Every weekend we begged our mothers to drive us to the mall, to leave us at the arched entrance by the Red Robin, and not to look back. We pooled our money. Birthdays, summer chores, quarters from fluorescent plastic Easter eggs. We bought T-shirts emblazoned with the names of bands and bracelets shaped like penises, breasts, middle fingers. We wore our contraband to school under our jackets and swapped shirts while waiting for the buses. No other kids recognized the faces spread across our chests, and we liked it that way. When we stared at our navels, we tugged our shirts tight until the singers’ black eyeliner stretched and smeared, until we were looking in a mirror. We straightened our hair, fried it, frizzed it, teased it with combs and cut layers up to our temples. Only Shyanne could convince her mother to buy the black box dye from Walmart. The rest of us concealed our envy and relief. We once went too far. We met older boys on the internet who sent us songs thick with screams and photos of their beat up cars and blue bangs and wistful eyes. Shyanne’s parents found our messages and phoned the school. We pleaded with the counselor not to tell our mothers. We laid low. We waited for the summer when Kelly would come to Grandma’s for a week. We smuggled a book, Introduction to Buddhism, all the way to New Jersey, desperate to decode the Nirvana lyrics all the blue boys wrote in their statuses. We wore skin-gripping gray jeans to Sunday Mass, and when Grandpa found our Buddhism lessons, he made us sit at the kitchen table while he read from the Book of Job. Grandma felt guilty and drove us to the shore. We wandered the sandy boardwalk, breathed salt air and never changed into our bathing suits. We yanked our tank tops above our ribs and let a local man give us henna tattoos. Peace signs, yin yangs, bold exploding suns. We said No when he asked if we wanted an outline of Italy on our inner thighs. We said Yes when he asked if we had enough olive oil at home to rub into our stained skin. That’s the secret to it lasting longer, he said with a wink. We made a plan to hide our bodies.A few weeks later, Kelly’s mom discovered the olive oil stashed behind the toilet, and we soon fell out. We went back to school, different schools, all of us. We swore we’d talk everyday, but Kelly told us not to call anymore after we tasted vodka with Shyanne’s brother. We got boyfriends, drank too much, lost each other's numbers when we lost our phones in dark rooms. Our lives unfurled on Facebook. We got tattoos, permanent this time. Kelly got married. Shyanne’s profile stayed frozen in our past. A middle school mall selfie. The sun ricocheting off a backdrop of parking lot snow, her black hair catching all the spare light. We have what relics we can remember. Not relics, fossils. The figures that left depressions in the sand are long gone, sand themselves now, returned to a great current I remember the Buddhists call a stream.
Ever since her husband was hit by a municipal bus, Mrs. Atwal would spend her afternoons watching the hippos at the aquarium. Their fleetness of hoof belying their primordial size.At two o’clock, on the nose, the hippos were isolated in a separate part of the tank and the mermaid show would begin. Children crowded the double-paned glass. A drowsy piano tune was piped through the speakers. The mermaids emerged from some unknowable recess in the tank. Each time one of the mermaids waved at Mrs. Atwal, or otherwise made eye contact with her, she imagined a hippo breaking loose of its enclosure and flattening the mermaid against the glass.“Afternoon pick me up?” The question threw her, as the man was small—very small—and she couldn’t be sure whether he was asking to be physically picked up.“It’s the good stuff,” he added, and held out a large soda container with a crooked straw poking out from the lid. Then shook the drink so the ice rattled against the sides. “Seems like you could use an eye-opener.”She declined as politely as possible. They watched one of the mermaids purse her lips and blow a kiss to the children.“I hate these floating turds. I wish one of them would get crushed by the hippos already.”She decided she liked this man, and when he asked her if she wanted to visit the food cart—the one by the penguin exhibit—she accepted his invitation.Outside, an axolotl-shaped balloon escaped a child’s hand and floated skywards. The man pointed at the boy and bent over in laughter.“Idiot,” he said. “How hard is it to hold on to a balloon?”The man ordered a single tray of fries, which he proceeded to slather in ketchup from the condiment pump. Mrs. Atwal ordered a small pouch of chips, which she slipped into her bag for later. They sat down at a picnic bench overlooking the Gentoo penguins.“You know how much they pay you if you fall into one of the exhibits?”She shook her head.“I mean, with a good lawyer, we’re talking millions. Even with a bad lawyer, you’ll be set for life. Just for slugging it out for a few rounds with some puffin.”He continued: “A couple of months ago some kid got bit by an otter. Guess what? A quarter million dollars. Can you imagine? He was ugly as sin before the otter got him. A quarter million! What would you do with all that money?”She tried to think of an answer. It shouldn’t have been hard to imagine as her husband had taken out multiple life insurance policies before he died and she had that much—more—in the bank.A seagull flew over to pick at the greasy jetsam under their table.“Fuck off, you ocean rat,” he said, trying to kick at the gull, but his feet couldn’t reach the bird from his seated position.Mrs. Atwal rose to go to the bathroom.“Where are you going, lady? It’s just an ocean rat.”The bathroom was precisely empty. She sat down on a toilet seat in the stall and thought about whether seagulls could digest fries or if it caused them to get sick and throw up later.Under the stall, she saw a coral blue tail fin trawl across the floor tiling. She opened the stall to find a mermaid in a silver wig crying over the sink. She edged beside her.“Why doesn’t Jason look at me the way he used to?” the mermaid said.She wondered if Jason was the other mermaid in the show. Or a land dweller with the biologically appointed number of toes.“He’s always talking with Miranda. And she can barely go thirty seconds without reaching for the air hose.”Mrs. Atwal nodded conspiratorially.“Miranda doesn’t have the lung capacity for this work.”“Right?”“And Jason, I saw him laughing earlier when a child lost his balloon.”“How cruel.”“Cruel indeed.”The mermaid threw her mammalian arms around Mrs. Atwal.“Thank you.”The mermaid hopped and shimmied out of the bathroom. Mrs. Atwal returned to the picnic bench, where only the man’s partially eaten tray of fries remained. She took out her bag of chips and ate them leaning over the railing encircling the penguin colony.“Ma’am,” said the moon-faced attendant. “You have to stand behind the red line.”She looked at the red line, which was several inches behind the railing.Would standing behind this line shelter her from life’s assorted dangers? A tall order for a band of paint, she thought.But like the well-mannered woman she was, had been raised to be, she stepped behind the red line, and for a moment even she believed that nothing bad could befall her.
Against the verdant landscape of boarded-up gay bars, bluffs that swell over cresting waves, and hot sand between toes, a haunting, frenetic, and razor-sharp narrative scurries to life in Season of The Rat (Cash 4 Gold Books, 2025). Like the rat, author Elizabeth Hall invites her readers to “taste it all- flowers and cigarettes.” The result is a work which resists definition—part novella, part confession, part dissertation, and part infestation. The reader plays the simultaneous role of voyeur and confidant, observer and observed, the rat in the ceiling and the girl who listens to its scurrying steps below. Season of the Rat is subtle and riotous, “a fat California orange in the palm of your hand.” Hall invites us to examine how we are changed by our tragedies and our inquiries—every shard of human experience piled at the sides of our roads. It is an exploration of our private ruins and all that finds a home there. I sat down with Elizabeth in West Adams to discuss Season of the Rat, anal breathing, sex, shapeshifting, California, and what’s on deck for this literary powerhouse in the making.Aiden Brown: I was so excited when Allie [Rowbottom] asked me to read this book. Without knowing what to expect, or knowing you, it just blew me away. One of my favorite things about it is the ambiguity of its genre identity, so I have to start by asking how you describe Season of the Rat. Elizabeth Hall: I think I’m officially calling it autofiction. It’s definitely based on my actual life. I’m usually not very interested in writing just a straight memoir because I get bored easily. And so the research is a huge help to stay motivated, and also provide a necessary counterbalance of joy and exhilaration—so any memoirs or essays I’ve written in this vein dovetail heavily into research, for better or for worse. AB: That was one of my favorite things about the book—the research kind of weaves into and around the more emotional and personal narrative, which creates such a strong portrait of intellectualization while still resonating emotionally. Your protagonist’s—or your—exigence for the rat research is self-evident within the narrative, but what drew you to researching abandoned gay bars?EH: The bars were actually before the rats—I found this book about Orange County by an LA Times writer Gustavo Arrellano, and there was this anecdote in the book about them. My friend Caitlin and I started going on adventures to these places in Laguna. It was an avenue of research that served as kind of a reprieve from my other research about my mom, or the cult she was part of that was founded in Orange County. A lot of my work focuses on sex trauma. Some heavy things were coming up within my own family in that regard. So I think it’s natural that I gravitated toward locuses of queer joy, especially in what I tend to think of as such a stiff place. And that research, too, helped me navigate my own queer journey. It was easier for me to go to an abandoned place to discover my queerness in a way than to go to a gay bar with people in it. I took the introverted path.AB: That’s so interesting because in the book, there’s almost always someone with you in those scenes. Actually, that brings me to one of the things I loved the most about this book—I mean, of course, I don’t love that it happened—but the way your relationships, for better or for worse, kind of lurk beneath your research and weave in and around it. In particular, I found the connection between the trauma you endured and the research on rats, garbage, and ruin so striking. How did those connections develop for you? Was it something you planned going into the project or something that emerged over the course of writing it?EH: So, the origin of the book was the sex assault. It started, honestly, because of an argument with my wife. The scene was cut from the book, actually, this tiff about the tent. But it was the first camping tent I’d bought for myself, and I’d taken it on so many solo camping trips, including a journey from here to Portland for my first book tour. And when I was about to go camping by myself in Joshua Tree with it, my wife was like well, you’re not going to bring that tent. And I was like obviously I’m bringing the tent. I don’t have another tent. She and I had just moved in (this was during the pandemic)—my wife also works a corporate job, and so she was living at a very different income level than I was. So, I took the debate over the tent as almost a symbol of that disparity. Like, of course you can just buy a new tent while I have to be okay with sleeping in my rape tent. I also didn’t want to give [Mark] or the assault power over my beloved tent. Eventually, it became a joke between my wife and I—we had a riff on “rape tent” for a very long time. And so the first scene of the book was originally going to be about this rape tent. I had intended it to be an exploration of [Mark’s] and my relationship through the lens of class. Actually, the assault came to be more in the background compared with the original exigence of the project. I really wanted to emphasize how much resources play into why people stay in abusive dynamics. AB: Period. Absolutely. EH: This was around that time when it was really popular in certain lit circles to listen to edge lord-y podcasts like Red Scare. They had an episode—actually, just the other day—where the hosts speculated that people stay in these dynamics for psychosocial reasons—they were attempting to do a psychoanalytic read on various dynamics like narcissism, or codependency. So, there was also a part of me that wanted to write this in opposition, not to Red Scare specifically, but to that whole idea that people are addicted to their lover, or that emotional reasoning is even a primary motivator. I wanted to shift the conversation—people, I feel, are almost taking pains not to talk about the resource aspect. It’s expensive to live in Los Angeles, and a person shouldn’t have to give up their life in a place because someone chooses to do something to them. When the assault happened, we had already been broken up for a while, but we were still living together. My primary motivator for staying wasn’t that I was just having such a good time hanging out with this person, it was for want of choices which didn’t implode my life.The choice to stay was one I made to try and control the situation. I’d just gotten a nonprofit job, which I was able to turn into a full time position largely because of the stability I had at that time, and because of the stability I’ve had with my wife Heidi since. At the time I was writing this book, I was working at one of the most beautiful libraries in Los Angeles. And I’ve worked hard to get these two idyllic situations. Had I gone to a shelter or stayed on a friend’s couch, that destabilization would have been observable to an employer. And I’d never had a full time position. I wasn’t able to even get a tooth fixed. I’m a big proponent of Maslow’s Hierarchy—like, how are you supposed to concentrate when you’re worried about having your basic needs met? Without the stability I have now, I probably wouldn’t have been able to write this book, at a minimum. AB: What is your relationship with [Mark] like now? How did it change or what changed about your perspective on it while you were writing Season of the Rat?EH: A part of me wanted him to bear witness to the pain he’d caused. Another part of me wanted to write about it quickly—I wrote it within months of leaving the situation—to preserve the sense of love I still had for him. Another myth that I’ve encountered is that you’re supposed to immediately hate someone after they’ve harmed you in that way. But we shared all kinds of deep intimacies with each other over the years. I understand why people do close their hearts, and my feelings toward [Mark] have hardened over time.I don’t think of [Mark] as a monster—I think doing that makes it harder to heal. While I understand why people would need to think of someone who did that to them that way, it created a dissonance for me between the reality of what happened and the ten years we spent together, the friendship we had. And even after it happened, we lived together; we were in a band together. Prior to his violations, I really did enjoy his company. After the assault, he was still my primary emotional support, which was that much more destabilizing. There’s a pattern in my life of being close to someone that then I had to extricate myself from—music I couldn’t listen to anymore. I always knew I was going to write about him, and I wanted to do it with a degree of diplomacy. I mean, I could write another book about sex assault two years later and write it totally differently. AB: You say this in the book—and really it was a gut punch for me as someone who’s had similar experiences—that he never denied the assault, it was just something that didn’t impact him on the day to day. EH: Yeah, he just went on living his life. The day after it happened, we dropped off the other person who was on the trip with us (who didn’t know what had happened) and I noticed that [Mark] was already on dating apps. He dropped me off in downtown LA to go on a date, and I spent the whole afternoon floating through the city. By the time I’d gotten in my Uber home to San Pedro, he was taking selfies in the desert with a new girl he was dating. I remember going home, crying and just thinking I can’t run away from this—I mean, literally—I didn’t have a car. And he got to just go on like everything was normal.AB: I was really struck by that portrayal of the banality of that kind of assault, and how human—or maybe diplomatic is the word—you were while still expressing that anger and that devastation that comes with sexual assault. I mean, we harden toward them over time, like you said, but making them monsters can also obfuscate a situation for us in so many ways. It is like floating, or like walking a tightrope. That brings me to this tension between fear, harm, and love. I felt that tension very strongly in Season of the Rat. What’s the relationship between those ideas for you personally?EH: I'm someone who grew up very much fearing showing emotion with the exception of, perhaps, within the church system. Definitely one of those people who went wild at a youth retreat—hands in the air, all that. I felt like it was like a safe form of love, I guess. I'm not religious now, but when I was younger, the idea of Jesus providing unconditional love was huge to me. Especially because that was not something I was getting necessarily in other aspects of my life. My mom is a wonderful person, but she has a lot of anxiety that tends to manifest as hypercriticality of herself and others. I think she moves through the world believing criticism is really helpful, and that it’s a loving thing to do. She grew up in a very dysfunctional home that created that lens of get it together, you know—“lock in.” That was translated to me and my sister through her, so I don’t think I was ever going to have that easygoing, free feeling love vibe. Part of [Mark] and my whole relationship was that we were both very much afraid of vulnerability and emotionality. The main thing we did together was smoke a lot of weed all the time and listen to music together—we really were not linked up in a soul-bonded, emotional way. In fact, I don't think we ever even said I love you until we’d been dating for four or five years—which is insane—and it only happened then because I was having an emotional affair with someone who was so free-flowing with love. That's why I was attracted to the affair, I'm sure. It woke me up to the range of love that I was missing out on. Even today, I'm married and I still get very embarrassed about showing affection. My wife worked on a really big live show, and I was making her a little card for when she came home, and then I was so emotional, and it low-key embarrassed me. I was like, I'm not going to put this out. And then I was like, wait, yeah, I am. This is so dumb! I am almost 40 and married. I don't still need to feel that way. So it still happens, that fear of being seen, to use a TikTok phrase…AB: The mortifying ordeal of being known.EH: Exactly. I mean, love is one of the most vulnerable things about us—the fear that it won’t be returned. I'm not like that now—compassion is free, love is free; it hurts me none to share these things with people. I think having access to love from Heidi—she's a very extroverted person, very giving, a very different person—and seeing her vulnerability with me and with her friends has been really helpful in navigating that vulnerability and fear, and letting love kind of effuse within our dynamic.AB: I haven’t had the pleasure of reading your first book, but I assume by the title I HAVE DEVOTED MY LIFE TO THE CLITORIS, that it explores similar ideas around vulnerability, love, and sex from a different standpoint, since you were in a very different place in your life when you wrote it compared to Season of the Rat. I’m curious how,if at all, your process differed between the two books?EH: Both were written during destabilizing times in my life. Going to CalArts for an MFA was a pretty good culture shock for me. I'm really more of an autodidact. I barely went to undergrad college, skipped a lot of classes; I thought it was like a hack to use a spreadsheet to track my class absences. It's not a hack, it was a waste, but I thought I was real slick. Going to CalArts was, in and of itself, a bit of a risky move for me. [Mark] had applied to grad school in California, and CalArts was the only place I got into near where he was accepted. At the same time, my mom was in the process of finding some things that had happened in the past with my sister which were pushing her to get divorced, and then she went bankrupt—her whole life kind of blew up. So, I don't think it was that surprising that I was drawn to an excessive research project. I think it was escapism. I'm a very escapist person, whether that be through marijuana or exercise. The idea for the clit book came from a poem that I had previously published, which was comprised of sex writing cutups, that people were responding really well to. I didn't feel like I had the writerly skillset for a novel, but what I could do—similar to the rats—was, and is, research. I can always do that because it makes me happy, and research is an escape in some ways. You get to live in another world. The clit research made me feel so alive. I’d wake up in the morning at like 5am (I’m an insomniac) and the sun would be shining—California sun, you know, every day.It was so beautiful, and I could travel to the sixth century or something and it felt crazy, and that made me really happy. I also was learning at the time how unhappy my sex life had been with [Mark]. Because I was raised really religious, he was the first person I’d ever had sex with. Even though I wasn’t religious anymore, there was still that internal backbeat of thinking it was cool that, although I was like 26 and in grad school, I had only had sex with one person. It was definitely misguided in retrospect. As I wrote, I was having a lot of compulsory sex with [Mark], because I just didn't know. I was having sex every day and giving blowjobs every day, and had no idea that wasn't a normal thing. And I never came, obviously, so—I'm only being this frank because it's a sex book—AB: No, I love it.EH: So, I was in the process of recognizing that cultural training, and of discovering that it wasn’t just me—it was actually everyone I talked to. I would talk to friends in the grad program and they all were like yeah we never come, even people who’d had upwards of twenty partners. I initially thought maybe it's just [Mark] and then it's like–, okay, no, this is systemic. Actually, until he read the book, I don’t think he had a desire to focus on my pleasure. I really think this comes from an internalized misogyny among many women and men, this idea that women's pleasure just doesn't matter. Like, no one comes from penetration. I mean, some people do.AB: Love that for them. Huge if true.EH: Right, it’s rare; the vast majority of people don't. And he was like Well, I've never had that problem with previous partners.AB: Okay, so those women were lying to you. EH: They're lying to you! Until he read the book, which probably hit home the ethical aspect of pleasuring a partner, did anything change in terms of us having better sex. But writing the book was eye opening for me and really changed a lot of how I thought about actual sex and agency around sex. It also exposed a lot of my own internalized misogyny, which I'm still working through.AB: Speaking of things you’re working through, I’m curious what your writing life has been like—how did you start?EH: I struggled with learning disabilities, and didn’t really read a book until high school, which was when I got into diaries—Sylvia Plath’s specifically. Then, I got into biographies of writers. Anaïs Nin was the first writer I was obsessed with. I was still very religious then, so I would go through and cross out the curse words and the sex words. I always knew I wanted access to a different life than the one I was living, and reading and writing were windows into other worlds. Reading shapeshifts time; you’re slowed down and almost living inside the book and alongside the book. I was interested in the lifestyle of a writer or what I thought that would be. A lot of my favorite writers were very craft-oriented like Nabokov, Miller. But Nin especially—she was self-taught and kind of a bad writer when she started, so revision was big for her. I knew with my academic sensibilities that it would be huge for me too, and that’s really informed the kind of writer I’ve become.AB: I really see the confessional style in this work. That’s so interesting you say that because my primary impression of this book (once I could catch my breath) was how well-crafted it was, both structurally and on the sentence level. Season of the Rat comes out in May—what else is on the horizon for you?EH: I’m not working on a big project right now, but I am working on some smaller essays. I write reviews, for Full Stop and other places. I really like doing critical work. I think I was scared to do any kind of review work because I didn't feel like I had the academic training to understand books systematically, but I found out I really love doing it and my editor at Full Stop, Fiona, is such an amazing reader and editor that I just want to keep working with her. I’m kind of loosely working a novel idea—the problem with novels is that I lose interest really quickly—but, it's about a health clinic that does anal breathing—AB: Oh, hell yeah.EH: —which doesn't exist, but it's inspired by trends in colonics. I've always written a lot about wellness and been interested in it, not as a practitioner necessarily, but as a cultural phenomenon. AB: I wouldn't be surprised if you don't see someone trying to harness anal breathing in a few years. EH: Oh, anal breathing is the final frontier. I feel like whenever my larger projects don't work out, they usually become a smaller piece. I have an essay coming out in Hobart that kind of dovetailswith Season of the Rat’s storyline. I feel like there is an idea for something about my mom that’s percolating. I tend to be inspired by things in a moment and then go hog wild over them. If I were a really disciplined person, my life would probably look different, as would my writing, but I let my ADHD take the reins creatively. I'm definitely here for the girls and for the messiness.AB: There’s a lot of really beautiful vulnerability in that too. Girls forever. I can’t wait to see what you do next.Season of the Rat is forthcoming this June from Cash 4 Gold Books.
Last spring the county newspaper paid me $200 to write about local dreams. I interviewed a man whose job it was to cycle out the books from the little lending library in the center of town. We met at a diner nobody liked and was always empty but stayed in business as such diners often do. He told me he mostly dreamed about colors. Yellow in spring, green in winter, purple in autumn. Summer heat made the man's legs swell and he didn't want to talk about what he saw those nights. He seemed uneasy about the approaching season. As we spoke my smartphone gathered time beside undercooked bacon. Recording a voice I'd listen to speak these words once and never again. This is the nature of the news and the people who write it. We fill our notes with memories and chronicle a world that grew so fast it forgot how to stop and remember.I ask the man if he believes in dream analysis, and he tells me when he sleeps on his back he sees faces in the colors. People he met when he served jury duty in Greenfield three years before. I don't know their names or anything about them, he told me. The day aged through the pollen-painted window. Buzzards circled above the bridge across the river to the rust-lined highway to Boston. The man fingered the bacon on his plate. Oh, he said. We sent a boy to jail for murder. Outside the diner the man asked me if I'd put him in my story. I told him it's up to my editor. I didn't know if that was true but when I don't know something I appeal to some faceless power. We shook hands and he asked me what I dream about. I told him reporters should never become part of the story. He laughed and said, No, really. Tell me.I told him when I dream about the places I used to live, they look nothing like those places, but in the dream it's all real and true, that I know those places like I do the people I've loved. Every place in my dreams has a road leading north. I thank him for his time. You're from around here, he said. Not really, I said.The man got in his car and backed into a fire hydrant. Water gushed like blood from a torn-off thumb. Then he turned the car around and gunned it against the hydrant. His engine sobbed. I took pictures with my phone but they were all blurred, out of focus, smeared with light. Faces filled the windows around us, some I knew, faces angry and entertained, faces of why now, of not this again, of I get it, man, I really fucking do.
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The paper assigned me to cover a recent wave of carjackings. Not the carburetor thefts. They told me that was a different beat, and that we'd talk about pay when I had something good.As I waited at the light on Avenue E one morning a woman opened my passenger door, flashed a ten-dollar utility knife, and told me to drive.Where? I asked.South, she said. I gassed it. A pollen-clouded patrol car was parked outside the gun store at the intersection. A cop, leaning against the door, didn't look up from his phone. We left town. Drove past restaurants, gas stations, farms. All for sale. The butterfly sanctuary was closed for repairs. Further south a line of cars waited to park at a brewery. Food trucks belched steam and a couple locked arms on the grass. I nearly collided with the car ahead of us.Watch it, said the woman.Sorry, I said.The woman told me to take the highway. We inched through Sunday construction. Men clustered by potholes and idle machines. I wondered if any of them looked inside my car and confused us for husband and wife. I told her this.Don't say that, she said. She checked her phone and was on the verge of tears.Her directions were more forceful now. The ramp past Deerfield, left, right, left. Take it slow down this street. Look for a truck with no bumper. Apple red.The same, the woman said. The same.She was out of the car before I parked. The woman sprinted, slipped and shouted up the angled drive and flung open the garage door. Two men fucked on a yoga mat, free weights and kettlebells and gym clothes abandoned around them. A radio spewed dad rock on a chair. The woman grabbed one of the men by the hair and tugged. The men broke apart, their passion fissioned to sweat and rage. I see you, the woman screamed at one of the men. He didn't seem angry or shocked. Calm, almost, as if this was expected, predicted, even welcome. No one said anything. Just frozen acknowledgement, where no words suffice to explain how the resolution of tension causes both pleasure and pain. Then the woman shoved me back to the car. Pushing tears back into her eyes as she moved. Drive, she whispered. South I drove again. Small mountains rose as if the world was teething. We approached the tallest, one I'd climbed before blind-drunk on a snowy, lonely night. I hooked an observation road and shot past hikers too weary for the steep rock path. My legs ached from the long sit. At the peak we got out and gazed across the valley and the towns and the curves of the green-brown Connecticut River.I dreamed about this, said the woman.What do you mean? I asked.I saw my husband. Driving there. I felt how happy he was. How that garage felt more like home than ours.How did the dream end? I asked. The woman rocked back and forth, hands in her pockets.Like this, she said. What do you mean? I asked.I forced you to drive at knifepoint. When we arrived I forgot my knife in the car. My husband chose someone else. Then we drove up this mountain. Then I woke up.We said nothing for a while. A prop plane flew above us in a circle and then turned north, against the wind.Then the woman said, The way my husband felt. That love inside him. That deep, physical love. I'll never forget.Then she said, I don't have any money.We drove back to town under a rose-gold sky. There are no sunsets anywhere like those in western Massachusetts. I wondered if I had the right to tell this story, or if everything was off the record, or whether these things even matter when you're a witness against your will. As we turned onto Avenue E the woman pressed her knife against my neck. Wallet, she said. Then, more softly, she said, Please.She took thirty bucks and a gas station gift card and the picture of my nephew, then tossed the wallet in my lap and stepped out into the street.
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The paper laid me off on the fifth of July. In June we covered bridge repair delays, unaffordable homes, church fires, community musicals, childhood illiteracy. Covered births, deaths and arrests. Covered sickness, hope and happiness. We covered the war, and then they shut us down. Some private equity barons out in Boston coveted the land beneath our office. I had an hour to clear the city desk I shared with three other journalists. One week's severance. Benefits 'til the end of the month.I asked my editor what to do with my half-finished story about a man who'd drowned in the river. He was a local, an institution, a bellwether figure. Sought your change outside the sandwich shop. Bought milk and bread from the communist theater group on the corner of Avenue G. Once, he told me a story about being a judo champion in California and as he spoke he hand-chopped the air and winced and bore his teeth, but he seemed proud to remember those moves. Ben. Ben Armstrong. I'd written his name on a notepad and circled it in red ink.Forget it, my editor told me. We were close in the way you become when you deal with the constant mess of private lives, because that's what local news is, a constant mess bursting into public, ordered and shaped by writers and publishers. But I knew next to nothing about him, his family, what he wanted, how he saw himself, here, at the end. But it was too late to ask. I watched him slide a half-dozen reams of untouched paper into his backpack and step nervously out into the light on the sidewalk outside our office. On the bathroom wall I wrote in permanent marker The News Was Here. Then I pissed, didn't flush, and left with some notebooks and pens.At home, I caught up on my drinking. Shouted at hummingbirds. Built a castle of beer cans on the back porch and staggered through its walls before a midweek thunderstorm could blow it down. Mostly I slept. My blanket gathered cat hair as I moved from bed to floor to couch like some forgotten, guilt-soaked king. I wondered whether the stories I told really mattered. If they changed the world or changed someone's mind. If any sort of story matters when a story must make noise, provoke, and never repeat.My mother, a man's voice said from beside the couch one day. It was the man from the diner. He gripped his legs with thick, red hands. Like many men who lived in town, he seemed on the verge of explosion. His eyes darted between the brown houseplants on the windowsills.Then he said, That's who I see in the summer when I sleep. That's not a color, I said.She is, he said. Like this. The man pinched his arm and then held it close to me. His arm shook and a small spot bloomed red then purple-brown. The ease of his bruise scared me and I wanted to tell someone about it.I loved her but she, well, you know, said the man. The man's arm kept shaking.Then the man said, Someone can love you and still do terrible things. Like nobody taught them how to do it right.Yeah, I said.I rolled over and listened as the man watched me and breathed. Am I asleep? the man asked.I think I am, I said.No, said the man. I'm asleep. And I really don't want to be. I want to wake up.I turned back toward him and then said, Sometimes when I want to wake up I open my eyes as wide as they'll go. Sometimes if I do it enough I can break through the sleep and escape.The man tried it. The valleys beneath his eyes turned the color of plums. He used his fingers to stretch the skin like he was trying to release air from inside his head.It's not working, he said.I'm sorry. Am I dead? Did I die in my sleep? I don't know.Please wake me up. Please. Please!Alright, I said.I threw off the covers and gripped the man by the shoulders. We made eye contact. Blue ones. The sky in spring.Ready? I asked.Yeah.I shoved him. As he fell backwards the man grabbed my face. I lost my balance and we tumbled together in darkness. I don't know if I hit the ground. Don't remember. All of a sudden I was awake, alone, in my blanket, and that was all. I sat up. I had nowhere to be. No stories to sell. I closed my eyes.What remained was a burst of relief. Like a bath of liquid gold. But it wasn't my relief. In half-awake clarity I knew that the man had escaped from the dream. His dream or mine, I wasn't sure. But he was free, somewhere out there, even if it meant returning to whichever hell had inspired the dream to begin with. I wanted, desperately, for the man's happiness to be my own.
Chase Griffin’s alchemical style continues with Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace (Corona/Samizdat, 2026). At once a fanciful record of an unfathomable mind and experiment in merriment, the book is unabashed with its lingual adventurousness. When life gives you strange frequencies it’s time to whistle your own tune. Griffin is a psychedelic jester, and, as is common to that type, also the smartest guy in the room. I spoke to him about the book.Rebecca Gransden: Where there are gaps in this text, there are gaps in my life. I was only able to write this introductory material after an extended break from text of all types. They say the only way to get out of a black hole is to have never gone into it. While I don’t recommend going any further into this one, it’s already too late for you. -Roy Christopher, 2024 What’s the deal? When and how was this written and translated? Where does Roy Christopher fit into all this? Chase Griffin: Zoidoid was written in an alternate 1980’s by an alternate-me. And Roy is an alternate-Roy. And Roy has half-translated (half-translated because he suffered some Lovecraftian-madness while translating and he couldn't finish) Zoidoid from a fake future language (alternate-me is also a philologist) into English. Thanks for writing that intro, alternate-Roy!RG: How long did it take to write Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace? Did time pass fast or slow or in-between?CG: It took a year to write Zoidoid in my head. I was working as an overnight stocking clerk at the time. And it took a couple nights to let the whole thing pour out of my head onto the page. The year was long because overnight jobs are fucking awful. The two days passed slowly, but that was a pleasant slowness. I think one of the greatest feelings in the world is being in the midst of that fabulous kind of writer's schizophrenia when time stands still and the alien worm voice guides the pen.RG: It’s been a while since I've written in commonplace. I shouldn't be writing so sporadically in here... the way I’ve been writing in here for the past twenty or so units. I am realizing now that I should be much more diligent. What are your aims regarding language and style for the book? Any intentions regarding world building or backstory?CG: Context: Peter has this notebook filled with his archeologist, archivist parents' writings on the past (our present) and the language of the past and how the language might be able to unlock the secrets of the mind control device permeating all. Further context: So the commonplace book referenced is both Peter's diary (the back half of the fictional notebook which makes up the whole of Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace) and an archeologist book (the front half of the fictional notebook which we do not get to read).I went with this constrained epistolary style because that style best suits a story about translation and a world that makes unreliable narrators of its population.RG: Believe me, I wish I could turn off fresh emphasis. I don't want this trouble. I wish to be a googly-eyed wacko normie schmuck just like everyone else. Who needs this kind of stress?What would you like to emphasise?CG: I don’t know. Having a faulty, sparky monkey brain is great. There’s nothing wrong with the mass madness that is humanity. Because none of it matters. I love my madness. It’s my superpower. And only the outwardly mad ones are the sane ones. We’re all flawed and terrible because we’re gross animals. But who cares. Let’s all forgive each other for being born dumb animals. The sooner we get over this mass psychological determinism we are all bound to, then the sooner the big, dumb Doubt can begin, and then we can all accept it, and then we can go ahead and finally begin gently, cautiously being big, dumb monkeys attempting to not be big, dumb monkeys (which I think involves a lot of mass inaction and quiet and staving off entropy and the elders starving for the young (my modest proposal)). Maybe it is written that we will stop doing things for long periods of time. Maybe it is written that we will finally give up and realize we’re not good or better because we’ve done nothing bad. We’re just lucky. The circumstances we were born into gave us ourselves. We did nothing to earn a self. Not one of us has free will. So these words don’t matter. Nothing matters.God, I’m such a drama queen.Ask me tomorrow. I’ll emphasize a belief in something tomorrow.RG: Why am I still eating this dip?What is the best dip? What is your favourite dip? (Not necessarily connected).CG: Guacamole. Guacamole.RG: Have you ever smirked momentously?CG: Sure. After a good fart. RG: I believe I'm having a strange reaction to death. Makes sense. I often have strange reactions to many things.Have you ever had a strange reaction? Do you aim to establish a particular type of reaction in those who read your work?CG: Sure, I have strange reactions all the time. Life is weird and I have a faulty, sparky monkey brain. And no, not really. I'm not looking to establish a particular reaction in readers. I'm looking for readers who are down to have fun with the text.RG: I think I will crack open my briefing case. Today's setting will be archoniff sider and maybe it will help with my damn sass. What is the importance of sass to Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace? Where does sass begin and end? How much is too much? Does sass have an objective measure?CG: It might not be sass. Sass might be a random word that Roy chose when he was translating. And I don't know about the beginning and ending of sass. Maybe there is no beginning or ending. Yes, I feel like sass has an objective measure and its measuring instrument is an oversized spanner covered in purposeless springs and gears. RG: Please introduce Bippy.CG: Bippy is Peter's dead mom’s cat. This prissy furball is the hero of the book and the best character I have ever written.RG: I’ve written too much and I am going to become an unshakable thing. How horrid!Have you encountered any horrid unshakeable things, either in the writing of the book or generally?CG: Surely. All the time. I encounter horrid unshakable things all the time. I live in a densely populated village. How could I not encounter horrid unshakable things? Don’t read the local paper, by the way. But what am I to do? Nothing really. I see it all as character building. I have to be like the Buddha Or maybe not. People suffer so much more than me, so why shouldn’t I suffer some too? I just got lucky because I wasn't born into terrible circumstances. No one earned anything. How horrid! RG: The book features song lyrics. Are there melodies behind these lyrics or do they exist solely on the page?CG: I have melodies for them, but the reader can make up whatever melody they want.RG: What significance does music have to Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace? Do any bands or albums share common elements?CG: Music plays a big role in prosody, and prosody is very important to me.Music is always on my mindMusic prompted the writing of Zoidoid. One night at work, while I was listening to “Doctor Worm” by They Might Be Giants, I came up with the basic outline for Zoidoid.Also, Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace and its fraternal twin, Satanic Panic & the Very Special Episodes (they will be published together as The Ampersand Collection on Corona Samizdat), are like the twin Guided By Voices albums Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes. The common elements are the signal issues and equipment blockage. The books and the albums have these fun messages to send you but the low studio quality and signal issues (mostly due on both parts to limited budget) only allow fuzzy snippets of the messages to get through. And, of course, this fuzzy snippet-ness (this constraint technique) is all a part of the charm.RG: I am the only untranslatable person in the world. There's no one here who can decipher the whispered gibberish.Does your writing demand comprehension? What is lost or found in translation?CG: My writing doesn't demand comprehension. All that matters is the emotion and the emphasis, the incomprehensible human-ness (the faulty, sparky monkey-ness), poking through the rigmarole-membrane of the literal and figurative institutions. My works are more like fantasy and fairy tales (which don't require explanations for their motions) than science fiction (which is like a fairy tale giving excuses for its behavior).RG: How do you define New and Old?CG: Pre-old is our time. Old is the glorious golden civilization that arose from the ashes of our time. New is the oppressive society that followed the downfall of Old.RG: Does Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace have anything to say when it comes to politics and current affairs?CG: Not sure. I don't think there's much to say. We're all actor-bodies of the leviathan-theatre and all political conversation is a big script. It's all catechisms. Even what I just wrote. And also with you! Gesundheit!But maybe the book is asking about obscurantisms and mesmerisms. Are we searching too hard or too little for obscurantisms and mesmerisms? Are we too paranoid or not paranoid enough? Should we be putting our energy elsewhere? Is this, the searching and obsessing over possible hidden things, a design—like a figurative Air Loom? RG: How do you approach the use of signs and symbolism in your work?CG: Character and story always come first. The conceptual materials are handed to me by the characters and the story. Then comes the welding torch.Going back to music, this is how a lot of the great concept albums were made. Fellowshipping equals motif discovery.RG: Onomatopoeia—what are its limits?CG: What are the patience-limits of your ideal reader?RG: How would you advise someone approach reading this book? Any particular demeanour or method of engagement that would enhance the experience?CG: My books like to be read aloud (although many readers have told me they prefer to read them silently)—in the same way Shakespeare is best ingested when read aloud aloud. Not saying I’m Shakespeare by the way. I need to add way more dick and fart jokes to my work if I want to be Shakespeare. With something like Hamlet, even if you don't understand the language and the cultural references, if you read it aloud you understand the emotions and the emphasis. And maybe that kind of understanding is more important than direct understanding, which is an understanding that always ends up getting folded into the flux.Also, use whatever pronunciation you want for my made-up words. And then stick to whatever pronunciation you choose.RG: I looked back to Shea to make sure he wasn't examining my facial expressions too closely.What facial expression best expresses what Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace is trying to express?CG: How about that fun face Johnny Cash is making in that famous picture of him flipping the bird?RG: Do you hate computers?CG: Meh. I'm pretty indifferent. What even is a computer? Are they terrible for the earth, like air conditioners and cars?RG: Believe me. I didn't want to trust him. I didn't want to set aside my urge to stomp his brains in. I didn't want to not hate him, the fucking mentor fuck. But I submitted, and I set it all aside.Have you ever trusted someone to be your mentor? If so, what influence have they had upon Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace?CG: No. No mentors.There have been Lots of cool old guys and gals in my life though and they’ve given me really good advice. Please excuse this aside. The most trustworthy old people I ever met was this hippie-pirate couple who owned this fantastic used bookstore and junkshop called The Memex. I spent most of my youth sitting in the back of their store reading old copies of Mondo2000, the Illuminatus Trilogy, Rocco Atleby novels, Ursula Le Guin, and the Whole Earth Catelog.RG: Do you ever get the feeling of brain growth caused by reading? In a physical, oh jeez, something changed and I’m not sure in what way?CG: Yeah, definitely. I feel squirming sometimes. And I hear a little voice. The voice says things like, “It's just you and me, buddy,” and, “More guacamole, please.”RG: What portmanteaus, neologisms and/or spoonerisms do you like? Are there literary devices you would NEVER use, because they are lame? Conversely, are there literary devices you consider underused, so would like to advocate for?CG: I like whatever looks good on the page. And, I don't like to knock stuff. Because I wouldn't want to indirectly knock a fellow writer’s style. Everybody is allowed to do their thang. And, I don't know what's overused or underused. I use devices when the need arises.RG: Is there a chance that Bippy could have her own spinoff universe?CG: Yes, absolutely. Bippy deserves ten books.RG: Which renowned philosophers would read and appreciate Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace?CG: He’s a TV character, but I feel like Bernard Black might like my book. I had his voice in my head, impatiently making up words and saying sassy lil deconstructions, when I was writing this one.Although, Bernard would probably open my book, drop a piece of jammy toast in it, make a face at his mess, and then toss the book-jam-toast monstrosity at an annoying customer.RG: How is information transferred via Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace?CG: Information is transferred through the air via the Air Loom.Spoiler alert: The Air Loom was built during the golden civilization when we finally figured out the horrible truth. We built the Air Loom in order to hide the Lovecraftian revelation from ourselves.RG: Have you ever kept a journal, diary, or log?CG: Yeah, I keep a journal. I mostly write about the cute things my kids do. I keep a commonplace book too. That’s where I do all of my story and character mining.RG: What is your dream for the book?CG: My dream is for it to get folded into the book cocooning all of my current books, SCHLEMIEL GAUCHO, which is about this one-man Brothers Grimm who is collecting postmodern fairy tales (my books) before they are swallowed up by the flux and incorporated in the fold.RG: Where is Peter Zoidoid and where is Chase Griffin?CG: Peter Zoidoid is in the book writing with the slime-pen filled and Chase Griffin is in Tampa writing this answer.
A miracle had come to the mansion that evening, dressed in peasant robes as she played go on the doorstep. The house of Lord Liu was in desperate need of a blessing. The past month had been disastrous for those staffed within its walls. The change from a serene yet celebratory atmosphere had quickly dulled after one of the maids caught sight of the Lady’s physician leaving her room with a cut over one eye. Surmising that he had said something to anger her, rumors spread over the course of a single night – vines choking the mansion halls, blossoming with fragrant anecdotes.The less fantastical yet albeit as shocking truth was made clear the next day, when all the maids were assigned dark sashes to wear across their waists. A sign of mourning, a homage to the Lady’s stillborn daughter. They were to wear them throughout the year and were warned to tread carefully around the Lady’s room, as she was, according to the physician's report, “of a disagreeable disposition.”When servants came to deliver her meal trays, they came silently, heads hung low like crouching flower stems. She would get angry over the most menial details – a stray stain on one’s cheek, a distractingly uneven gait. Once she had clutched a young maid by the cheeks, demanding she get on her knees and pluck out her own eyes.Those are my daughter’s, do you understand, you knave? My daughter would have had those eyes. Her nails dug into the maid’s face, drawing blood with her thin fingers. She would have had them. Greedy. All of you, taking what isn’t yours.No one could bring themselves to complain. Employment at the wealthiest home in their village was the best most of them could achieve, beyond taking up whatever meager trade their families specialized in. They were well compensated, and much of their pay sustained relatives. They were servants, masters of staying out of the way when need be, so they listened as she wailed night after night and learned to adjust.It was on another of those tumultuous evenings that the girl arrived at their doorstep. She couldn’t have been more than eight years old, barefoot in white robes, setting up black and white go stones on a wooden board. Her dark hair was short, brushing against her shoulders, two buns tied with lavender ribbon on either side of her head. At first, she appeared to be some beggar child, perhaps sent out to be the breadwinner by a parent. More careful parents would have their children rummage through the cook’s trash, and the servants, who had all come close to living similar lives, turned their heads whenever they saw mousy clumsily scampering off with bones and rinds. The nature of her posture, too straight and poised to be that of a poor person, was immediately suspicious. Her robes were free from blemish. Though she wore no shoes, her feet were similarly spotless. Most striking of all was her skin – the palest, most enviable shade imaginable. Courtesans spent half their earnings on lead powder to reach such lengths, and died before they ever could.The maids exchanged furtive glances. They ought to remove her quickly, or call one of the guards – how had she managed to evade them, anyway? And while lugging that wooden go board, too?Before any of them could attempt to escort the girl off the premises, the Lady appeared from the opposite end of the courtyard. None of them realized she had left her room, and her steps held no trace of a sound. Her dark, ebony colored hair slid in lazy circles down her back, uncombed for days. “Who,” she said aloud, in that quiet tone that suggested a beating, “are you?” “Hello.” She rubbed a white go stone between her fingers and looked up eagerly.That day, the Lady of the house received the daughter she had so badly wanted.
. . .
She was, according to the maids, a no-name girl from a no-name land.Her official words were that her parents had died of plague, and she was now an orphan. The go board and stones belonged to her father, the last sentimental possession she carried. The establishment they used to run had been burnt to the ground to stop potential contagion. She was – according to her words – all alone and dearly missing her mother, and had caught word of the compassionate Lady Yin of the Liu household. Compassionate? Was the same dry, echoing thought in all the servant’s minds. By now everyone had heard of how unhinged she’d become during her time of social recluse. She was still visited periodically by other court women, but solely because she was of higher rank and could not be disrespected in such a way without the possibility of punishment.Compassionate was not a word that could be used to describe her any longer, but it was the one the go-girl used, and just the thing to soften the Lady’s hardened heart. She had taken the orphan in and claimed her as her own. The Lord had contested the decision at first, but he worried that any comment on the girl would revert his wife back to her former state. Lady Yin kept the girl at her side during all her daily activities. During the few times she left the house – still publicly in her year of mourning – she toted her newfound child with her. The Lord had decided that the girl was a cousin they were charitably adopting. Visitors had no choice but to believe it – she had all the doubtless exuberance of a noble. She looked like the Lady, and many theorized that once she was of age, the two would be difficult to discern from a distance. The girl was not prone to childish outbursts. She wasn’t meek by any means, but she never seemed to share the tantrums of others her age. She settled disagreements by striking deals, a skill that amused elders of the House. They engaged in her games for their own fun, and thought nothing of the calculated way she examined their moves, mistaking her serene expression for complacency.But the servants noticed the girl’s strolls through town, where she talked with any established businessmen she could – and their sons. She was never swayed by material things. Birthday gifts of jewels and silk managed a thin smile from her. And when she was presented with a meal, she ate alone unless it was required that she dine with guests. A guard posted outside her window had caught her pouring soup on the flowers below, a wastefulness that could never have been attributed to someone of her supposed origins. All their combined observations were, together, a coal lump of speculation. How could they explain the bone-chilling coldness of the girl’s skin, the strange way she smiled, as though unsure of how her cheeks would shift when she did? How she embraced her mother with all the affection of an undertaker, arms stiff as wood? For a while they entertained the notion that she was a demon – told stories to each other in the servants’ quarters about how often the Lady and Lord would get sick now that they’d accepted the girl as their own. Some days it seemed they were well and truly dying, with how skinny the Lady had gotten, though she insisted that she was fine, that she was getting better; she said all these things as she cradled the young girl in her arms, the girl who was squeezing her fragile mother tightly, latched onto her skin like lice.The conclusion came upon them swiftly. The girl had come when the House was at its weakest, the Lady at her most vulnerable, to drain every last drop of good fortune from them. And what would the servants do once their master was buried and gone? Where would they go? Back to the streets, every last one of them, begging as they once did, or working in the sweltering forges, or sewing cheap tarps in the shops. They had been nothing before and would be less than nothing now, the dirt that lined the irrigation canals.So they plotted, as servants are naught to do, and waited until the girl had departed to her own chambers – which took days, to the point where the cook had suggested they just pry her off, the Lady was too delirious to know, she’d probably appreciate the lack of weight pressing against her feeble lungs. At the behest of the maids, they waited for the girl to finally leave her mother’s side, all teary-eyed as she sullenly returned to her room.They caught her as she was about to climb into bed. Her eyebags were swollen and dark, and her skin paler than usual. She shuffled onto bed like a maggot, and asked quietly for the furs she adorned herself with before sleeping. The maid held the blankets above the girl’s head, intending to drape them over her shoulders, and with the other hand sliced her neck.The girl made a sound, something like a whine, an animalistic noise. The blood gushed from her in crimson ribbons, streaming down the bed. The other servants left their hiding spaces and circled the maid with the knife to watch the demon die. It twitched on the mattress, writhing weakly, fighting with a frail, human-like strength. It made slow motions with its mouth. What demon cried out mother with such a cracking voice?They all seemed to shake their heads at the same time. No, they thought, watching the little girl go still on the mattress, she was killing them all.
Before getting into bed, Gaspar Santos plopped his dentures into a glass of water. He adjusted himself into a comfortable position between the sheets, sinking into the softened mattress, and eased gently into his sleep.Back in his younger days he had been a pearl hunter, and in the wee hours of night he dreamt he was diving deep in the sea, exposed once again to sharks and fanciful currents. Darkness and silence besieged him, and no matter which way he looked, he could not make out an oyster. All at once he realized he had descended deeper than was advisable and his oxygen would run out before he could reach the surface. Gaspar Santos’s muffled scream was released as a burst of panic bubbles. He flapped his arms and legs, convinced he would not make it. Unable to calculate the distance, he felt he would soon capitulate, but in the exact instant in which he involuntarily thrust open his mouth, he emerged to the surface of sleep and gulped an unexpected mouthful of air.Soaked in sweat, he became aware of the clinic as his breathing slowly returned to normal. His eyes caught on the dentures. The bluish light filtering in through the window blurred the outlines of the glass, and he discovered a likeness that cracked him up. His prosthetic teeth, submerged in the bottom of his glass, resembled a marine oyster. Gaspar Santos’s laugh bounced against the walls and multiplied in the night of Mindanao. It was a laugh imbued with generosity and delight; the only thing missing was some teeth.
Noah Rymer’s domain is that of the illuminated store, the lonely places on the outskirts of town, the back rooms of an America in thrall to the failure of its own myth. With denouement (Anxiety Press, 2025) Rymer envisions a peripatetic slumberland, surroundings subject to abstruse moods. Nowhere addicts succumb to an anaesthetised pulse, ensnared by the numb rhythms of a society gone ill on its symptoms. I spoke to Noah about the book.Rebecca Gransden: Simple place to start, where did denouement begin? It strikes me as a piece that has a lifetime’s worth of backstory and experience tied up in its making, but do you recognise a point at which it came to take hold, to form its current incarnation?Noah Rymer: denouement definitely has its roots from a lifetime spent in suburbia, but it’s hard to think of when it all came together. Most of it stemmed from a desire to explore the psychogeography and mythology of the American suburb, the misé en scene of what surrounded me growing up.I remember being very much influenced by classic Americana literature such as ‘The Swimmer’ and Don Delilo’s White Noise, the latter of which I stole heavily from. Reading Delilo really set things in motion, and helped flesh out a lot of what I wanted to do with denouement. Hearing The Specials’ “Ghost Town” for the first time was huge—it became the theme song for the book. I think reading Baudelaire was crucial to the storyreallycoming together as well; my unnamed character quotes a bit of French in the graveyard scene, which is actually a prose-ified part of my favorite Baudelaire poem, “The Swan.” His [Baudelaire’s] understanding of boredom-as-vice plays a huge factor in how the story develops, because almost everything is arrived at because of an inherent desire not to be bored, to satiate a certain curiosity.RG: Your writing lives in suburbia, on highways, down supermarkets aisles. The places that are everywhere and nowhere. How do your characters react to these environments? There’s a background uniformity, a sameness, to the landscape that suggests a melancholic form of inertia, as there is no hope of a different place to escape to, even if a moving away is possible. How does psychogeography factor into your work?NR: I think my characters are suffused with an inherent sadness, a damning boredom from their surroundings. I know I was. There’s always been something sinister to me about suburbia, and I’ve carried that sense of unfamiliarity within me ever since I was a kid. They (my characters) are trapped in a state of limbo, a kind of purgatory, a labyrinth with no apparent exit. Psychogeography has been a fervent interest of mine these past couple of years, and denouement definitely wouldn’t’ve been the same if I hadn’t read Debord before working on it; reading the Situationalist International Anthology was huge for me. I love the dérive as well, although I utilized the tactic more so when I was in the city. I believe I unconsciously applied the tactic to the lives of my characters—they themselves are drifting through life, their whims their only guide, and so they move through the story semi-randomly, through their own desires. But I still think that, eventually, they will escape. Purgatory implies some progression towards the divine, a sanctification through trials, and that is what I intended for my characters. After I wrote denouement, actually, I understood it as part of a triptych—like Bosch’s The Garden Of Earthly Delights, or a literary trilogy—like Dante’s Divine Comedy. So this is my Purgatorio; I’ve just finished writing an Inferno, and right now I’m penning my Paradisio. So all of what I write is guided towards an ultimately hopeful and cathartic end, even if it doesn’t seem that way at first.RG:she moved like a ghost throughout the two-story and basement as if it were a decrepit Gothic castle, damaged by an unspeakable past with an uncertain future in permanent collision with the former, crashing in slo-motion. her voice came out scratchy and uncertain, like the movements of a deathly-rusted machine.The machine is a theme I picked up on, whether it be rattling radiators and air-conditioned rooms of suburban living or the gasoline gods that drift the roads of a ritualized America. There is a rhythmic force to your writing that parallels the propulsion of the machine. How do you view the machine when it comes to your fiction?NR: denouement is very much car-centric because it is a product of American culture. Yet it is fetishistic in a different way than how Crash approaches it;it is fetishistic in the sense of ‘fetish’ as an idol worshiped. The car becomes the byword for ‘freedom,’ self-propulsion, to be one’s own person. The car is Promethean. In other moments, though, I can see and understand transit (the metro, the car, the bus) as a kind of modernization of Charon’s ferry, so there’s a duality there: that of self-propulsion, and of being brought to one’s end, in the teleological sense.As an aside, I also think that the rhythmic propulsion that you mention was influenced by listening to acid house during the writing process. It’s the kind of music that seeps into you, dictates how you pound the keyboard, how you understand the movement of your characters—both in their own gestures as well as how they themselves glide through the story by your own writer’s hand. And acid house, of course, is a perfectly machinated genre of music. It is thoroughly inorganic and plastic, and, as such, perfectly represents and replicates the prefabricated and artificial social structure of the suburbs.RG:denouement addresses the protracted decline of a culture enthralled by consumerist doctrine. Stores are meccas, a place subliminally signaling a religion substitute, a surrogate for the protections of family. Shopping is framed not as a task undertaken out of need, but as an experience, with store displays taking on artistic dimensions. What was your approach to the theme of consumerism for denouement?NR: Mere observation. I think that’s what most of the novella was, actually—making passive observations and then adding my personal commentary. I think I tapped into consumerism in particular because I used to work at a grocery store for a couple of years, and so I was completely inundated by it all. I used to dream of working, actually. I couldn’t escape the flow of commerce. I heard the machinations of product in my mind, at home, wherever I went, and it became an all-consuming force. It’s also because America has an inherently capitalistic framework: consumption is built into the American mindset, is as natural as breathing. It also helps that I’m Catholic, and the parallels between genuine religious experience and its secularized equivalents become just clear enough to be properly horrified at. We live in an age of substitution, of signifiers who have forgotten what they signify. All of the crosses become inverted.RG: There is music to the world of denouement. The beeps from cash registers, the humming of refrigerators, all serve to create an environment primed to lull your characters into a form of unconscious automatic functioning, sleepwalking consumers wrapped in a narcotic and dazed mindset. Music acts find a place at a dive called Rat King. Traffic flows. I understood your characters as possessing an unconscious drive to break free from the rhythm. How do your characters attune to the rhythm? What place does chance play?NR: As I mentioned before, I was listening to a lot of acid house during the writing and editing process, and I think that dissociative groove is very much baked into the story. My characters are smart enough to recognize the palliative aspects of all of these forms of machinated harmony, to point it out and commentate on it, but cannot escape feeling dehumanized themselves by their presence, alienated by what surrounds them. They can’t escape it. Intelligence cannot, and does not, grant salvation, so even if Julie can, for example, see the kids at the house party and recognize how completely dead inside they are as they perfectly synchronize in doing the Macarena, she still can’t escape from feeling dead inside herself. Chance doesn’t play too big of a role in the story for me, but I do think it leads to revelation. The first example of this is the unnamed character wandering to the bedroom where they’re having the orgy, and she is able to see it for what it really is: a desperate hedonistic escape, a fantasy that has collapsed in on itself and is now shown in all of its depravity. The second example is at the end of the novella, when she stumbles upon the old bluesman singing his little hymn and at that moment is shown the light in a small but meaningful way. And she realizes a form of catharsis in writing down the events of the night. RG: Small details imbue the world of denouement with its own energy. Your descriptions ensnare the background detritus and panorama of modernity. Advertisements, branding, flyers become beacons. When it comes to style, is that something you’ve honed over time or has it evolved naturally?NR: It’s hard to say. I think it’s a little bit of both. In the process of writing denouement, I surrounded myself with a particular set of influences that would help me nail the aesthetic and the atmosphere: Gregg Araki films, Euripides’ Bacchae, Dub Housing by Pere Ubu, Jim Morrison’s poetry. So in that sense it was honed. But I do think my style has also evolved naturally, because I’ve always been writing about the dark side of suburbia—denouement represents the sum total of that. I think all the themes and ideas that I had experimented with prior find their fullest expression here. It was something that I was unconsciously working towards.RG: A character that stands out to me is The Milkman. He’s a purveyor of illicit substances, and the persona he’s invented for himself toys with the idea of drugs as a healing or palliative measure. He refers to his clients as ‘patients.’ What medicine is The Milkman delivering?NR: Milk was actually a cameo for a character I originally wrote in a short story, ‘Dead Los Angeles’. But in denouement he’s a lot more sinister, Luciferian, the closest thing to an antagonist within the narrative. I think it’s a negative healing that he delivers, that he ultimately wants to ensnare people within that palliative haze. But at the same time the drugs he administers to the unnamed character provide the opposite effect to what recreational drugs usually do.Instead of masking reality, he reveals it as much as he revels in it; The Milkman is physically a person, but spiritually an insect, a disgusting cockroach-like beast whose layer of humanity peels off as soon as my unnamed character takes the drugs. And so she sees things for how they really are—everyone becomes a manifestation of their own vice, and so their ugliness is presented on the outside as well as on the inside.I tried to reveal the spiritual reality through a material monstrosity the way that Flannery O’ Connor utilizes the grotesque in her stories to the same end. Milk was also inspired by the passage in Genesis where the serpent tempts Eve to eat of the fruit of The Tree of Good and Evil, and in a sense, the unnamed character has a certain innocence that Milk completely shatters. But to be completely honest, I originally wrote him in as an excuse to write the Burroughs-esque/Cronenbergian scene that follows. So I had a lot of fun writing my interpretation of a bad trip. But I’m also glad I found something to say with it as well.RG: the doors flew open with a quick BANG and quickly slammed against the wall as a robber, in an act of nervous bravado, announced his presence in a voice that was strong and shaky, the first-time tremor of a decent kid hard-up and down on his luck. his dialogue was clearly influenced by all the gangster movies he watched, his actions betraying famous scenes and heists studied carefully on the screen. but in his execution, it all fell to pieces, like a bad theater student trying their hand at improv.Your writing poses the question of what part the cinematic plays in culture, and to what degree the screen simultaneously reflects, infiltrates, or guides. Is film an influence on your work?NR: I’m glad you asked the question, because I used to be a film critic! Film is perhaps the biggest influence on my work, and I always imagine my writing playing out like one. I’m always thinking in terms of lighting, cinematography, staging, etc., and tend to think of my stories on the visual level, as opposed to in terms of plot, dialogue, or anything which would be more literary than filmic.I’ve always been interested in the mimetic qualities of film as well, which goes all the way back to Aristotle’s Poetics and his understanding of tragedy as something that we imitate, that we take on the emotions of the tragic hero and thus experience catharsis—the evocation of fear and pity. But, as you point out through the excerpt, mimesis can tend more towards the copying of actions, the erasure of the boundaries between real life and media. I think American Psycho influenced me in this way—there are scenes where Patrick Bateman is watching a horror movie before he kills someone, or pornography before he goes to pick up a prostitute. And then there’s Emperor Nero, who thoroughly blurred the distinctions between real-life and the stage throughout his tenure as ruler. I couldn’t tell you what all of this means, exactly—either in relation to my own work or the culture as a whole. But there’s definitely something there, something dangerous and revelatory. RG:Immediately, an intense, suffocating silence was draped over the masses like a burial shroud, stifling the slightest whimper or roll of a solitary tear with the immediate brutality of what had just been said. Death was supposed to be something far from our own reality, something that only happened to the elderly, or a distant relative. Now the truth had appeared, uninvited and unwarranted, with horrific immediacy. Class was dismissed for that day and the next.In “The Book of the Dead” a string of deaths brings a dose of weirdness to a small town. It is a place where conspiracists stir a form of religious apocalypticism and the residents look for a mystical driving force behind events. What is your approach to the strangeness of suburbia?NR: I think the strangeness is most defined by not delving into Lynchian territory (or trying not to, at least), even though Lynch has always been a huge influence on my work. So I write the alienation that I personally feel, and how that alienation can manifest outwardly. But I usually take cues/steal from horror movies and weird fiction in order to fully realize the ‘suburban gothic.’ I think of what I do as inherently expressionistic, that the inner world of my characters is reflected in their environments, but I do think it also goes vise-versa. RG:denouement will be released by Anxiety Press. How have you found the process of working with them, and what is your opinion of the small press scene in general?NR: It’s been pretty chill, honestly! I just sent over the manuscript to the E.I.C. and he said it looked cool, that he’d like to work on it. He sent over the cover art some time ago, which I liked, and that’s all there’s been so far. I haven’t spoken to the guy since August, but I figure he’s pretty busy as is, so I’ll try not to bother him. I am a little biased, since I run a small press myself (Pere Ube), but I do have a lot of love for the scene—at least, the handful of indies that I prize above the rest: I gotta give props to joints like Ex-Pat, BRUISER, and APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL. I usually have a more adverse reaction to the other presses and mags, particularly the ones that are seeking to serve an agenda, to fill a quota. From what I’ve seen in a lot of contemporary indie presses, there’s a belief that fiction must have a social purpose, must be representative of diversity, must be didactic, and that all seems like such a drag to me. The small presses that I mentioned, that I like, are good because they prioritize the craft of the writing rather than the identity of the writer, and I respect that more than anything else.RG: Do you consider how someone who reads your work might react to it?NR: All the time! But it’s less of ‘will they like this’ and more of ‘will they understand what I’m trying to say.’RG: There is an idea that once you live long enough in the same place, it begins to turn sour the more you try to identify it, understand it, dissect it—ants swarming over the bloated corpse of a crow or spiders eating the insides of a caterpillar in well-trimmed lawns and clean-cropped woods, that very soon every house becomes a haunted house, even the one you grew up in and have lived in your whole life, and yet it all comes to a conclusion within the simple realm of psychology, paranoia, mental illness and the like, residing within little else but Zoloft-hallucinations and cough-syrup.The above excerpt is lifted from “Prom”. Does denouement haunt you?NR: Everything haunts me; denouement is just an attempt at putting it all on the page.
I notice some crocodile cracking near the bend, which is already pitched the wrong way—against the turn, so as a car’s tires point left the road’s normal force pushes it right, recipe for a rollover—and think somebody’s going to get killed. So I go to the municipal office to complain, but no one’s there. BE BACK SOON says the sign. So I grab one of the envelopes and start to write on it, just right on the envelope, my name is Ryan Pendleton I live at 29 Keep Tryst Rd in the Hermitage and someone’s going to get hurt and then the woman comes back, hi can I help you? And I say yes who can I talk to about some alligator cracking in the road, and she says pardon me, and I say I mean there’s bad damage, something really terrible could happen, I grew up by that bend and I know how kids drive on it, it’s dangerous even without the cracks, who can I talk to about putting a sign up? and scheduling some maintenance? And she says sir that would be traffic, or well hold on, paper shuffle, to be exact you’d probably have to talk to the sheriff about the sign, and the maintenance would be the state department of transportation, and by now I’ve been here ten fifteen minutes, all in the wrong place, so I’m starting to get a little short with her, not her fault and I’d like to think not mine either but I say okay, the sheriff as in across the street? Or across town? because I can’t remember if it’s the cop cars that say Monroeville Police that park across the street and the cop cars that say Duquesne County Sheriff that park across town, or the other way round, and she says as in across town, and I say I walked here, you know, I don’t have a car, I can’t walk all the way down Main Street and still get there in time, can you call him? And she says okay sir but I’m sure he’ll ask you to set up an appointment, maybe for Monday but I’m not certain, and that’s when my fist hits the desk, involuntarily really, I am just six layers deep of not getting this simple fucking concern addressed, and as I’m trying to level my voice back out Is There A Problem Here? and I turn and no-sir one of the Monroeville Police’s uniformed officers, not even the correct side of town but he’s eyeing me, he’s right by the envelope I put down, just trying to get some information here sir as regards a road near where I live and of course he picks it up and reads it, and the woman’s face doesn’t not register fear, and secondly I may or may not be a known Concealed licensed entity to some among the Duquesne blue so suddenly Monroeville’s More-or-Less Finest is doing some spring kinematics in his head, one hand hipped and one hand in the kind of palm-forward configuration that’s meant to calm but really feels like he’s trying to summon some kind of invisible force power to get you where he wants you, at the very least down and disarmed, and while he’s getting closer I’m thinking of Eddie, that girl from high school’s little brother who didn’t wear a seatbelt when his sister’s friends were whipping around Long Pond Road and lost control and it was only Eddie who went through the windshield, only him, probably saw the most amazing shower of glass before he lost everything, upside down blood in his head and shiny shards in the late afternoon sun, maybe he heard his science teacher Mr. Bonner saying something about the states of matter, how glass is not exactly a liquid but it’s not entirely right to call it just a solid, either, it is an a-morph-ous solid, which I always remembered because it sounded like Animorphs, and just like Tobias glass was always ready to change, to break, and it didn’t have any long range pattern either, glass is random and it’s not brittle like a crystal it can be blown and shaped into something like the big thick tempered mostly bulletproof window I fell into, after, BE BACK SOON, the blood eddying behind my tongue, sunset coming and the bamboo shoots still growing silently silently towards the road, an inch and a half per hour, and when they’re wet they bend down, they’re so easy to hit, you have to pay attention—
The night trees were blue by the Wensum. Eels seethed in a ditch. In the flint wall of a garden a door trembled. A green man sat naked on the riverbank, his feet in the water, head nodding, vines and tendrils ran down his chest. A swan guzzled between his legs, blood flowed down his mossy thighs. Twitching and jiggling, burning ropes suspended from the boughs of a hawthorn tree. Across a playing field the cathedral rose, all spire, dissolving sour yellow into the sky, drifting towards the moon.Cakes were scattered in the mud by the Watergate. The girl guides were elsewhere, in bed. The guides’ carers were in bed also. Or sitting at a kitchen table with a mug of malted milk staring at their reflection in the black glass of a garden door.A walking stick, made from a shark’s backbone, floated down the river. A leprous-white hand attached. And to the hand, an arm, a body. Lids flickered; eyes opened; large, luminous green. The man was a watcher. Watching himself looking out for others to whom he could attach his gaze.Andrea tucked the hospital gown into the waistband of her jeans. She sang a song of her own making. She smiled, which made her think of teeth, her teeth, and she smiled again, broader this time. A plaster covered the puncture mark in her left hand. The hand was sore, and several of the fingers were numb at their tips. She stopped and looked at her hand, fearing, for a moment, that it would become another thing, shears or claws or jaws, or another’s. Another’s perfect hand, unscarred, cold and steady with silver fingernails and dry palms. Andrea wanted to be sure that she would not change any more than was necessary.Men came down the path. Three men. One stared, eyes out of his head. One sang and leered. One walked with a swinging stride, hands in pockets, his face two tiny eyes, a red gash of wet lips. Three men taking possession of the night.Andrea knew the moment they noticed her from the thickening of the air in her throat, from the return of pain to her left shoulder, from the sudden heaviness of her boots, the stickiness of their soles. The men called. They told her what they thought she was. They told her what they wanted to do. They told her what they were going to do.Andrea stood still in the middle of the path. The river slowed and stopped. The river speeded up. The men came closer, growing smaller all the while. Andrea reached into the gown pocket and took out a gross anatomy knife. The men came on, their sounds more distant, their forms shrinking away. The handle was plastic, lemon yellow and warm. Andrea drew long lines where they might have been. The air parted with a sucking sound, again and again. The men whispered in the grass; they had not passed but they were gone.She tossed the knife into the river, wet before it hit the water, picked up her tune and followed the way towards the road. The trees shivered as she passed. Canaries with glass beaks fussed and chittered in the air a few feet above and behind. Andrea reached in her pocket and found the knife. Safe.Wavering orange light was visible through the trees, cries drifted with the smoke from Lollards Pit across the river. The path warped to her left, ran through a wicket, past a cottage and out before a tower. The Cow Tower. The place she would meet her friend Judith. Andrea walked on but could not see her. She passed round the tower to a tall iron gate and looked through. On a green silk divan reclined a large woman in a great fur coat.‘Aren’t you terrible hot, Judy?’‘I like to be cosy, don’t you know, old girl. You’re looking less than marvellous, if I might say. You made it here all right?’‘A little local difficulty. Nothing to speak of, darling. How did you get in there?’‘The ladies from the Adam and Eve carried me over. Would you believe it? Big girls the lot of them. My kind.’‘It’s been quite some time since last orders, Judy.’‘A long dry season, my friend, makes kindling of us all.’Judith reached over and switched on a tall standard lamp. Yellow light projected upwards, illuminating the canaries that swirled above where the upper floors used to be, making their beaks sparkle.‘How should I…’‘Just give a good firm shove, love.’The gate moved, shifting a mound of dried leaves forward with a hush. Andrea looked up and around. A dark circle of blue, the sky, a ring of gun ports, another of arrow loops, pellitory and red valerian grew in effusions on every welcoming surface.‘The armchair is for you, sweetie. You must be exhausted after your troubles. No one was less deserving of troubles than you, dearest. Curse the deserving, the bastards.’‘You wouldn’t have a cup of tea, would you?’‘Haven’t I flask? And a hamper too? You’re starved, of course.’Andrea took a melamine willow-pattern plate out of the basket and raided the same for gala pie, potato salad with chives, for asparagus spears sopping with butter, for sweet tomato chutney, for a salad of endives, marigold leaves, watercress and sorrel soured with vinegar. She was a long time eating and all the while Judith watched her contentedly, pulling from time to time on the pipe of a port sipper glass. Andrea poured herself a mug of tea and settled back in the armchair.‘Did you tell them at the hospital before you left? That you were going to leave?’‘I did not.’‘Might they look for you?’‘I suppose they might. But I’m here, aren’t I? Where they aren’t. And I haven’t done anything wrong.’‘You haven’t done anything wrong.’‘I haven’t done anything wrong.’‘You haven’t done anything wrong.’Andrea took a fat gulp of tea.‘Have I done something wrong, Judy?’‘You haven’t done anything wrong, my love. Not a thing.’‘Only to myself.’‘Only to yourself.’‘What did I do that for Judy?’‘You know why, honeybear.’‘I can take care of myself now.’‘You should.’‘Do you love me, Judy?’‘I do.’Judith patted the silk heavily raising a small cloud of dust out of the horsehair. Andrea dropped the mug and rose, the plate fell on the stones, she approached the sofa, Judith opened her coat and her arms and embraced Andrea, enfolding her, pulling her close, stroking her hair. Scents of parma violet, of turpentine, of chypre, of wet slate, of old leather, of smoking peat. As Andrea began to fall asleep Judith reached out and turned off the lamp. Judith could feel the knife through the gown.Andrea woke, blinking, alone on the divan, swaddled in fur. Six girls in brown and yellow uniforms crowded around the gate, gazing down at her, their faces bright, shiny and serious.‘She’s awake.’‘We can see that…’‘Would you like a cake, lady?’‘Shutup…’All but one of the girls laughed. The one who had offered the cake.‘Cake for breakfast?’ said Andrea.The girls danced, singing: ‘Cake for breakfast! Cake for breakfast!’Andrea walked, smiling, to the gate. The unsmiling girl pressed an open pink toffee tin forward. It was crowded with fairy cakes, each topped with a thick, vermicular swirl of buttercream and a scattering of blue and yellow sugar stars.‘Take one…’Andrea took one.‘Take another.’She took another.‘Thank you,’ said Andrea.‘Bye! Bye!’ said five of the girls, and they skipped off.The unsmiler stood still. She returned the lid to the tin.‘We’re picking up rubbish today. Along the river.’‘Oh…that sounds…’The girl interrupted her with a solar, yellow-toothed smile. She held the cake tin up at a distance from her uniform and marched away.Andrea shuffled off the fur. She stood looking up to the new sun and raised an arm to protect her face from a shower of hard bright objects; birdless glass beaks. Andrea squeezed through the narrow gate gap, turned back to the river. She walked down Ferry Lane towards Tombland.A lone horse passed by slowly, pulling an empty cart. In the shadowed window of a house was a rocking horse with a mouth too large for its head and ivory slabs for teeth, as if it had not quite finished eating a piano.The lane sank and river water flowed rapidly along the deep channel. Andrea stepped to one side and a large boat with a tall mast under a single sail came on, one man fore and another aft, throwing, pushing and pulling on long poles.Roped together on deck were two vast pieces of roughly dressed creamy limestone. The water flowed back to the river and the channel filled in.Andrea stopped next to a gate in a black iron fence. A sign read: Browne’s Meadow. She stepped in and onto the large bituminous rectangle of a car park bounded by red brick walls and, beyond these, by willows and sallows that nodded and soughed in a soft breeze. A fine, many-handed chestnut roan stood at the centre, its haunches facing her, its tail flicked as she approached. She made a wide circle round to face the horse, which she patted and then embraced around the neck. The ground became soft under her soles. The cars were sheep. The tarmac was grass and sweet briar, bramble and mulberry, whortle-berry and holly, juniper and gorse, cornelian and hazel; bilberries, redcurrants, gooseberries, dog’s mercury, barberries and bittersweet grew in random profusion. Andrea released the horse’s head and it plodded into the distance.Andrea sat in the wonder meadow. She felt the similitude of her limbs to the various parts of nature surrounding and thought of how she might be joined to them more completely, more fruitfully. Her skin was bark to her. Her body south-facing always, a spirit searching for union, for extension, for vegetable tranquillity; unpractised in green ways, in rootedness, but sapful, exalted and germinal. She might, with the aid of an artful incision, grow atop a hawthorn, or an alder, an oak or a hawthorn, or entwine herself for life within a gorse bush, a thousand shining yellow eyes, spiny green fingers, tough branched arms, scenting the air by day and night.Memory is an arsonist, setting fires cell-deep at ungovernable intervals of time and space. Lights go on, searching out pain. The hands of another. The mother voice, singing to block out the noise. Titanic laughter and with it confusion. Clouds, white, grey striations, disposed across the eye. The folded heron in the reed bed, the river drifting deeply, its world mirroring still. Judy sat on the orange plastic seats in casualty. And again, Judy waiting on the orange plastic seats in casualty. And later, Judy waiting on the green plastic seating in casualty. For Andrea to return, clean and swathed.It might be the deep chill damp of the earth rising or her body warmth sinking into the meadow but there is a gradual cooling, a dimming, an extinguishing. For the first time since memory began these hard fires, their successions, their wasting, their consummations, their miseries, go down and out and mindsmoke drifts, drifts away. The dark, at last, is light.The suffering blue of the sky called her back from the green, the hard tar and grit beneath her gown; a sheep, a car, beeping its horn.Andrea stood and brushed herself down. The driver spoke some sour words out of their window and reversed to park. Out in the lane Andrea headed for the cathedral close through a crowd of grinning, blue-uniformed boys. She sat on a bench and looked up at the pink-tinged spire, at a falcon stood distantly on the air aside its uppermost taper.‘When I rise,’ she said. ‘I shall be free.’
