Madison Murray, My Gaping Masshole (Self-published, 2025)A tart is born: Announcing Madison Murray’s fiction, poems, collages. The collection is replete with references to Boston (especially North Shore, Massachusetts). You know, Dunkin Donuts, clam chowdah, the Red Sox Big Green Monstah, Paul Revere, etc. My Gaping Masshole is one unholy, whole, big-ass jam on the concept. Murray’s lewd charm stains every page. My fave parts are Murray’s stories, with real laff-per-paragraph settings, characters, dialog. Of today’s several new writers who are also sex workers (or sex worker-adjacent), Murray is the raunchiest… and funniest.The geo-specificity reminds me of this essential William Blake riff from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive. And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity.” (Italics mine.) Not “genius” in the sense of Einstein (although that fits). But in the sense of the human imagination embodied in every locale. Every writer does this to a degree. I know I never cease the love-hate relationship with the Los Angeles of my mind. Of course, in 2025 we’re deep in tawdry, post-post-post irony mode, so Murray mocks and embodies a debased “mental deity” of Massachusetts with the obsessive affection of a dirty completist. Book vloggersThere’s a world of yackers on YouTube. Most stick to reviewing large-press fiction. But keener vloggers venture into independent presses and niche genres. Here are some trends. Best vloggers: Chanel Chapters (pictured) reviews from Melbourne with access to at least two excellent indie stores (Metropolis Bookshop and World Food Books) and local libraries. Chapters’ open mind, plunging cleavage, and sometimes potty mouth recently incited threats by YouTube to demonetize her! (All part of the global megamedia crackdown, folks.) But this reviewer continues to rock with wit, humor, urban tours and delicious fits. YouTube has not exactified what rules were broken, so WTF else is she supposed to do? Go, Chanel!Ana Wallace Johnson has accrued 68K subscribers not only for reviews (personal takes but I haven’t disagreed yet), but also for travel vids and glimpses of her low-budget/highbrow NYC lifestyle and tastes. What sets Wallace apart is a droll demeanor. Come for the laffs, stay for the books: Wallace’s taste ventures past mass-market narrative toward non-fiction, drama, used bookstores, and forays into independent presses. The Wallace wit includes impromptu raps where she observes her word-choices in the act—self-mocking/self-correcting. Her Sally Rooney review had me howling. Honorable mention: Chris Via on Leaf by Leaf has total cred and writes legit lit crit. Trend Watch: “Weird lit” is a big vlogger term, but notice how often it is equated with horror, a mega genre that occasionally edges into artful lit-fic via voices such as Elle Nash and Charlene Elsby. Also, is Shirley Jackson really “horror”? Vloggers sometimes confuse “weird women lit” with the “sad-girl novel” and straight-up narrative. Like, are Ottessa Moshfegh and Sally Rooney actually “weird”? This adjective is abused! Editor’s advice: Avoid non-descript, general terms: thing, stuff, good, bad, really, something and, yes, weird… unless that is indeed the best word.Emmalea Russo, Vivienne (Skyhorse, 2024) Resonant novel fashions a (fictional) update of (actual) deceased artist Hans Belmer’s long-surviving (fictional) lover Vivienne Volker. Vivienne may or may not have been involved in the long-ago suicide of Belmer’s other (fictional) lover Wilma Lang, who may or may not suggest (actual) writer and artist Unica Zürn. But never mind all that. It’s just intrigue to power the contemporary plot and stylistic gymnastics. These feats include revolving POVs and entire chapters rendered in YouTube comments. Themes include shady shenanigans of the art-world “industry”; the hypocrisies of cancel culture (the author was a prey of same); and cross-generational sex/romance offered nonchalantly. The book may haunt you months after reading if you encounter Belmer and Zürn.Jessamyn Violet, Venice Peach (Maudlin House, 2025)Uh-oh! A TikTok time bomb has burst the Superdoom Portal. A vengeful AI president punishes all citizens, sex bots and media stars. Nothing, it seems, can stop the haywire L.A Hellscape seen by twisted visionary Jessamyn Violet. Inside dope: The author wrote this dystopian funhouse during the first Trump preziduncy. She learned Maudlin House would publish it just as Trump was re-elected last year. This gives the story’s vindictive President TBD 3000 – and all its characters and scenes – the quality of a Cassandra curse. Except that it’s farcically funny. David Trinidad, Hollywood Cemetery (Green Linden, 2025)Heaven’s stars are quasi-immortal, while Hollywood’s are fated to fade. Graciously, Trinidad’s page-sized eulogies grant a couple dozen bit players one last flash-in-the-pan. The actors tell their own stories, but Trinidad’s voice floats above them, an angel wearing shades, bestowing epitaphs, footnotes and the harsh irony of glimmer and glamour doomed in a company town. (Capitalism, like time, is cruel.) The lives of these players (including one dog, Toto) end prosaically. Still, they emit elegantly tangy poetry, as does this book.Elaine Equi and Jerome Sala, Double Feature (Insurance Editions, 2024). Elaine Equi and Jerome Sala are poetry’s power couple. For decades they have lived, loved, performed and blown minds together. Equi with amusement, bemusement and rough-to-smooth edges that engage the senses, then the mind. Sala with knee-slap spit-takes on commodity culture borne from a career in advertising. Both are premiere pop poets, descending from the New York School of tender accessibility. Despite their years together, this is, to my knowledge, their first collaborative book. It’s two chapbooks in one… a bargain!Diva Corp USA, volume 2, zineI do not understand the art industry, especially how its monetary mechanics so unsustainably skew to collectors and a handful of “art stars.” This tracks roughly with music and publishing. But the art world erects a pantheon of demi-gods in acropolis museums: The new Los Angeles County Museum of Art is a $ billion palace of excess by “starchitect” Peter Zumthor. Hilde Lynn Helphenstein’s Diva Corp essay “Stop Crying Over Spilled Inauthenticity” says this “increasingly byzantine” world strains connections between genuine artists/art lovers and its buyers/institutions. And, as if embarrassed by fancy servicing of the 1%, it bathes in identity politics. Is this what makes it prone to serial cancelling even while its elites roam free, hypocritically? Other Diva Corp contributions include stories, poems and reproductions…all on newsprint. It performs its public service in mock mystery. I attended the launch event. The editors/publishers were MIA. They are anonymous. Issues were placed by the restroom toilets. I couldn’t find one. But they did print my theoretical manifesto “Das NeuroKapital.”Dunce Codex, anthologyPubbed by editor Roo, this is two collections: prose and poetry. Impressive design and voices. Gobs of lit-besties young and not so young: Benjamin Weissman, Dennis Cooper, Frank Demma, Gabby Sones, Lily Lady, Erin Satterthwaite, Riley Mac, Meat Stevens, Derek Fisher, Manuel Chavarria, Sophie Appel, Selva Imran, Priscilla Jasmine, Brittany Menjivar, Clarke e. Andros, Pedro Minet, Alistair McCartney, Thomas Moore, Eileen Myles, Jacqui Alpine, Charalampos Tzanakis, Amy Gerstler, Jimmy Vega. Plus many worthy peeps new to me. Freakishly, my name pops up in two unrelated pieces and in Roo’s intro! Order from duncecodex@protonmail.com.Car Crash Collective, anthologyLike Dunce Codex above, this robust volume is proof of scene solidity. It evolved from the same-named reading series by lit Angelenas Erin Satterthwaite and Brittany Menjivar. (Events in L.A., New York, Berlin and…) There’s no index, so rather than skip to a name, you open and read. Rewarding prose results include Zoey Greenwald, Kate Durbin, Chris Molnar, Taylor Lewandowski, Alec Niedenthal, Sarah Velk and Belinda Cai. Beau Geste, 2nd Issue, zineHere’s a multi-media mind fuck: A magazine that is also an oversized artwork is also documentation of a recent Los Angeles performance. Curated by Jordan Rountree, the texts/images reflect that event’s perpetration of a high-level goof: Ostensibly it celebrated playwright Bertold Brecht receiving a long-overdue star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Except there is no such star for Germany’s socialist inventor of confrontational theater. (He deserves one: As a Nazi-fleeing expat in L.A., Brecht co-wrote the screenplay for the Fritz Lang-directed Hangmen Also Die!) Work is by Rountree plus Hannah Bhuiya, Brittany Menjivar, Joseph Mosconi, Zara Schuster, Ian F. Svenonius, Dakota Blue, Jean Marco Torres.Silicone God, Victoria Brooks (U.S.: House of Vlad, 2025, England: Moist, 2024)Here is part of my Introduction to the U.S. edition of this freak-ass novel: The characters and narrator(s) of Silicone God reference by inference what elsewhere has been termed The Singularity—the point where all technology hyper-evolves to one mass/individual consciousness. This is not a future historical period: It is a forever present. In Silicone God, that point is called Time. It manifests in the characters of future Silicone/human/god hybrids (their bodies composed of The New Flesh), while the Now is “our” limited experience as fleshly humans, also known as The Rotten. The author’s stand-in, Shae, envisions the Singularity of Time in passages that mix the cosmic with the tartly comic… and just plain bizarre… sometimes echoing (to me) the deranged geography of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations:“When I first saw the Sea of Time, I thought it looked like heaven. It was a heaving mirror, the same colour as the violet sunset and the silica under my feet. Massive cock-shaped mushrooms poked up among the dunes.” This partly explains Silicone God’s portal shifts of temporal teases. With tentacle-tongue in cheek, Brooks’ book’s dramatis personae embody a menu of preposterous and sublimely amusing monstrosity. Personal apocalypse is a hot and horny bitch mistress from a “future” (teasingly aggregated into the figure of Evaline), ever out-of-reach from a yearning ego-desire (loosely reduced to a self-conscious, auto-fictionesque narrator Shae). This scrambles “character” and “narrative.” Not to mention “gender.” And even “species.” Interrupting and disputing Shae’s chronology (directly on the page!) is Nez, a divine transexual character (created by mushroom gods 3,000 years in the future). Among these figures, a form of gender politics is at play. Males are backgrounded or subsumed into sometimes-competitive female psyches. And the carnally charged friction between these characters pistons plot conflict, intermingling their voices… suggesting that in Time, they are components of one God—or Goddess—psyche. Networking such concepts is a web of purposefully messy evolution imagery. This includes mushrooms, plus cephalopods and their anime tentacle-porn appendages. If mushroom gods usher in the Silicone Becoming of Time, does their form signify the phallus? As with the living, twitching dildoes in multiple sex-scenes, the answer is yes. Except, like everything in Silicone God, the phallus mutates, often mid-coitus, to female organs, and mixtures betwixt:“My little suckers cupped her skin – the slimy hot and cold sensations sending her wild. I put one on her clit, and carefully engorged it with blood so much that it became a mini cock. She begged me to kiss it till she came.”The Hamletesque, self-doubting narration of Shae jolts these freak shows with the frisson of lived experience. This is Silicone God’s twist on the (by-now) depleted or (always) ill-defined genre of auto-fiction. Did these scenes “really” happen? I don’t mean, did Shae’s legs really engorge into semi-autonomous octopus limbs, the better to pleasure her lover? But did the narrator want you to wonder if the author “really” was/is a multi-lover mistress gunning for full-on lesbo relations in a world of earthquaking gender norms? Or, is the shifting of skin and sexes a metaphor for lovers deceiving their intendeds and themselves? For seduction?Brooks cagily demurs. In a 2024 XRAY chat, she posited her theories of plastic narrative to me thusly: “My book gives dramatic colour to thinking around the mistress archetype, and I have been a mistress many times. So, some of the tougher scenes (and some of the hot ones!) are direct from experience. I've paired the very real, with the outright unreal.”
A week after my baptism, I hit my little brother in the head with a tee-ball bat and sent my whole family into a frenzy on a Saturday afternoon in mid-March and got locked out of the family car and told to sit on the couch and think about what I did while my younger brother bled all over mom’s brand-new dishtowels in the middle seat of our 1998 emerald-green Yukon Denali. As my family flew down the street on angel’s wings, I contemplated what I had done while picking at the beige, peeling leather couch in the living room and ruminating on the eternal ramifications of hitting my younger in the head with a tee-ball bat in the middle of March as the promise of new beginnings and new life stirred outside with the birds nesting in the globe willow out back and the grass greening again after being suffocated under months of snow. I thought of how Jesus died for my sins. I thought about my recent baptism and how all my sins must have sloughed off my body and swirled around the drain and were sucked into the city sewer system never to return. I thought of how now Jesus and Heavenly Father must have hated me so much because wasn’t I supposed to be my brother’s keeper and not his assailant? I thought about how I must be beyond redeeming, beyond saving, beyond the grasp of God’s love because if Jesus had a younger brother He definitely would’ve looked out for him before He swung the brand-new tee-ball bat He got for his eighth birthday on a cold day in early March as an incentive from His Father to practice swinging a bat in preparation for the upcoming little league season. Yeah, Jesus would’ve taken every precaution. He would’ve made sure that His younger brother was still in the house and not following Him into the backyard because His younger brother only wanted to follow His perfect example, learn from His flawless batting stance, His celestial follow through, to learn from the Master Himself about what it looks like to wind up and smash a homer over the Wall of Jerusalem and straight past the Judean Desert and into the Dead Sea where the ball would float at the surface forever as a reminder of His power and majesty at the plate and His impeccable .407 batting average. Jesus would’ve meant business. He wouldn’t have taken the bat out back willy-nilly. He wouldn’t have swung it against the concrete basketball court because He wanted to kill an army of giant, imaginary spiders. And if He had crusaded against this imaginary army of spiders in a fit of righteous fury, He would have done so with the certainty that His younger brother was a safe distance away. He would have had the foresight to, at the very least, tell his younger brother to stay on the back patio because the spiders were mean and liked eating little brothers for lunch. He would’ve told His younger brother that He was there to protect him, to save him, to vanquish the army of giant, imaginary spiders because the last thing Jesus would ever want to do was to inadvertently harm His younger brother and send him to the hospital to get seven stitches from his temple to his hairline. Jesus’ younger brother would’ve been safe, and the spiders would’ve been slain. And years later, when the two of them are older, you might hope to find them sitting on a couch eating Salt and Vinegar Lays and sipping glass bottles of cane soda while the Angels play the A’s in Anaheim. They would be talking about JJ Bleday and how even though the A’s have a young roster this year that doesn’t mean the future isn’t bright. They’d clink their bottles and nod in agreement. Amen to that, they’d say. Amen and amen.
He flies into town, late, rents a room in the neighbourhood, meets her first thing in the morning, holds her, remembers how her mother looked, same dark eyes, same dark curl on the top of her head. Every six months, he catches milestones: crawling, walking, first words, kindergarten, high school. Same room, same turquoise couch, same breakfast snacks. Years. Back and forth. He becomes an intermittent constant.At home, he cleans out the extra room, installs a Murphy Bed, hangs her favorite poster. He investigates the local university, uses it as a lure she won’t resist.
We drank Prosecco on the number 31, escaping the confetti blizzard, the plastic champagne flute cheap between my lips but the ring heavy on my finger, while my parents returned to their hotel and we continued on the early bus—Who gets married at eight in the morning?—and some passengers clucked and said Cheers, but most looked out to the felt-clad streets where stony-faced bankers marched to the rain, then we chugged up a small mountain on a train, and still in my wedding dress with the matching red patent shoes, I whispered footsteps in snow strewn with autumn leaves, and later, after we thawed our bodies in steaming water and fucked in the bathtub, bones squeezed between ceramic and lobster-pink skin, I hid the bruises beneath an evening gown, and we toasted again, ate pizza and lit candles jammed into green glass bottles while I picked at wax cascades with manicured nails never knowing when this day, this love, this marriage, would end.
The survivalist stuff started as a hobby for my husband. An attempt to disconnect from the tech-dependent modern world. But quickly, our renovated backyard started looking more like a trash dump than a place to entertain the neighbors. He just kept making “tools.” Dental floss snares. Crayon candles. Pantyhose fishing nets. Dryer lint tinder. Maple syrup mouse traps. He used every single trash bag in the house for the water collection system. “Where are your shoelaces?” I called to my sons as they trudged towards the bus stop, flopping out of their sneakers.“Dad took them for his tourniquet kit.”When he wasn’t eating or sleeping, he was outside. “Are you going to help me with these dishes?” I called one night from the kitchen window as he crouched over his little fire pit, throwing Vaseline-soaked cotton balls into the crayon flame. “I’m tending,” he said.Frisbee plates. Paperclip fish hooks. Cardboard sun hats. Coffee can pots. He took all the condoms from the nightstand and stuffed them with twigs. “To keep the kindling dry.” I marveled at how quickly it happened. One day he was coming into the house, sweaty from a long bike ride, kissing my neck so the kids would scream, the next he was fashioning my black thong into a slingshot and hoarding the apple seeds and peach pits that came back in the kids’ lunch boxes. Now he lives completely outside. His new rule: no coming inside the house, no interacting with electricity, no modern appliances or food products. The part I don’t understand is, isn’t a frisbee just as man-made as a plate?Apparently the Super Bowl is an exception. He comes in at half time, leaving the backdoor wide open. I say, I thought you weren’t supposed to come inside, and he says, We could get a TV for the deck, and I say, I thought you weren’t supposed to use electricity, and he says, I’m observing it, not using it, and I say, Don’t sit on the furniture. His friend comes by to borrow a saw. “Is Jim home?” “Kind of,” I say.We meet our counselor in the park. She asks what I miss most about my husband. I say it was how he made us laugh. “I can still make you laugh,” he says. So now he does weird things in front of the kitchen window, like draw a smiley face in mud on his belly, or pretend he’s being beaten up by a ghost, throwing himself on the ground repeatedly. Mostly I pretend I don’t see him.“Is it a sex thing?” my girlfriends ask.“Right, like, what does that say, that he wants to eat mice?”“Did you try calling him filthy? A filthy animal? Did you try calling him a filthy, disgusting, animal?” I haven’t tried that.The boys play games on his old phone. I buy them new crayons. I’ve learned how to clean the grill, back the truck into the garage, file taxes, fix the TV, fix the garbage disposal, pleasure myself sexually, trim a steak, and snake the drain with a hanger. He’s learned how to shit in a hole and eat bugs.I write reminders for him with sidewalk chalk on the driveway: BEN–SEMIFINALS– SATURDAY 2PM. He walks to the rink. Stands on the dumpster out back. Watches from the window.I know for a fact that he drinks beer out there. He must be taking it from the fridge in the garage. The electric fridge that uses electricity to keep its man-made contents cold.We put his shoes and suits in the dress-up box and my sons pretend to be my old husband. “Can we show Dad?” Luke says, but their dad’s already in his shelter, a piece of bark propped in front like a door. I flick the porch light once, twice, three times, he pops out his head and shouts “GOODNIGHT!” The boys blow kisses, naked except for the suit blazers. “WE LOVE YOU!” They yell. I shut the door and lock it.On Ben’s birthday my husband eats cake on the porch and the kids take selfies with him through the window. They draw pictures of our family: me with a stick-figure boy in each hand, their dad in a tree, beard, no pants. My mouth is a colored-in half moon, sangria red, no teeth, all lips and gums. I could be screaming or bleeding. Luke asks, Is Daddy going to come home soon? And I say, You’ll have to ask your father that. He says, Daddy, are you going to come home soon? And my husband says, I live outside now, Buddy, and Luke says, can we live outside with Daddy? And I say, No, and he says, Why not? And I say, Because we’re people, not animals, and he says, Is Daddy an animal? And I say, Yes. “It’s got to be a midlife crisis,” my girlfriends say. “Did he try jogging?”“Did he try sports cars?” “Did he try strippers?” “Yes,” they say. “We could fix this with strippers.”I take the garbage cans out to the curb and there’s my husband, gathering sticks, wearing his Eagles jersey, no pants. A true outdoorsman. He’s rubbing his beard and glaring at the front lawn. I could teach you how to use the mower, he says, and I say, I don’t have time, and he says, Well, I could mow it. And I say, Oh no, Dear, I wouldn’t want you to break one of your rules. I clean the gutters.I set up the new soccer net.I carry our sleeping sons from the car to their beds.The grass in the front yard gets longer and longer. The boys love it this way; they call it “the jungle.” I carve the Jack O'Lanterns. Pop the eyes out of the one that looks most like him.“I’m sunburnt,” he says to me through the window.“Put some mud on it.”“I have blisters,” he says to me when I walk to the mailbox.“Put some mud on it.”I stop changing the lightbulbs and stop washing the car and I throw out all of his clothes. Change the garage code. Lock all the doors and blast the AC. Bring the beer into the house. Drink it all. The grass just grows and grows.
There is a bony woman measuring things on the playground. She has a long tape measure that hooks in place. One end hugs the edge of a railroad tie bordering the perimeter of the wood chips. She measures the circumference of the area. She measures by the slide, the length of the monkey bars, the distance from climbing pyramid to swing set, and writes the numbers down in a three-ring notebook. The kids pay her no mind. They screech and race each other to the swings and climb up ladders and hang upside down. The woman deposits the tape measure into the sag of her bag and flips the notebook closed. She is silent and slow as she walks up the street, disappearing past vinyl houses.
All my cousin Francine wanted to ask about when I got to Georgia was 9/11. “You probably saw everything,” she said as we sat cross-legged on her bed.“I was seven,” I said. “That was a long time ago.” By then, I was ten, with only vague memories of that day: my mother talking my father out of packing suitcases; the sound of people shouting outside before my mother shut the windows, fearful of dust and chemicals. But Francine wanted falling bodies and clouds of ash. “You’re, like, right next to Ground Zero!” “We live on the Upper West Side,” I said. Geography meant nothing to Francine. She was thirteen and sitting in her bedroom felt like being in the presence of a wild animal. She spoke flatly, tamping down whatever Southern accent she might have, wore bruise-colored eye shadow, and painted her nails matte black. Her bedroom walls were covered with bands I’d only vaguely heard of: Simple Plan, Good Charlotte, My Chemical Romance. Their images were cut from magazines or printed from school computers, all held up with Scotch tape, paper trembling in currents of central air conditioning. Below her oversized Taking Back Sunday hoodie, she wore tank tops and already had boobs. On her wrists, she wore jelly sex-bracelets, though I noticed she rolled her sleeves down to hide them whenever she was actually out in public. “Guys grab at the ones that mean the thing they want from you. The black ones mean sex,” she explained to me, “and the blue ones are blowjobs.”“What?”“Blowjobs. Those are when you suck on a guy’s dick.”I was only vaguely certain what a dick was, with little idea of what would happen if you sucked on one. “Have you ever done that?”She shook her head. “Not yet. But I practice.” She didn’t elaborate.After years of refusing the invitations of friends who vacationed in Florida, my parents finally felt obligated to say “Yes,” and left me at my aunt and uncle’s place outside Atlanta on their way. “Less than a week,” my father told me as he lifted my bags from the rental car trunk. My left ear hadn’t unpopped after the plane landed, and I opened and closed my jaw, barely listening.“Just four days,” my mother said. “Four long days.” The whole trip made her antsy and irritable in the same way as waiting in line in the grocery store. She had a native New Yorker’s idea of the South, made nervous by such “conservative” and “backwards” people. Dad pointed out that she’d grown up on Staten Island.My aunt and uncle’s house was a giant McMansion in a neighborhood full of them. Each looked cobbled from scraps of brick and fake stone and vinyl siding. Juliet balconies jutted from two-car garages. Pool pumps harmonized in backyards. The mid-August air was unbearable; nobody had trees and there weren’t any sidewalks.Inside, photographs lined the wall beside the staircase, one of which showed me, fresh-birthed in a hospital crib. “Can’t get over you becoming a young woman!” Aunt Jane stared at me as I dragged my suitcase up the steps. “Me neither!” I didn’t know what to do besides match her breathless energy. She showed me to the guest bedroom, where their dog, Pierre, spent most of the day. He was an old Bichon with perpetually wet, brown fur around his mouth. He hated me immediately, growling from his place on the bed. “Oh, P, stop it! Be nice to your cousin.” Jane shooed him away. He scurried, wheezing, off into the hall. “He’ll get used to it. Maybe he’ll try snuggling with you!”“Here’s hoping!”Within minutes of my uncle returning home from his car dealership, we were gathered at the table, eating Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese. The small crocodile on Uncle Chris’s polo was askew; Francine later told me she’d unstitched every one in his wardrobe after being grounded for downloading music on Kazaa. Jane did her best to reattach them, and Chris still wore the shirts out of spite. After sunset, my mother called to tell me they’d made it to Florida. “There was a snake in the condo. Your father threw a shoe.”“And missed.” They took turns complaining over the phone about their accommodations, never asking how things were with me. After twenty minutes of me saying “oh” or “mm-hmm,” we hung up. I found Francine watching an anime about pirates. “It’s really far along,” she said. “It'd be hard to catch you up on the plot.” Uncle Chris was asleep in front of one of their many other televisions. Aunt Jane sat at the kitchen island with a glass of wine and an issue of Better Homes and Gardens, staring intently at copper pots hanging above the stove.I snuck through the sliding glass doors and out to the back deck. Night was no cooler than day. I pulled up a chair to the edge of the pool and watched a dead frog float from one end to the other. For the first time, I sensed I’d been set up for a lifetime of comparing everything to New York. Once the others went to bed, I ventured back inside. Through the dark, I found my bedroom. I couldn’t figure out how to work the lamp on the bedside table, then cried for a while before realizing I had to pee and had no idea where the upstairs bathroom was. I panicked, shaking below the covers. Finally, seeing no better option, I squatted in a corner of the bedroom and went on the carpet.In the morning, everybody blamed Pierre, who took a scolding from Aunt Jane with his head down, drool dripping from his tiny lips. Uncle Chris scrubbed the carpet with Resolve, leaving a bleachy splotch.Breakfast was microwaved sausage and egg sandwiches, soggy and chewy. Aunt Jane had “so many errands!” so Francine and I got into her PT Cruiser with her and set off. The drive was all six-lane roads and chain restaurants. It wasn’t until we arrived at the mall that I saw a human being outside of a car.Aunt Jane dropped us off at the multiplex entrance. “Napoleon Dynamo starts in twenty minutes—here’s money. France, I’ll text ya.”The instant the car pulled away, Francine walked briskly through the mall doors, going in the opposite direction of the theater, texting on her cherry red Razr. “We’re not going to the movie?” I asked, trying to hide my disappointment. “No,” she said. “I already saw it. Mom just always forgets what I’ve been up to the instant it’s over.”“Oh.”“You can go, though.”“It’s okay. I don’t really want to.”“No, you should go. I’m meeting somebody.”“Can I come?”She sighed. “Look, can you just give me an hour by myself? Maybe a bit more? I can’t have some little kid following me around the whole time. We’ll meet back at this fountain?” She pointed at a bubbling monstrosity at the center of a large atrium nearby. People sat here and there at tables along its rim, eating buttery soft pretzels. I noticed a boy lurking among the fake palm trees. He stood with a hunch and wore baggy, black clothes, his pant legs criss-crossed by straps and a chain wallet. Hair dangled down over his face, but I saw his eyes lock on Francine.“Meeting that guy?” I asked.Francine looked panicked, then put her hand on my shoulder. “Look, I’m not telling you to fuck off because I don’t think you’re cool. I do. You’re my cool, New York cousin. You can handle yourself. But that dumbass doesn’t know that. He’s just gonna see you as a little kid. Though you’re not.”I nodded. “Thanks.”“And because you’re cool, I know you won’t say anything to my parents.”“Of course.”“An hour.”“An hour.”Wandering around, I realized that I’d never set foot in an actual mall. I found an FYE and browsed the CD racks, picking one up now and then and listening to thirty-second song samples at a headphone station. The whole mall smelled like floor wax, burgers, and perfume. Pacsun kids loitered in Pacsun; Hot Topic kids in Hot Topic. For a time, I wandered the dark recesses of an Abercrombie, holding too-big spaghetti-strap shirts up to my torso.In the food court, I spotted Francine and the boy at a table, eating samples of orange chicken from small white cups. He held his hands out to her like he was begging for something. My cousin sighed and looked up at the skylights. Finally, with a tilt of her head, she gestured towards the restrooms, and the two of them walked together in that direction. The boy’s face was a grimace of nervous excitement; his slouch straightened. My first instinct was to follow them, but I didn’t. Instead I walked back towards the fountain. On the way, I saw a group of small children gathered around a Kiwanis Club-sponsored coin funnel, pennies circling as they slowly succumbed to gravity.While my aunt and uncle slept, Francine and I watched Invader Zim in the den. Pierre lay at my feet; I’d brokered peace at dinner by feeding him a chicken nugget under the table. “That boy you were hanging out with,” I said. “How old is he?”“Ha. He’s forty-seven. He’s my math teacher.”“Seriously.”“He’s fifteen. Met him at Chick-fil-A a couple weeks ago.”“I saw you and him going into the bathrooms.” “Yeah?” Francine kept her eyes on the TV, though I could tell she was worried about what I’d ask.“Were you doing drugs?”She laughed. “Drugs? No. Not that it’s your fucking business.”“Sorry.” When the episode ended, Francine flipped to MTV2 in time to watch a Fall Out Boy music video.“If you have to know,” she said when the song was over. “I was showing him my vagina.” My stomach went weightless. “He asked me to shave it for him, and he wanted proof that I did. So we went into a bathroom stall and I showed him.”I knew about pubic hair from everything I’d seen on the internet, and had been wondering about when my own would come in, but hearing someone talk about the subject of their vagina so bluntly threw me off. “Did he show you anything?”“No. He was scared. Told me to trust him, that he has a big dick, blah blah. Typical.” She turned to me. “Look, Marie. If a guy ever asks you to do anything like that, you don’t have to. If you don’t want. Don’t let him make you think it’s something you want, either. Okay? Just want whatever it is you want. Like, the minute I can get my nipples pierced, I’m gonna. But because I want to. Not for anyone else.” It was the most straightforward anybody had been with me about the matter of my body, or of the one I’d soon have.“Alright. Thanks.” I wanted to hug her, demand she teach me more, but stopped myself. Sometime after that, I fell asleep on the couch. When I woke up, Francine had wrapped me in a blanket and left a glass of water on the coffee table beside me, which tasted bubbly and odd in the early morning. On my last day in Georgia, it rained. We sat around watching daytime television. Francine scratched at her crotch. Uncle Chris clicked around on the computer doing research for a fantasy football draft, commenting out loud every few minutes about how slow the computer had gotten since it had been used for all that downloading. Aunt Jane puttered around the house.“Alright,” she said just before noon. “We can’t sit around here all day. Summer’s wasting! If we have to stay inside, we can go to Babyland!”“Jesus Christ, Mom,” Francine said, furiously typing text messages.“Don’t.” “Why would we want to do baby stuff?”“Hey! Watch it.”“Right, Marie?” My cousin turned to me. “We’re too old for it?”I shrugged. “I don’t even know what it is.”“Cabbage Patch Kids place. It’s like a theme park of dolls. Out in an even more boring suburb than this one.”I remembered having one of the dolls as a little girl, with yarn hair and a blue dress. Once, I threw it up in the air the way I’d seen adults do with real babies and its plastic face knocked me in the face and split my lip. “I had one of those a while ago,” I said.“See, Mom? We’re too old. It’s creepy.”“What if I said that I wanted to go?” Aunt Jane asked. “Would that be enough? If I asked that you do something for me? Unless you feel like sticking around here with your father, hearing him mutter about pretend football.”Uncle Chris didn’t turn from the monitor. “Please, girls, go. It’ll make her happy.”“And we can have lunch at Bojangles.” Aunt Jane dangled her car keys off her fingers. Francine roused herself from the recliner with a sigh and I followed.Inside Babyland, dolls stared impassively from their shelves. Little girls squealed and ran from place to place, picking up their new toys and bringing them to a small office where a woman dressed as a nurse made them take an adoption oath, fingers raised in the air, swearing they’d take seriously the responsibilities of motherhood.Following the mass of mothers and daughters, we came to a nursery staged behind enormous windows, the glass smudged. . In bassinets, dolls wore cloth diapers. Aunt Jane looked delighted. . A mechanical stork twisted back and forth above our heads, beak chattering. When it faced us head-on, I saw that one eye blinked while the other stayed half shut like it was having a stroke. Finally, we got to the central room. Most of the space was taken up by a fake patch of dirt. Doll’s heads stuck out here and there like ripe cabbages on beds of leaves. In the center of everything was a tree, a plaster monstrosity whose limbs reached up to the ceiling. In its trunk were round television screens where gestating doll fetuses were visible, floating in green-tinted amniotic fluid. Tubing snaked from plastic IV drips into different points in the soil, their sloshing contents labeled IMAGINATION.“Have you been here before?” I asked Francine.“Every couple of years,” she said. “I was into it before I realized how fucked up it all is. Trying to make women okay with becoming, like, breeding cows.”“It’s just toys,” I offered.“Not down here, it’s not.”Another nurse appeared, speaking into a headset microphone. “Mother Cabbage is getting ready to have a baby!” She pulled out a large caliper and measured the tree’s trunk. “She’s five leaves dilated!” The doll heads writhed in place around her as she described a magic dust that fell invisibly from the branches above. “It determines whether she has a girl or a boy. Which are we looking for today?”The crowd of women and girls shouted for a boy. The nurse stuck a plastic speculum into a space in the roots, and with feigned effort pulled from the depths a naked doll with a full head of hair and rosy cheeks. “Looks like this one is gonna get a new home right away. ” She handed the doll to a nearby child who immediately held it close to her chest. Aunt Jane and the other mothers applauded. When the birth was over, we slowly retraced our steps back to the entrance. I followed Francine in a daze while Aunt Jane lingered at the glass cabinets displaying the vintage toys, then insisted on buying me a t-shirt I knew I’d never wear. Out in the lot, a child melted down; somehow, her brand new doll burst a seam somewhere between the shop and the car, and stuffing bled from the hole, blowing in tufts across the asphalt.
***
It wasn’t until years later that I saw Francine again. She visited New York for a weekend right before I finished college. I met her at a bar near Penn Station. She dragged a suitcase, ready to head to JFK the moment we finished. Gone were the hoodie and jeans, replaced by a tunic dress and leggings; she’d stopped hiding her accent, giving her words a drawl I found musical.I thought about bringing up that trip to Georgia, but couldn’t fit it into the conversation, not wanting to resurrect those girls we’d been. But I felt I owed her somehow. The advice she’d given me, while imperfect, was the first I’d been offered to guide me. By the time we met as women, I’d stumbled and fucked up plenty, and wanted to share it all with her as we sat, filling one another in on what we’d missed. If she lived closer, I thought, we might’ve been like sisters.I haven’t seen her since, of course. A month after that day in the cafe, she met the man who eventually became her husband. They live in Boulder now with two children. They send me a Christmas card each year.“Oh,” she said as she finished her drink, looking at her phone. “Plane’s delayed.”“Huh. Well. Anything else you wanted to see?” My life, New York City, all I had to offer: it all seemed insufficient.“What would you do with two hours?” Francine smiled, deferring to me, waiting for an answer, for me to open her world up in the way she’d opened mine.
When he was a child, my dad lost two fingers working at the matchbox factory and declared three as his lucky number. He owned three of every shirt, prayed three times a day, and went to the Lygon casino on the third of each month. He ate ramen with three chopsticks, and sticky dots of broth sprayed across the table, onto his Tim Winton novels. We liked the crunch of Cajun grilled corn. We toothpicked kernels from between our teeth, and threw the cobs at each other's heads. Pretended to have seizures on the floor. On the drive to the convenience store after his AA meeting, he played Fleetwood Mac and The Smashing Pumpkins. Billy Corgan’s voice pulsed through the speakers. He checked himself in the visor mirror and his smile vanished. “I look like a blobfish,” he said. But our faces shared the same geometry. The sunset pinked the clouds, the West Gate Bridge speared the skyline. He bought me rice crackers, and when the cashier wasn’t looking, I tucked a Reese’s peanut butter cup under my windbreaker. I ate at home in the shrine room. The pedestal fan blasted, and I leaned my forehead against the Maitreya statue to be kissed by the coolness of its marble. Dad kicked me out to pray, but I pressed my ear to the door, trying to hear his wishes, trying to become his god.
I spent my twenties working at a bike shop in a midwestern college town. The town was thick with rationality, overflowing from the university. Despite this, I believed in God. The strength of my belief shifted from day to day, but when I stood in church each Sunday my faith was strong again. My boyfriend, Don, agreed to come to church after two months of dating. “I can see it’s important to you,” he said. “So I’ll come. But don’t count on any sudden transformation when I hear the organ music.”And I knew that he was right, that his guard was up too high. To Don, faith was a failing grade in a physics class. “If God wanted me to believe in Him, He wouldn’t have given me the capacity for rational thought,” he would say. Sometimes Don’s lack of faith upset me. I didn’t want to fight, so I just tried to ignore this divide, this one thing we did not, could not share. I knew that trying to convert him would only end badly.Still, I couldn’t help feeling a little giddy that Sunday when he finally came with me to church. We walked hand in hand from my apartment to First Congregational. There was a light drizzle. Halfway there, it turned into a heavy rain. Don had come prepared; he held a purple umbrella over the both of us, and I barely got wet. The service was beautiful. I always find it beautiful. Don fidgeted next to me, and I started to feel like a mother who was dragging her kid around. Then he whispered, “The stained glass is shining right on you. It’s turning you orange, sunset orange. You look incredibly sexy,” he said, and I stopped feeling like a mother who was dragging her kid around.“Is a sunset really that sexy?” I said, barely moving my lips. The pastor was talking about the binding of Isaac. Don thought about that for a while. Then, as the pastor reached the conclusion that the ram was there the whole time, if only Abraham could see it, Don touched my shoulder. “A sunset is beautiful,” he said. “Because it reminds you that you’re not in control. That the Earth will spin no matter how you try to stop it. Even if you want to prolong a moment forever.”I took his hand, and I began to pray in earnest. I prayed for all the usual things: my health, and my mother’s, and my father’s, and Don’s. A promotion at the bike shop. World peace. And, gripping Don’s hand in mine, I prayed for that moment to last just a little bit longer.After the service there was always a small reception. Each week, one family was tasked with bringing pastries and soft drinks for the congregation. This week the Robinsons had set the bar high. On the white plastic tablecloth lay donuts, danishes, bagels, muffins — it was almost too much. I had to look away. “Nice spread,” said Don. He was eyeing an everything bagel. “Find me something, okay?” I said. “I’m going to find a bathroom.”When I got back, Don was nowhere to be found. I saw an abandoned everything bagel on the table. It had one bite taken out of it. Where was he?Someone coughed and I turned. It was Pastor Baumann, with Don at his side. “You’ve got a nice friend here, Miss Brown,” said the pastor. He had a smear of yellow mustard on his upper lip. “Mr. Wilson and I just had a very nice talk.”He gave Don a pat on the shoulder. “I need to thank Mrs. Robinson for this spread. But I’m glad to have met you, Mr. Wilson. I’m sure I’ll be seeing you again.” And he was off.“Aw, I’m sorry Pastor Baumann cornered you,” I said, putting my arm around Don. “He can be a little intense.”Don looked at me oddly. “No, I liked him. We had a really interesting talk. I’ll have to tell you about it later.”I thought he would tell me about it when we walked back, but we didn’t talk. The rain stopped and started again, and Don remained deep in thought. We didn’t talk about the trip the rest of the day. Don left for the library to do a problem set, and I made some tea and watched TV. During a commercial break, I got a call from Don.“Marie,” he said. “I’d like to come with you to church again next Sunday. Would that be okay?”“To church?” I said. “I mean, of course that would be okay. But, why?”He was silent for a moment. “I don’t know. I just spent three hours working on an econometrics problem set. The whole problem set, the whole course, is based on the assumption that statistical distributions hold over frequent trials of an experiment. But the pastor…”“Baumann’s not that charismatic,” I said. “I don’t know what he could have said to you…”“It’s not exactly what he said,” Don said. “He showed me something.”“What, his new book?”“No,” said Don. “He showed me that I’ve been wrong. That’s everybody’s wrong, he showed me-”“What the hell,” I said, but he didn’t seem to hear me. “He showed me evidence,” Don said, passion rising in his voice. “That statistics, physics, biology — that they all present an incomplete picture of our world.”“Baby, you were with him for ten minutes. What the hell did he show you?”Don sighed. “He flipped a coin. He flipped it again and again, and he knew what it would land on every time.”“Well, it was weighted,” I said, without really thinking about it. “Obviously.”“Marie,” he said. “It was my coin. I had change from when we got coffee the other day…”“Let’s talk about this later,” I said. I hung up. I was shaking a little, but I didn’t know why. Don wanted to go to church again. That was good news, right? Don was realizing that science presented an incomplete picture of the world. This was what I had always known. God controls everything. But (and this was important) God controls it in a consistent way. Not breaking all His worldly patterns for some random pastor from some arbitrary town in the Midwest. And surely He hadn’t. Surely Pastor Baumann had just tricked Don. But why would he do something like that? When I called Pastor Baumann and explained what had happened, he was silent for a moment. Then he laughed. “I’m glad my little explanation had such an effect on the boy,” he said. “But, to be honest, I don’t understand why it works.”“Pastor Baumann, I already come to church every week,” I said. “I already believe. You don’t need to pretend you have magic powers to recruit me.”“Pretend?” said the pastor. “Marie, you hurt me. I never lie. As King David wrote in Psalms, ‘The righteous hates falsehood.’”“So,” I said. “Just to be clear. You’re claiming that you have magic powers over quarters?”Baumann chuckled. “Well, not exactly. But probabilities go a little wonky around me. A 50:50 coin flip turns into 70:30, or a 1:6 dice roll becomes 1:2. I haven’t tested it comprehensively, it’s just something I’ve noticed that newcomers to the church, like your friend, are often interested in.”“I don’t understand,” I said. “How do you know the changed odds?”“Well, I don’t really know,” said the pastor. “But if I call ‘4’ on a dice roll, it usually comes up on the first roll.”“It doesn’t sound like you’ve tested it at all scientifically,” I said.Pastor Baumann laughed again. “Well, Marie, we’re not really in the business of scientific testing here, are we?”The call turned to small talk, and I put up water to boil. When the tea was ready, I turned on the television to watch reruns. There was a small pile of change on the coffee table. “Heads,” I said. I tossed a quarter in the air; it came down sloppily, glancing off my arm and skidding onto the floor. It was heads. My heart beat sped up. Maybe Pastor Baumann was telling the truth, but he didn’t know the full story. Maybe God had temporarily altered the laws of probability for everybody. I flipped the coin again. “Heads!” I caught it neatly on my inner arm. Visions flashed through my head: I could go to the casino, make a thousand dollars. I could buy a new mattress, or take a class at the university. It was tails. Maybe it had been tails for Baumann, too, and he had cheated, somehow. My explanations were getting more pathetic.Don had left one of his physics textbooks on the couch. It weighed about five pounds. I flipped to a page in the middle. “For a point mass moving in a circle of radius r in the xy plane, we have the planar symmetry,” I read, before the rest of the page became blurry. There was nothing in here that was going to help me understand Baumann’s claim. I would have better luck going to the library and looking for books on magic tricks. A small voice inside of me coughed. They said the same about Jesus, it said. They said he was just doing magic tricks. But the pastor wasn’t the younger son of God. I was sure of that, if not much else. Pastor Baumann, with his habit of getting mustard all over his face, had to be mortal. The pastor was just lying. But why would he lie? If he was lying about this, what else was he lying about? This line of thinking gave me a headache, so I was glad when the doorbell rang. It was Don. He was disheveled. His shirt was wrinkled, hair matted; there were bags under his eyes. And he was beaming from ear to ear.“Baby, I’ve been in the library all day,” he said. He took my hand. “I read everything. I read Lewis and Chesterton and Torrey, and God, I get it now.” I took a step back. I didn’t know what to say. “Okay. Okay. Let’s just watch some TV, yeah?”“TV!” He scoffed. “How can I watch TV, when I want to just– go outside and breathe it all in, all of God’s creations. The fresh-cut grass and the new flowers and– and you.” He took me in his arms. “I love you,” he murmured. “I love you I love you I love you. And I love God, for thinking you up.”I leaned into him, unable to speak. We were so close we may as well have one person. Then he stepped back. “Let’s pray now,” he said. “I want to pray with you.”“I’ve always wanted to pray together,” I said, but I didn’t quite know if it was true. It felt odd, kneeling beside him, thanking God in silent sync. How much overlap was there between our prayers? I didn’t know what to believe now — what Don learned in his classes or what I had believed my whole life. Could either system of belief co-exist with the pastor’s professed gift? I felt like Don and I were little kids in daycare, playing next to each other with different toy trucks. But maybe, just maybe, as we knelt together, eyes shut tight, we were asking God the same questions with our silent prayers. Don and I broke up about a month later. He read more and more about Christianity until he wouldn’t talk about anything else. The bylines on his books shifted from Lewis and Chesterton to Scott Hahn and Jerry Falwell. Soon First Congregational, my church, was too laid back for him. He wanted to go to the Catholic church by the river. He wanted me to wear more modest clothing. He didn’t want to have sex. When he stayed over, he would sleep on the couch. If I walked by him in a t-shirt and underwear, he would sigh, or make a big show of covering his eyes. “Thanks a lot, Marie,” he’d say. “You’re really helping me out here.” His tone hurt more than his words. So I moved on. I got a promotion at the bike shop, but I knew I didn’t want to stay in this town forever: constantly meeting new college students in the coffee shops and bars, finding it harder and harder to talk to them the older I got. I didn’t go to First Congregational every Sunday anymore. I didn’t know what to believe. I peeked in from time to time. The people filling the pews looked so confident, so sure of themselves and their God. And Pastor Baumann spoke to them as seriously about the fall from Eden as he had spoken to me about his powers over probability. One foggy April Sunday, about a year after I broke up with Don, I was walking to the coffeeshop. I was on my phone, scrolling through Zillow, when I heard someone call my name. “Marie,” he said again. It was Don, only partially obscured by the fog. He looked different; older. He had a short beard, and wore a suit. “Don,” I said. I didn’t really have any questions for him. “How have you been?”“I’ve been good,” he said softly, and I said the same, and that was that. As I continued walking home, I felt uneasy. It was like speaking with a different person: a stranger. We used to talk all night. We used to share so much. I felt a sudden anger towards Pastor Baumann, as if he had stolen something from me. I stopped short. I wasn’t going home. I crossed the street and began to walk to the church. There was a service going on. I checked my watch; it was 10 o’ clock. Most congregants sat in the first few rows, except for a little boy and his mother. They sat in the last row. The boy sat straight and proud in a stiff little suit. The tie was all wrong. He stared straight ahead, so he didn’t notice his mother’s sideway glances. I could see the pride in her eyes. Her little boy, grown up enough to behave in church. When they got back home she would ask him what he thought of the sermon, and she would act surprised by whatever he said. “I never thought of it like that,” she might say. “I bet Pastor Baumann hasn’t either.” The anger that had reared when I saw Don came up into my throat. It closed up my throat and I couldn’t breathe. Two hours later, I knocked on the door of the pastor’s office. “Marie, what a pleasant surprise,” he said, beaming. “Come in, please.”“I need to know,” I said. “I need to know if you were telling the truth. I lost someone who was important to me. He’s a different person. His life is on a different course. You’ve done so much damage, you don’t even know-”“You’re babbling,” said Baumann. He got up and closed the door behind me. “Sit down, and I will tell you anything you want to know.”“Flip a coin for me,” I said. “Show me that everybody else is wrong.” The pastor raised an eyebrow. I fished in my pocket and handed him a dime. “If you’d like,” he said. “But you shouldn’t take so much meaning from it.”“Just get on with it,” I said, and he looked mildly shocked. “Fine,” said Baumann. “Heads.” He flipped the dime and I craned to look at it, resting on his forearm. Roosevelt grinned back at me.“Again,” I said. The pastor sighed and called tails, it was tails.“Again.” He called heads, and it was heads.“Again, again.” “Tails.” The coin flew through the air and Baumann smacked it on his forearm. I saw an olive branch and started to tear up. “Tails,” he said, and flipped again. It was heads. I thanked God and walked out of that place, into the dense April fog. It started to rain and the droplets fell down into the grass, just like they were supposed to.
Owls hoot to each other across dusking hills—the medieval whorehouses in Genoa are rediscovering electricity—news of masts spotted earlier on the horizon has circled back to them, which they’d divined already, for the seagulls took off from the harbor walls hours before—still, the whores step out onto their balconies, float up to the blanched rooftops, hoot to each other through rising stalks of stars swaying in the dark grange of night—they’re dreaming of sleeping in silk dresses, bathing in gold florins, myrrh and musk, tracing with inward eyes the moonlit-draped, rudder-furrowed wakes of phosphorous, the billowing sash of earth’s shadow smothering stars, burgeoning sails and masts growing ever-taller, getting closer, buzzing, buzzing, shriller than the summoning bells behind their locked doors, until they get so close those suave ladies glean that most precious secret all those learned scribes and bishops are too afraid to whisper—the world is round.
