do you forget about her? Do you bury her out back under the magnolia tree? When you open the fridge and she’s back again, drinking your Topo Chico, are you mad? Do you throw her in the trash with the matching mugs you bought us? When you can’t get rid of her, do you take her out to breakfast? Do you put little black sunglasses and a little black beanie on her because it’s sunny but cold? Do you hold her hand and watch the wood storks crowd at the lakeshore? Do you blow raspberries above her belly button? Do you nap together? When she has bad dreams do you put her head in your lap? Do you cry for the first time in years, curled against her, while she rubs your back? Do you pick her up and put her on the counter and kiss her? Do you tell her you’re afraid and you don’t know what you’re doing? Does she know that the future is a black hole and it will swallow you? When you reach for your gun in the night, do you point it at her? Do you tell her you’re leaving—to New York, to West Africa, to Ukraine? When you fuck other women do you crush her beneath your bodies because she won’t shut the fuck up? And do you think you’ll ever give her back?  MEAT/HEADA hemiplegic migraine lays me down in the early hours of the afternoon, insistent and urgent as you once were. Close the blinds. I want to see you naked. You always spoke like the desire almost hurt and there is hurt in me now and numbness spreads through the fingers of my left hand making them useless, one by one. At the very end of us you slept on the bed against the window and bullets of rain grayed the palms through the glass. You breathed steady and I made tea and read. If I try to read now the oil slick of pain above my eye will become a house fire. When it was time to go to the party, I woke you and you started, your body coiled and dewy with hangover sweat. And now the numbness reaches my wrist, and no frantic shaking brings the feeling back. I understood you then and I understand you now—the way that history acted on us, the shock of a fist to the gut—and anyway you are elsewhere and transformed, all meat. But there were days when the sun came in through the blinds and made us golden, when we made love after the protest, when we thought we might change the world because we were changing each other. So what if now I’m alone and half of me can’t feel a thing and the other half is delirious, effulgent, with pain? I can blind myself with a pillow, raise my hands, throw the sheet off and expose a breast. I can say the price is fair. AND LIKE GOD, I’LL FORGIVE YOU TOOI go for walks. A man with a red beard makes me laugh and takes me on bike rides through the forest. We weave down the trail, now in shadow, now in light. The sun sets on the long drive to the airport and I marvel at the stretch of wildflowers—yellow, blue, purple—carpeting the median strip. I say little prayers at night and two gifts you’ve never seen—a hanging wooden heron and a voluptuous philodendron—watch over me in my bed, the bed that you’re not in. Red snapper blackens in a pan and the sound of a distant saxophone, played poorly, haltingly, drifts into my kitchen. I read. I write. I work. I make plans. I get things I’ve always wanted. And maybe I’ve seen you for the very last time, your back in a black cotton t-shirt moving farther and farther away into the haze of a wet north Florida winter until you could have been anyone. Or maybe one day when the azaleas again blaze hot pink outside my front door, you’ll knock. And like God I’ll say: Come on in, prodigal, lover boy, mercenary, imp. Sit down. What a long road you took. Let me take off your boots. You talk. I’ll listen.
Interviews & Reviews

DAVE FITZGERALD RECOMMENDS: Mike Corrao’s ‘Smut-Maker’ and Mike Kleine’s ‘Third World Magicks’

I was cruising down I-70 aimed at Lawrence, Kansas when I got the email offering me a regular feature here at X-R-A-Y – part of a new “Recommends” series inviting me to draw on the deep backlog of reviews I’d already contributed to Goodreads, and pair them with new pieces exclusive to this site. Naturally I was flattered, and accepted right away from my fake-fancy hotel in the heart of the KU campus, already thinking about the pleasant symmetry of the timing. That is, I was in Kansas for the Inside the Castle 10th anniversary celebration, and as fate would have it, the inaugural title I’d attempted to write about back when I first started doing this some three years ago, was none other than Mike Corrao’s Smut-Maker from that very same small press. And as you’ll see from the next two paragraphs, which comprise that original review in its entirety, I do very much mean “attempted to.”I can't say with certainty that I read every single word of Smut-Maker, but it wasn't for lack of trying. This is not a work that you absorb so much as one that you defeat. With text that squirms across the page in constantly shifting sizes, configurations, and directions, against power-clashing, technicolored background combinations that often seem chosen intentionally to make the eyes bleed, this psychotic, psychedelic drama demands you fight for every page turn. Though it bills itself as a play in 72 acts, and all of the dialogue is dutifully bracketed by quotation marks, it's hard to imagine how it would be performed save by a group of maybe a half-dozen or so actors on a bare stage talking over each other all at once (just to be clear, I would absolutely go see this play). The best I can do for potential touchstones would be to liken it to the nauseating, spiraling, stream-of-altered-consciousness passages in Hubert Selby, tossed into a centrifuge with some of Mark Z. Danielewski's wilder formalist notions – but even that description feels forced.There are characters – I'm pretty sure – or at least references to names that could be characters. The titular Smut-Maker, for one, as well as a number of "Boys" who seem to be involved in various violent and/or sexual relations with one another. Wittgenstein, Bolaño, Sun Ra, detectives, and the author himself come in and out of focus as well. It's pretty much impossible to parse, but parsing it's not really the point. If you swim around in it long enough, little snippets of comedy and pathos, absurdity and wisdom, will start to bob to the surface around you, and by the time you're done, you may well want to flip right back to the beginning and start again. For this is also a work you could read 100 times and still never read the same way twice – like a Choose Your Own Adventure through Hell, where no matter what page you keep your finger on, you’re never getting out alive.I don’t mind telling you, I had no idea what I was getting into with this book. If memory serves, I bought it because it sounded sexy and it was on some kind of sale – but looking back now, I’m not sure I could have chosen a more perfect entrée into both the Inside the Castle oeuvre, or to my review practice in general. Smut-Maker was so emphatically different from any other book I’d read up to that point (that House of Leaves comp is downright mortifying to me now), that I might well mark it as a personal milestone – an indelible leap forward in my understanding of what books can do and be. Inside the Castle honcho John Trefry talks a lot about the importance of texts as physical objects, and as I reread Smut-Maker last week by the light of my office window, watching the garish ombré of each page ripple and morph between hues whenever the sun slipped in or out of a passing cloud, listening to my own brain chemistry crackle and fizz as it interacted with Corrao’s bubbling phraseological soup – “the rhizomatic labyrinth of mirrored buildings”; “subways looped into a Mobius strip”; “the world is not the same as it was a month ago”; “I’d rather just not know what I’m looking at” – I felt like I was finally starting to understand what that means.Of course, Trefry and Corrao would both be quick to affirm what I surmised three years ago – that “understanding” is not the point of reading Smut-Maker, or most any of the now-50-strong corpus published under Inside the Castle’s black diamond sigil; that anyone who does the work of engaging with such “experimental” texts (a reductive catchall term they both find frustrating and tend to avoid) will inevitably end up reading and interpreting them differently, and that the very premise of “understanding” them is a wrongheaded approach (indeed, they both said as much during a roundtable discussion on Joe Bielecki’s indispensable indie lit podcast Writing the Rapids, which I listened to en route to the event). These books are decidedly not puzzles to be solved, but rather environments in which to play.Also part of that illuminating episode was Inside the Castle regular Mike Kleine, who I had the pleasure of meeting in Lawrence, and whose short novel Third World Magicks acts as something of an ideal counterweight to Corrao’s psychochromatics. It’s easily the most straightforward narrative I’ve encountered among the now-ten Inside the Castle titles I’ve read, and yet every bit as much in tune with the press’s enigmatic ethos.Third World Magicks is what you might call deceptively simple. Kleine’s prose zips along with the matter-of-fact ratatat of technical writing or court reporting, whether he’s describing the work lives of indie music journalists in part one, or island-dwelling construction cultists in part two (these two parts are, somewhat mysteriously, separated by an author-mandated two-week waiting period). Without giving too much away – and truly, much of the pleasure of reading Third World Magicks is derived from its inveigling sense of mystery – I think it’s fair to describe it as being about both the conversation, and the conflict between language and art, and the perhaps inherent impossibility of expressing either one via the other. It evokes nothing quite so much as that old, unsourceable quotation – “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” – stretching that adage to its outermost shores from one end, before stranding it atop its innermost promontory at the other.Speaking as someone who put in a solid and committed three years as a music journalist for my local alt-weekly (shouts to Athens’ Flagpole Magazine), regularly attending two and three shows a week, transcribing dozens of staticky interviews conducted on my Motorola flip-phone, and reviewing countless albums for what worked out to, on average, about $25 a week plus cover charges and the occasional free drink, believe me when I say that Kleine’s depiction of the gig is hilariously well-realized. From working on “an exhaustive 100 songs of the decade list” and describing an artist’s live set as “truly something to experience before you die,” to the competitive name-dropping and the militant resistance to being impressed, or even surprised by new music for fear of being seen as not in the know, the trials and tribulations of blank zizou hit as hard as an Abul Mogard Farfisa drone, such that by the time she finds herself having a full-on, out-of-body, psychedelic experience, transcending time and space deep in the balm of that (phenomenal, look him up) artist’s “loud and enormous” sound, the idea of her translating her thoughts to paper feels completely absurd – an absurdity that is, necessarily, mirrored in Kleine’s own ekphrastic rendering of her mind’s ear.It’s that interior disconnect that Third World Magicks gets at most effectively, with regards to both its music writers in part one, and the dedicated, communal followers of black magician in part two (I’ve made a conscious decision to say as little about part two as possible here – much like the white cube at its center, it’s not particularly useful to describe – but rest assured it is worth that two-week wait). I recalled strongly my own eventual burnout with music writing – the creeping dissatisfaction I felt as I tried to bridge that last sliver of impassable distance between the art made by others, and my own latent creative impulse; to close the gap between all our lonely, disparate consciousnesses and somehow express my true self. blank zizou goes so far as to imagine making her own impossible music whilst drifting spaghettified inside of Abul Mogard’s, but no matter how many shows you write about, it’s still not the same as being in the band. And no matter how much brilliant art you make, it’s still not the same as telling people exactly how you feel. I could sit here and write whole essays about similar experiences I’ve had, standing in a packed house for hours with my eyes closed while fiery pillars of Fennesz or cosmic waves of Sunn O))) swept me up into the great beyond. But until you hear it yourself, you won’t know. And even when you do, it won’t be the same. Not for you. Not for anyone.I would estimate that for most people, each half of Third World Magicks could be read comfortably in under an hour, but fighting that impulse at the sentence level are a number of typographical tics (no capital letters, the use of ampersands in place of the letters “and” even when they appear within other words, a book-long commitment to vestigial k’s like the one in the titular Magicks) as well as a parade of ludicrous character names and a handful of science terms that, even upon looking them up, you may still not possess the tools to fully grasp (I certainly didn’t). With all these deliberately cryptic artistic choices pinging your brain like a cell tower, conspiring in their refusal to let you settle into complacency, the resultant sensation is akin to one of those NBA drills where a player attempts to get to his spots and get up his shots while two or three coaches throw extra basketballs at him without warning. Every time you think you’re in a rhythm with Third World Magicks, Kleine tosses a reverse footnote at your head or a sheet of pointillist punctuation at your ribs and makes you readjust on the fly. He keeps you moving, and it’s a joy to be moved.The Inside the Castle 10th anniversary was an oft-indescribable joy as well. Twenty-some-odd people from all walks of literary life – writers, reviewers, teachers, translators, booksellers, avid fans, local friends, and a couple of very cute cats – gathered in an unfinished little barn on the prairie for two days of readings and electronic noise. I expected to be the furthest traveler, coming all the way from Georgia, but visitors from Massachusetts, and Idaho at least gave me a run for my money – a testament to the cult-like, summoning gravity of Trefry’s vision. The chiggers were fierce. The lightning was multipronged and cycloramic. The breakfast-for-dinner was better than anything I saw at my fake-fancy hotel. But more than that, everyone was simply lovely – kind, and open, and thrilled to be there meeting other weirdos like themselves – putting names to faces – bridging our gaps. I wouldn’t claim to “understand” everything I heard across that magical weekend - from the warpfield poetics of Candace Wuehle and Madison McCartha to the generative philosophical would-you-rathers of Kyle Booten to the bleeding edged linguistic produnovas of Grant Maierhofer and Trefry himself - but I felt honored and privileged to hear every bit of it, and to carry it home with me, and to now pass it along to you. Compared to my time in the music writing trenches, I definitely felt like I’d found some of that connection that evaded me during all those mind-blowing shows I’d covered alone. When enough writers get together to share in their work, you all start to feel like part of the band. Even criticism can elevate toward the realms of art.Trefry himself is an ardent supporter of book reviewing as not only a service to the small press community, but as a vital part of any writing practice, as evidenced by quotes like “nothing has clarified my intentions and expectations about literature more,” “everyone should do it,” and my personal favorite, “if you’re writing a book review as though it’s not your work, you’re doing it wrong.” I’ve tried to approach my reviews with this level of care since that first, labored attempt to describe Mike Corrao’s Smut-Maker to the world, and Trefry and Kleine have likewise put their money where their mouths are with Third World Magicks, going so far as to include several reviews of the book at the end of the narrative proper, almost as a kind of ellipsis – a nod to the ongoing discourse in which Inside the Castle and its readers are mindfully participating. Take it from someone who knows. Indie rock is doing just fine. But indie lit still needs all the reviews it can get.In wrapping up this edition of X-R-A-Y Recommends, allow me to paraphrase a popular conceit from my music writing days: these guys are your favorite writer’s favorite writers. Corrao, Kleine, and Trefry may never be bestsellers, but they’ve got cred coming out of their ears. They write pareidolic. They write klangfarbenmelodie. And I love their work for the same reasons I still seek out strange and unfamiliar music every day – for the pleasure of new words, new ideas, new ways of feeling and being surprised. As strange and beguiling as Inside the Castle texts can be, they are, in fact, for everyone. Enjoying them is not about being smart enough to figure them out, but rather finding curiosity and excitement in the incomplete spaces of your own unknowing; letting them live, and breathe, and work on you, quite possibly for the rest of your life; coming back to them again and again, with the understanding that they’re no more static than you are; that they’ll change right along with you, and the chemicals in your brain, and the light outside your window; that no matter how many times you read them, they’ll still be different every time.
Fiction

PATATINA by Rosalind Margulies

My boss is a dog and today is the dog’s birthday.Okay, not really. I like to say that my boss is a dog, but it’s just one of those things you say to make it easier, you know? But it is her birthday.The dog’s name is Patatina, which is Italian for little potato. The dog’s owners, Mr. and Mrs. Bianchi, are Italian. I’m from India or at least my grandparents are. And Patatina is a Papillon.(Patatina can also mean pussy. In case you were wondering.)Here: Lake Oswego, 15 minutes from downtown Portland but several income brackets removed. Me in my shitbox 1998 Volvo with a busted window and no license plate because it keeps failing the Oregon emissions test; I park around the back of the garage of the Bianchi’s nine-bedroom mansion so none of the neighbors get scared by my car. Pat is in the garage. She does a few happy loops when she sees me, leaving a circular trail of piss in her wake. It’s nice to have someone who’s always excited to see you.My job, basically, is to hang out with Patatina. Mr. and Mrs. Bianchi are too rich and busy to watch her – he owns a firm that creates value for shareholders and she runs a blog on how to practice yoga in a God-honoring way – and Patatina is too much of a free spirit/biter for doggy daycare so I get twelve dollars an hour to play dog nanny. Take her for walks, you know, throw the ball for her, sit on the couch with her and cuddle, pick up her shit. Sometimes when I’m walking Patatina next to a busy street and she shits and I have to pick it up, I imagine that I’m in one of the cars passing by and I’m seeing something about myself that I can’t from the inside, only I have to imagine what it is.Pat isn’t really my boss. I guess we’re more like coworkers. I use a treat to lure Patatina into the back of my car. She knows the routine and settles right in and starts gnawing on the seatbelt. I put the address in Waze even though I mostly know where I’m going. Halfway there, I get an ad for Burger King; “Buy A Bacon Cheeseburger,” it instructs me, and covers the map so I miss my turn. At red lights, I watch Patatina in the rearview mirror to make sure she isn’t eating my carpet or seizing or anything. She’s cute, I guess, the way a stuffed animal is. She has those plumey Papillon ears that little kids love to touch without asking. She’s either descended from four generations of Sicilian show dogs, or a rescue, depending on whether it’s someone from the Women’s Ministry or the Animal Protection Alliance asking Mrs. Bianchi. Today she’s four years old.Patatina, not Mrs. Bianchi.While the groomer washes Patatina, I wander through the Target next door. I get a text from Xiaowei: good morning baby 🙂 and then three red hearts. I send her back four red hearts then use Mrs. Bianchi’s credit card to buy trail mix for me and a pack of doggy salmon chews for her. Patatina, not Mrs. Bianchi.When I pick Patatina up she has pink bows clipped to both her ears. “For her birthday,” says the groomer, scratching Pat on the under part of her chin. Pat closes her eyes and puts on a face that suggests she’s approaching climax and the groomer says aww. I give her a salmon chew and load Patatina back into my car. Pat’s party isn’t until four, which means we have a couple hours to kill. Usually I’d take her to the dog park or for a walk by the river, but Mrs. Bianchi wants her pretty and good-smelling for the party so I don’t want to risk getting her dirty. Instead, we kill time at an artisan pet store. A man in a dirty black sweatshirt with a garbage bag slung over one shoulder paces back and forth in front on the sidewalk screaming garbled obscenities at me and Pat but I ignore him. Inside, I examine bags of dry dog food that cost more per pound than the chicken I buy at Safeway and ask the clerk if they sell hamsters. The clerk, an attractive green-haired person, shakes their head.“We don’t sell any live animals,” they say. “It’s inhumane.” Outside, the man has begun repeatedly slamming his head into the glass wall of the store with a dull thung, thung, thung like a mallet on a held gong. “Okay,” I say to the cashier, disappointed. I wanted to look at hamsters. The cashier tells Patatina to sit and gives her a milk bone even though she doesn’t. Patatina’s birthday party is nautical themed though the nearest ocean is hundreds of miles away and I don’t think she’s ever so much as shit on a seashell. The party was gonna be an intimate thing, Mrs. Bianchi told me, real piccolo affair, just the family and the neighbors and about three dozen of Patatina’s closest well-wishers. Two white tents have been set up in the Bianchi’s sloping lake-side backyard and silent caterers mill around slinging canapes. I accept a beetroot and walnut blini shaped like a dog bone. I can’t relax, though; I’m on duty. This party is a warzone and my weapon is a metal dish. The Bianchis didn’t get shortlisted for the 2023 Lake Oswego Excellence in Lawn Care Award by accident; whenever I see Patatina squat, it’s my sworn duty to get the dish under her and catch whatever excrement emerges before it can hit the ground. If I miss, the consequences to both the Bianchi’s Bermudagrass and my time-and-a-half party pay could be dire.Navy SEALs aren’t under this much pressure.After my fourth trip inside to flush I return outside to find Patatina’s head vanished into my backpack to the general amusement of the guests. I yank her back by the collar and find that she’s gotten into the trail mix. Cashews and raisins and M&Ms rain from her jaws and she tilts her head back like a duck, snapping her teeth as she tries to funnel as much gorp down her gullet as possible. “Stupid fucking dog,” I mutter. Patatina licks me on the nose and I get a whiff of macadamia nut. One of the caterers laughs at me. A little later on, Mrs. Bianchi finds me to say hi. “Dhivya,” she purrs. She wraps me in a hug and kisses me on both cheeks, taking care to avoid the dish in my hand. Mrs. Bianchi is tall and old-lady fit, sinewy and tan like a piece of beef jerky. She’s in company mode, which means she’s actually talking to me and also about 500% more Italian than usual. Mrs. Bianchi talks like Mario whenever her friends come around. She used to hide her accent until Mrs. Tyndall, the wife of some retired Blazers benchwarmer, said she thought it made her sound continental and now Mrs. Bianchi rolls her Rs like politicians roll logs and talks about her childhood spent stamping grapes in Genoa every chance she can get. “I hope-a Patatina didn’t give you too much-a trouble,” she says. “Oh, you know Pat,” I say vaguely and she laughs like I said something very funny, like, yeah, I do know Pat, that darn dog, always getting up to capers etc.By six p.m., Patatina has wearied of begging trophy wives for hors d'oeuvres and retired inside so I am honorably discharged and Venmoed $150 for my service. Inspired by both the knowledge that Xiaowei is at home waiting for me and the three glasses of champagne I snuck from the party, I treat red lights like stop signs and make it home in record time. Xiaowei and I share a studio apartment downtown above a Korean restaurant. It can get cramped and it always smells like bibimbap but it’s air-conditioned and plus I don’t really mind the bibimbap thing. I find Xiaowei sitting on the sunken in part of our mattress, painting her toenails white. “Hi, baby,” she says. Xiaowei and I have been dating for two years. She has a tattoo of a heart next to her eye and kind of a lot of lip filler but I like the way it looks. I tell her about the party and when her toenails are dry we have sex, just the one time, because she has work soon and doesn’t want to get sweaty.Xiaowei is the first girl I’ve ever been sure I loved.When we’re done, I eat an edible and lounge in bed and scroll through Twitter and watch Xiaowei put on her work makeup.“I might order Mexican for dinner,” I tell her.“Mm,” says Xiaowei, who’s doing her eyeliner and can’t move her face too much. That’s when I get the phone call. I roll my eyes when I see the caller ID and pick up on the third ring. “Hello Mrs. Bianchi,” I say.“Dhivya,” she says. Her accent is about as Italian as mine so  the party must have ended. “We just left the veterinary urgent care with Patatina.”“Oh shit,” I say. Xiaowei, now applying glue to a false eyelash, pauses. “Sorry, I mean, oh no, what happened?”“Patatina was throwing up and throwing up. And then she tried to stand up and she couldn’t.”“Oh shit,” I say again. “Jesus.” Xiaowei shoots me a look but I ignore her. “She gonna be okay?”“Well she has to stay overnight but the vet thinks yes,” says Mrs. Bianchi. “It was lucky, Marco went to get a hammer from the garage and noticed Patatina wasn’t well. The vet says it’s lucky we got her here so soon.”“Thank God,” I say. Xiaowei relaxes, turns back to the mirror, raises the eyelash to her eye and begins to fit it in place. “Do they know what happened?”“Yes,” said Mrs. Bianchi. “They gave her some hydrogen peroxide to make her throw up and they found all sorts of things in her stomach. Raisins, macadamia nuts, chocolate candy. All sorts of things that are toxic to dogs. The vet said it was like she had eaten a bag of trail mix.”Ah.“And Clara Tyndall,” Mrs. Bianchi continues, not bothering to hide the anger in her voice anymore, “told me about a thing she saw at Patatina’s party. Do you know what?” I don’t but Mrs. Bianchi doesn’t wait for an answer. “She saw Patatina eating trail mix out of your backpack while you were not watching her although you were being paid to do just that. And she also said she saw you drinking a glass of champagne while, again, on the clock.”My eyes are focused on Xiaowei, who’s moved on to her other eye. She dabs eyelash glue on the band of the lash with the practiced hand of an Old Master.“Well? Do you have anything to say to that?” Mrs. Bianchi asks me. “I had three glasses of champagne. Not one.”“Hilarious,” she says, and then tells me I’m fired.I allot myself four days of feeling bad for/about myself and spend the first two stoned out of my mind playing video games and the second two wandering around in various parks, also stoned out of my mind. The fifth day I log into Indeed and apply for every job that pays at least fourteen dollars an hour and only get medium stoned.I apply as a gas station attendant, a line cook, a budtender, and a cashier at 7/11, and a bus driver even though I don’t have a CDL. Xiaowei tells me she might be able to get me an interview as a barback at her club but I don’t think she means it. I ask if she wants to get lunch with me at the food carts but she says no, she has to get waxed, so I drive down to the waterfront and eat my Chicken Nanban sando alone, sans the occasional passing biker and a probably homeless woman passed out on the grass a few yards from me. It’s a beautiful day; the sky is paint-sample blue and the Willamette River is dotted with sailboats. I’d figured that the one good part about getting fired would be that I’d be able to spend time with Xiaowei outside of the overlapping hour or two a day we got when I was done with work and she hadn’t started. But she seems pissed at me. I’m not sure why.I might know why.I guess I should tell you why.The CliffNotes version: the last time I was unemployed, I cheated on Xiaowei. It wasn’t that cut and dry, obviously. It wasn’t like I lost my job and thought to myself, Man, this sucks. I better go cheat on my girlfriend about it. It just kind of happened. I’d been working as a busser at a French restaurant downtown and failed a drug test. My manager, who I had done coke with during work hours on no less than a dozen separate occasions, told me that he was sorry but there was really nothing he could do. It didn’t matter if he meant it.Xiaowei, who I’d been with for about a year at that point, could tell I was feeling down so she invited me to come to work with her, which you might be thinking doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun but one thing I haven’t mentioned is that Xiaowei is a stripper. So going to work with her meant I got to watch my girlfriend and half a dozen other assorted hot girls waltz around naked, and occasionally she’d bring me a whiskey sour or give me a free lap dance. Basically I got to be the king of the strip club.Except that night there was this Seattle tech-bro type guy sitting right next to me who made it very clear that he was interested in Xiaowei. Four-fifties-in-her-G-string-before-she even-took-her-top-off kind of interested, I mean. So she did this thing where she kind of crouched down facing away from him and put her ass cheeks on his chest, and he was rubbing on her ass and handing her twenties, and I was pretending like I couldn’t see them even though like I said I was sitting right fucking next to him. And he was talking to her, saying all this stupid Pretty Woman shit, like I can get you out of here and You’re way too good for a place like this and Have you ever been to Vernazza? And actually it was that last one that got to me. Vernazza is this Michelin-star restaurant over in Southeast where they make the mozzarella right in front of you. Xiaowei’s always wanted to go but I’ve never had the money to take her. All I could think about was Xiaowei on a beautiful romantic candlelit date at Vernazza with this dickhead, both of them all dressed up, playing footsie under the table, maybe. And that was so much worse than her having her ass on his chest.By the end of the night I was majorly pissed in both the American and British senses and Xiaowei and I got into a shouting match on our walk to her car. I told her that she was basically as good as cheating on me and she told me that that “cheating” was what was paying our rent because, in case I forgot, I did not have a job currently, and I told her that if she cared that much about money we could drive over to the Motel 6 on 82nd and find her her own pimp right now. And Xiaowei told me to fuck off. And so I did.I fucked off to my buddy Max’s apartment for the night to cool down. And his friend was there, some red-headed girl with the kind of face you forget while you’re looking at it. And then Max went to bed.You know what happened next.When we were done, I went outside to smoke a cigarette and I called Xiaowei. I’d had a few more drinks after arriving at Max’s and I barely remember what I said, to be honest. I think I said I was sorry. I think I told her I didn’t know why I did it and that I didn’t know what I’d do if I lost her. I think I cried. I think I said something about Vernazza.I know I told her I loved her.Which wasn’t a big deal in and of itself, honestly. I’d been telling Xiaowei I loved her for a couple months by that point.That was just the first time I meant it.I got the job watching Patatina a week and a half later, which I think went a long way toward smoothing things over with Xiaowei, though it took a long time for her to trust me again. At the interview, I told the Bianchi’s that I’d had a dog growing up, a ferrety terrier mix named Lucy. She was big and scruffy, like the kind of dog you’d see in an apocalypse movie digging through the trash after the bombs have gone off and everyone’s dead except Will Smith. When I was 15 I went on a run with her after she ate dinner and her stomach felt like a balloon afterward. The vet told us that it was gastric torsion and that surgery would be fifty-five hundred dollars, and there was a sixty percent chance it wouldn’t work anyway. I’d actually started to cry a little bit by the time I was done with the story which I was really embarrassed about at the time but ended up getting me the job. Mrs. Bianchi told me that she could tell that I really loved Lucy and that she hoped I’d love Patatina the same way. I return the other half of my sandwich to its box and walk up to the sleeping woman. She’s wearing a ratty pink pajama set and up close, I can see the tinfoil clutched in her hand even in sleep, like she’s so scared someone might try and take it from her it’s become instinct to hold onto it as tightly as possible at all times. I watch her chest until I’m satisfied she’s breathing, then leave the sandwich box next to her and walk back to my car.  It’s nearly one p.m. but the call wakes me up; I’ve begun adapting to Xiaowei’s schedule, which means late nights and later mornings. Early afternoons, really.“Turn that off,” Xiaowei groans from next to me.“It’s not an alarm,” I mumble, sitting up to accept the call. “Hello?”“We have a bit of a situation,” says Mrs. Bianchi without preamble.I yawn. “You fired me,” I remind her. “I know,” Mrs. Bianchi says, and I can picture her rolling her eyes. A strict botox regimen keeps most of her face petrified so this ordinary movement becomes extraordinary on her; it’s like watching a whirlpool in a still lake. “I know, and this would just be a one-off, one-day thing. But we could use you. We could use your discretion. Five hundred dollars?”“For just one day?” “Yes.”I tilt my head from side to side until my neck cracks. “Six-fifty?”Mrs. Bianchi sighs.By the time I’ve gotten dressed and pulled up to the Bianchi’s house, it’s two. I park behind the garage like always and head into the house, an enormous structure of white squares that resembles an angular cloud. The main floor is basically one enormous room, shiny white kitchen and living room and dining room all in one. Patatina is curled up on a leather ottoman but scrambles up when she sees me and runs in circles around my feet, yipping and pissing all the while. Something’s definitely up; neither of us is usually allowed in the house.Ms. Bianchi stands by a polished marble island in the kitchen sector. She’s dressed in a mauve-colored lounge set and holds one hand to her head like she’s nursing a headache. “Hello Dhivya,” she says.“Hello Mrs. Bianchi,” I say, trying to sound dignified, which is difficult while fielding an eight-pound dog who seems to want to lick every inch of your sneakers. I get down on one knee like I’m proposing and Patatina hops up so her front paws are on my bent knee and her face is almost level with mine. Her tongue is out in an expression of vacant ecstasy; I scratch her behind the ears.Mrs. Bianchi sighs. “So, you know Big Sexy,” she says, which would be an incomprehensible question if I didn’t know Big Sexy.“Of course,” I say. Big Sexy is the terrible chihuahua owned by Josh, the terrible crypto-zillionaire California transplant who lives next door to the Bianchis. He’s chased off so many Amazon delivery drivers that Jeff Bezos probably knows him by name. He’s got absolutely no training and free run of the neighborhood. Big Sexy, not Josh.Actually, Josh too.“Well, it seems Patatina has also become acquainted with Big Sexy recently,” says Mrs. Bianchi, grimacing. She gestures towards Pat, who’s still perched on my knee. I notice now that there’s a new roundness to her stomach, a slight distension of her nipples. Pat wags her tail. Maybe she can tell we’re talking about her. “And Patatina,” Mrs. Bianchi continues, “cannot have puppies. I am secretary of the Portland branch of the Animal Protection Agency. I hosted the Spay and Neuter banquet last year. I gave a speech on the importance of pet population control. And I absolutely cannot be seen taking her to get a — a late-term spay. I am a chairwoman of the Lake Oswego Women's Ministry. I co-chaired the Northwest Oregon Pro-Life Dance-A-Thon just last week. They’d eviscerate me.” “Over a dog abortion?”“Late-term spay,” she snaps. “And yes. Last year it came to light that Naomi Zweig’s Persian Max was actually a Maxine, but by that time she was already a month along. Clara Tyndall saw her taking her to the vet, and…” Mrs. Bianchi shakes her head. “I still have nightmares about the Facebook callout posts,” she says. She looks so miserable that it’s hard not to feel bad for her but I manage anyway.“So that’s why we need you,” Mrs. Bianchi continues. “I’ve gotten the appointment with the vet all set up, and everything is paid for. You just need to bring her in, sit in the waiting room while they do the operation, and then bring her back here. Two hours, max.”Patatina licks me on the nose.I put the vet’s address into Waze even though I mostly know where I’m going. Halfway there, I get an ad for Burger King. “Buy Two Bacon Cheeseburgers,” it instructs me. The ad covers the map but I make my turn anyway. I get a text from Xiaowei: Goodluck with the dog abortion lol. See you tn. Xiaowei’s got a rare night off and has agreed to spend the evening hanging out. Nothing crazy, just takeout and maybe a movie. Completely unremarkable except it’s the first time she’s agreed to spend any real time with me in the two weeks since I lost my job. At a red light, I heart react her message and send back Can’t wait! I park in front of the vet's office and bring in Patatina, who’s excitedly wriggling at the end of her leash like a landed fish.I don’t know if she’s too dumb to know that she’s at the vet or if she does and she’s too dumb to care. The receptionist calls Pat’s name and we follow her through the door behind the front desk into an examination room. It’s dingy and smells like cat. The vet, a woman with smooth gray hair pulled into a low ponytail, enters a moment after we do, clipboard in hand. Patatina rushes to greet her.“Yes, yes,” the vet says to Pat, who’s trying to climb up her leg. “Hello to you too.” She smiles at me. “You must be Patatina’s Mom,” she says. “Sure,” I say.The vet writes something on her clipboard. “And we’re getting spayed today, correct?” I dislike her use of “we” but say yes. The vet nods. “I do feel I should tell you,” she says. “We don’t commonly spay dogs while they’re pregnant because it can be very distressing for the dog. They don’t understand what happened, why they lost the litter—any of that. They can get very depressed.”“Ah,” I say. I twist one of my earrings.“I just wanted you to know that,” says the vet.I sit in the waiting room while they spay Patatina and page through a huge encyclopedia of horse breeds that looks like it's meant for children. The woman next to me holds a pet carrier in her lap. An electric green iguana sits coiled inside.“He has a cold,” the woman tells me. Her micro-bangs are slightly crooked. The iguana sneezes.An hour passes, then two. I go for a walk, skirting the large homeless encampment set up in a vacant lot next to the vet’s office. A handmade sign nailed to a tree among the tents reads “IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU’D BE HOME BY NOW.” I find a coffee shop and buy an Ube coconut milk latte that costs seven dollars, not including tip. I spill a little on my shirt and the stain it leaves is purple.At three hours, I start to worry. I return to the vet’s office and ask the receptionist if everything is alright, and she assures me it is.“Patatina’s out of surgery,” she tells me. “The vet just wants to observe her for a little while, make sure she comes out of the anesthesia okay.” I text Xiaowei and tell her I might be a little late, then return to my horse encyclopedia.A half hour later, just as I’ve finished admiring a picture of an Orlov Trotter, the door behind the desk opens and a young East Asian man in blue scrubs emerges with Patatina trailing on a leash behind him. She looks slightly dazed but still manages a slow tail wag when she sees me. The man hands me a manilla folder and a small bottle of pills.“She did great,” he tells me. “You’ll need to watch her pretty closely tonight, and tomorrow. Keep her up and moving around, if you can, to help her recover from the anesthesia, but don’t overexert her.” He gestures to the bottle of pills. “Half of one every three hours or so. She’ll be in a lot of pain. There’s more aftercare instructions in the folder.” I nod and lead Patatina out to my car. She’s moving much slower than usual and needs help climbing in. She sighs and stretches out on the seat and immediately closes her eyes; no seatbelt gnawing for her tonight. I get in the driver's seat, twist open the pill bottle, and dry swallow two. It’s nearly eight when I pull back into the Bianchi’s driveway and lead Patatina inside. I was just expecting Mrs. Bianchi, but Mr. Bianchi—a handsome man with hair that always looks like he’s just got back from the barber—is here too. He’s dressed in a well-tailored three-piece suit; Mrs. Bianchi wears an ankle-length silver dress, and her hair is arranged in a complicated updo. They’re obviously dressed to go out, or maybe they’re just getting in.“Hello, Dhivya,” says Mrs. Bianchi. Mr. Bianchi nods at me.“Hi,” I say. Patatina doesn’t move toward her owners, just stands next to me and yawns. I hand Mrs. Bianchi the folder and the bottle of pills. “The surgery went fine. All the information is in the folder. The vet said you need to watch her pretty closely tonight, but she should be okay after that.”“Oh,” says Mrs. Bianchi. “Well, we were actually just about to head out to the 2023 Lake Oswego Excellence in Lawn Care Awards Ceremony. So if you could stay for a few more hours, keep an eye on her, that would be great.”“I’m sorry,” I say. “I can’t.”“What?” says Mrs. Bianchi. “Why not?”“I have a, um, prior engagement.”Mrs. Bianchi stares at me for a moment, then turns and says something to her husband, too quietly for me to hear. He nods, and she turns back to me. “We’ll pay you one hundred extra,” Mrs. Bianchi says.I think about Xiaowei. “I really can’t.”Mrs. Bianchi purses her lips. “Three hundred extra. Nine-fifty total.”That’s my half of rent, and then some. I swallow. I put my hands in my pockets. I scrunch and unscrunch my toes in my shoes. I think about Xiaowei waiting for me, about our plans for tonight. Barely plans, really. Barely anything. I could take her out to dinner. I could use part of the money and take her out on a real date. I could even take her to Vernazza.“Yeah,” I say to her. “Okay.”Mrs. Bianchi, not Xiaowei. 
Interviews & Reviews

MIRACULOUS AND UNPREDICTABLE AND PERVERSE AND UNKNOWABLE: An Interview with Shannon Robinson by Rebecca Gransden

Primeval forces threaten to invade the worlds of Shannon Robinson’s short stories. Wild presences haunt suburbia, and folkloric figures surface as manifestations of deep-seated anxieties. For the collection The Ill-Fitting Skin (Press 53, 2024) Robinson presents normal life in all its complexity and confusion, where Mother Nature shows her claws and mythic creatures bare their teeth. This skin is pregnant with dread, imbued with the surreal, and, like a serpent, ready to shed and transform. I spoke to Shannon about the book. Rebecca Gransden: What is the story behind The Ill-Fitting Skin? When did you conceive the collection and how long has it been in gestation?Shannon Robinson: I love your choice of verb – “gestation”: it feels very apt, since many of my stories are concerned with motherhood and nurturing. I’ve been working on these stories for about twelve years, beginning with my MFA at Washington University in St. Louis. Over the years, I’ve placed work in literary magazines, but the more recent stories are exclusive to this collection. RG: The collection opens with “Origin Story,” an unsettling tale that deals with parenthood, childhood, and dark, primeval forces. The house featured in the story begins to experience a type of invasion, initially by something unknown. Why did you choose an ordinary family home for the setting of this story?SR: “Origin Story” is about a boy who turns into a wolf, and while lycanthropy is a fantastical phenomenon, I wanted there to be an underpinning of emotional authenticity. I think the best monster stories hit close to home: the darkness is scary because it’s inside us, or right beside us, implicating us. As parents, it can be so difficult for us to separate ourselves from our children, and this is especially fraught if the child is challenging or troubled or non-conforming. And sometimes the distance itself is the issue—that is, the parents’ anger and alienation. The original title for the story was “This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine,” which is something Prospero says of Caliban in The Tempest, but I eventually settled on “Origin Story,” because it had more directness, more punch … less lah-di-dah.   RG: Several of the stories address the meeting point of superstition and science. Lycanthropy is presented as possible metaphor for a medical diagnosis, and unusually fantastical births suggest underlying psychological unease. Yet, there is the impression that neither pathway leads to a comprehensive or satisfactory answer. What is your approach to the rational and the paranormal when it comes to your fiction?SR: I trust the rational, but that’s not to say I don’t think there are times when we recruit the rational to justify the non-rational, or that the non-rational does not leak in around the edges. The medical advancements of the past fifty years alone have been astonishing, and yet there’s still room to get it wrong because we’re dealing with the incredible complexity of the human body and mind, and we can’t help but be human along the way. Are we still drilling holes in people’s heads to let out the evil spirits? No. But are we sometimes misdiagnosing and overmedicating? I’d say, yes. And here’s the thing: despite the fact that we carry our bodies and brains around, despite their quotidian normalcy, there are times when they seem so odd—miraculous and unpredictable and perverse and unknowable—that they are like magic, for good or for ill.    RG:  I’m wearing purple socks with teddy bears on them in a raised, rubberized pattern. The hospital provided them. These I will keep. I will wear them around the apartment for the next few days until the soles get dirty and I begin to worry about the state of the unswept floors. In “Miscarriages” ordinary items meant to soothe accentuate the sense of disquiet. These objects suggest the search for a type of material grounding in the face of events that evoke much confusion. From Feng Shui, origami cranes and unsettling gynecological crafts, objects in their juxtaposition inhabit a surreal and unsettling space within the story. What part do these objects play? SR: As you suggest, we seek comfort in the material. Our personal possessions, our daily objects, our souvenirs… our STUFF! We seek the concrete because so much of what surrounds us is nebulous and fleeting, and we do this despite knowing there’s no real remedy, hence our chronic dissatisfaction with our stuff. “Purchase”: there’s a lovely doubleness to that word, suggesting something we buy but also the act of trying to find a hold. Many of the objects from the story are artistic items—and art is a special kind of container for our anxiety. The story is written in sections, which I think of as containers, which in turn feature containers of one kind or another (lists, ultrasounds, a medical model …) along with that most profound of containers, the womb.  RG: “The Rabbits” makes reference to the 18th century case of Mary Toft, a woman who claimed to have given birth to a brood of rabbits. There is a fairytale-like quality to the sequence of events. What led you to take on your own version of the story?SR: I came across the historical material after falling down a Google rabbit hole, appropriately enough: I must have been researching something related to maternity, and I somehow came across this hoaxster, Mary Toft. She really did fool people for a time, including the king’s physician; granted, she was very committed to the act, which involved some gruesome props. I was interested in writing a version where Mary experiences her rabbit births as authentic and miraculous—and yet she is perceived as a fraud and a trouble-maker. I like your comparison to fairytales, because their form suggests dream-like exploration rather than settled conclusions. I was interested in writing about the strangeness of conception, pregnancy, and childbirth… about its uncanny aspects and also about how, during these experiences, women can feel their agency is compromised, or at least, complicated. RG: Several of the stories address the idea of lost children. What draws you to this theme?SR: I have lost a child, through miscarriage, so I have that personal connection to the theme. And even though I now have a child, I still feel terror at the prospect of losing him. Which is not to say that I’m white-knuckling it minute by minute, but it’s there in the background (as I imagine it is for every parent). I’m also interested in what we lose as children—the phrase “loss of childhood innocence” comes to mind, but I hope to capture something less corny, or at least, more complex in its presentation. For instance, even children who do not experience an emotional loss directly can have survivor’s guilt, which is its own kind of trauma, and you see that at play in some of my stories.      RG: Animals are presented as substitutes for human children, from a womb-dwelling bird and rabbits, to pets. The nature of attachment, of judgment, of maternal need, is a theme common to the collection. How do you view your use of animals, and the animalistic, for The Ill-Fitting Skin?SR: I love animals… but I also eat and wear them, so I deal with that daily paradox. I think animals occupy such a fascinating category: they are us, and yet they are not us; essential and yet alien. They make for uncanny comparisons, hence the power of fables. And Art Spiegelman’s Maus. With animals, the metaphorical doesn’t want to stay metaphorical, and I suppose I’m drawn to that sense of uncomfortable proximity. And that vulnerability. Animals are fierce and self-sufficient, and yet (increasingly) we see how their existence is fragile.   RG: Truth be told, I had the kind of cleverness that readily alchemizes into stupidity by way of vanity. Five years in a PhD program and nothing to show for it except a box of rambling notes. So this is indeed my penance for being so ineffectual, I’d tell myself as I scrubbed, wiped, scoured. The idea was that it was a temporary gig, a stopgap, and soon a real job would surface. Like a magical island. Or a dead body. One of the characters that has stayed with me since reading the collection is the uncommunicative and off-putting householder Hartley, featured in “Dirt.” How did you go about creating him? There is a sophisticated progression in the dynamic between the two characters central to this story. What was your approach to characterisation in this case?SR: In “Dirt,” the narrator doesn’t sign up to be a “sexy” cleaning lady, but she finds herself playing that role for her new client, Hartley. When the story was first published in Joyland magazine, I was so surprised to find that some people—some women—found Hartley to be “endearing”! I see him as quietly menacing and highly manipulative. Granted, the narrator’s first impression of him is that he’s a dork, and so when he pushes her boundaries, she keeps trying to convince herself that she’s in charge. Or at least, that she’s okay with this, that she’s willing to be a good sport for the paycheck, that making these accommodations isn’t shaming and infuriating. Ultimately, his dorkiness is just a red herring, and she sees he has no qualms about pursuing his desires at her emotional expense. In writing this story, I very much had gender dynamics in mind, but I was also influenced by my time as an office worker, which in retrospect, had shades of the Stanford Prison Experiment.RG: If you decide to hate boys forever and ever, turn to page 92.If you decide to just hate this boy, turn to page 98.For “A Doom of Your Own” you take on the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure form in a way that is psychologically revealing. What attracted you to use this structure? Later in the collection D&D plays a significant role in the story “You Are Now in a Dark Chamber,” and a zombie parade is the backdrop for the interpersonal strifes of “Zombies.” What role do these games and niche cultures play in the collection?SR: I grew up reading Choose Your Own Adventure books in the ’80s, and I loved the way they allowed me to participate in the story, how “you” got to choose where the story went next. At the same time, as a fan of the genre, I became aware that choice was an illusion, and even when you think you’re doing everything right, you get trapped in loops, or end up lost in the dungeon or eaten by the ant people or whatever. I thought that sense of frustration (and gaslighting and self-sabotage…) would lend itself well to a story about a toxic romantic relationship. You don’t have to be a child of the ’80s to appreciate “Doom of Her Own,” but I have found that Gen X readers particularly enjoy its nostalgia element. As for games and niche cultures, there’s an underdog feel to them, which I find appealing. In “Zombies,” the narrator berates another character for referring to zombie cosplay as “hipster”; she says that “it’s full-on Renaissance Fair, Dungeons & Dragons, no irony.” In other words, not “cool”—which I think is a good thing (even if my narrator doesn’t). I also like the fantasy aspect of these activities. There’s often a certain amount of gothic inflection… as well as humor. And horniness. It’s very story-friendly.  RG: A theme that is returned to throughout the collection is that of transformation. Sometimes your characters are in a place of denial, at other points led by unconscious impulses, or have transformation foisted upon them. What use do you make of transformation in the collection? Have any transformative experiences of your own influenced these stories?SR: As I recall, in Charles Baxter’s Burning Down the House, he disparages the notion of epiphany in fiction: he finds it all very phony baloney. My characters don’t exactly have epiphanies—there is no big, “And then I realized…” moment, no definitive pivot into clarity. But the characters come close, and I hope that I leave them (or at least most of them) in a place where they can move towards some positive transformation—that is, towards some greater understanding, strength, or happiness.As for transformative experiences of my own that have influenced these stories… they’re all what you’d expect: motherhood, my MFA, and marriage to a fellow writer who loves me and really cares about my writing. Aging in general has been good for me: less vanity-selfishness-insecurity, more wisdom-kindness-confidence. All that has helped me to become a better writer. A better person, with crappier knees. Fine.   RG: There are many references to myths, legends, and folklore dotted throughout The Ill-Fitting Skin. Is this an area of inspiration?SR: Absolutely! Since childhood, I’ve been interested in fairytales (the Grimm versions; Disney’s versions are fun, but the originals are where the truly fascinating weirdness lies) and Greek mythology. I have a copy of D’Auliares’ Book of Greek Myths, which I won as a Creative Writing prize in sixth grade and have treasured ever since. I had its beautiful illustration of Demeter reunited with Persephone in mind as I wrote the ending of “Miscarriages.”  RG: How did you decide upon the title for the collection?SR: The original title was No Good Will Come of This, which felt like a minor tribute to Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are? (the Canadian title of The Beggar Maid)…  but I ran it by a test audience, and it did not fare well. So I went through the stories and made a list of images and phrases that popped out at me. The phrase “an ill-fitting skin” occurs in the last paragraph of the story “Dirt” in reference to a garment that the narrator is throwing in the trash—a dress that she wore with great ambivalence for a male audience. I thought that phrase really spoke to externally imposed expectations and confining notions of identity: so many of the stories’ characters struggle with these. And I liked the fairytale feel of that phrase, “ill-fitting skin”—like it’s an enchantment, a curse… a prison, but also possibly a chrysalis, ready to be shed.    RG: Looking back on the stories, and the time in which they were written, how do you feel about the collection now? What lies next for Shannon Robinson?SR: I feel very proud of these stories, and it’s always wonderful to hear that people have been moved by them. As for what lies ahead… more writing and more readings. I love giving readings! It’s the theater kid in me. Right now, I’m working on a novel about a Victorian baby killer. There’s a love story in there, so it’s not quite as grim as it sounds. Tenderness: I can promise you that.

by Mike Topp

$25 | Perfect bound | 72 pages
Paperback | Die-cut matte cover | 7×7″

Mike Topp’s poems defy categorization. That’s why they are beloved by seamstresses, pathologists, blackmailers and art collectors.

–Sparrow