The purchasing of books is life’s finest pleasure. And while I often have a stack of them unread, they are read eventually, and therefore this habit does not seem excessive or indulgent to me. It is perhaps a bourgeois affectation—there is something embarrassing of an over-large personal library—but there are certainly less healthy ways to spend one’s money. I am no stranger to that, certainly. If God and constancy may will it, that period of my life is closed shut, like a book I’d like to forget entirely. Those pages are wine-soaked anyhow, grainy with drug-powder, the words to those many stories smudged and barely legible. Yet unfortunately, I had upset an important balance: I was buying too many. If I bought, say, four books, I would read three of them immediately, and leave the last for some later time. But now I was acquiring more than ever. While I am a prodigious reader, I couldn’t keep up. Yes, I am one of the top admirers of literature in the world, currently, and anyone in my life (the few, that is) can attest to that. So, as you can see, this position of mine had gotten the better of me. I could count at least 150 books in my possession I had not yet read. Many of these books were purchased during various publisher’s and bookseller’s flash sales, when a $18 paperback can be purchased for a measly six, shipping included. It’s hard to stop oneself in those moments, erratically clicking on as many attractive titles as memory allowed me to recall. And now, well, 150 books! That’s simply too many left unread in one’s possession, and so I promised myself I would buy no more until that pile had shrunk by half. And, in the case I badly wanted to read a book I did not have access to, very badly wanted to do this, then I would either have to wait, or see if it was available at the public library. God, grant me constancy!I went to the library to acquire Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal. This book had been recommended to me by a well-meaning friend. The recommender, the doorman of my building, said it read to him like something I would dream (I often tell him my dreams, for he is the only friend who tolerates this, always a smile on plump Horacio’s cherubic face). Well, of course I found this comparison flattering, and felt I needed to read it as soon as possible. Sometimes books announce their presence to you, like some vagabond courier knocking haggard upon the castle walls with an important message. Leaving the library with the slim volume (it is a mere 80-page novella, among the best kinds of books there are), I flipped through its pages and was left agog: the prior library patron had annotated it. And not merely lightly annotated—they had underlined, circled, and written words in the margins of almost every page of the book. It is a public book, and they had made it private. My reading, effectively, had doubled: not only would I read Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal, but I’d have to read this phantom reader’s version as well. I considered returning it. I did not want this person’s version of Too Loud a Solitude. I didn’t even know them. What if they had very bad ideas? I feared their version of the novella would merge with the one printed by the publisher, and they would, unknowingly, from the past, destroy the effects of this book on me.I tried to ignore this phantom reader’s pointing and gesturing as I read. The plot of the book was simple enough: an old man destroys books using a hydraulic press. It is not clear why. He is completely insane and an alcoholic. But why did this phantom reader insist on underlining the fact that this drunk and insane man had worked at this hydraulic press for 35 years? The narrator repeats this fact, it’s true, yet this reader felt it necessary to highlight the number of years every time. I could not feel anything but contempt for this version of Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal. It does not matter that this old man has been at this work of destroying books for 35 years. It could have been 40 years, or 20. The effect would remain the same. The author had merely made an arbitrary decision. 35 years. Yes, authors enjoy doing a bit of this all the time: the marquis went out at seven in the evening and so on. The curtains in my room are blue (they are white).This phantom reader-cum-writer (for now, they had written their own version of Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal, which we could call Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal 2, or perhaps, My Too Loud a Solitudeby Bohumil Hrabal by Anonymous) had many things to say about the book in question. Some of their marginal notes said: “love for destruction” and “destruction” and “against common sense” and “discovery” and “loneliness in society” and “weird tenderness to work tools” and “power of books” and “USSR?” and at the end of the book were a series of furious notes, completely and utterly illegible.Was this person fucking stupid? Were they just a fucking complete fucking idiot? A total degenerate moron? They had heavily underlined or added multiple stars (drawn as if the person holding the pen were in fact an illiterate child or a mental invalid) to the following words or phrases: “slaughterhouse” (heavily underlined, starred), “too loud a solitude” (heavily starred, if you can believe it), “the heavens are not humane” (underlined multiple times), “too loud a solitude” again (heavily starred, again). When I had finally reached the end of Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal, I felt annihilated. Not by the novel in question, no, but by this phantom reader-cum-writer’s new version of the book. Their stupidity, I found, was so boundless I felt certain then that the human project was completely doomed. Completely, utterly doomed. Nothing would ever get better. Things would only get worse. Every day, I realized, was a testament to this fact: life itself was the experience of being surrounded by entropy, atrophy, and necrosis. But most importantly, it was a testament to boundless stupidity. Nothing should have existed in the first place. And in fact, it was the stupidity of nothingness to have created existence by accident.I realized, then, there was only one thing left for me to do. I would either have to hang myself (the thought of which turned my stomach), or I would have to kill this person. Anonymous. For they had done something of irreparable harm: they had forever damaged Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal which had led me to lose complete faith in the human project. I could not merely go out and buy myself my own copy and read it again, unsullied by this silly and ridiculous and more importantly, very stupid person. That initial phantom reading will have forever imprinted on me, and therefore, completely and utterly destroyed Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal—a book, incidentally, I did not really like, which is in many ways beside the point. The only punishment I could fathom was to end their life. Because then I could say we will truly have had a tit-for-tat: I will have altered the course of their existence (by ending it) in exchange for their having ruined my experience of Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal, a book I didn’t like, and more importantly for causing me to lose faith in the human project. It’s possible I would have liked this book much more had I not first encountered it in this fallen state, and perhaps then, I could have gone on living in a satisfactory manner. The human project could have seemed salvageable. I could have continued to eat breakfast and so on, I could have continued to make love with beautiful women and so on, but now I had lost complete faith in the human project, and everything, utterly everything, had become equally ruined.But, of course, I first needed to find out who they were. This proved trickier than I imagined, the more I thought of it: I had assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that it was the previous library patron who had done this. But in fact, it could have been the patron before that one, or the one before that, or the antepenultimate lender. The more I thought of this possibility, the more I felt enraged: they had not only permanently ruined this book for me, but for, perhaps, an entire population of readers. There could, by all rights, be a small city of now permanently damaged readers, who are to walk around for the rest of their lives with this version of Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal residing within their forever diminished personhood. So, in fact, one of the reasons the human project was doomed, utterly and completely doomed, could have been for the fact that—given so many readers had read this version of this version of Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal—they too had given up on the human project, and they too had lost the will to improve the conditions of life in any achievable fashion. And if this were to happen to several people, all from the same source, then that hopelessness would spread like a bacterium. And as we know, when something of that nature goes untreated, it’s over. It’s completely over. In many ways, I thought to myself, it was conceivable that this version of Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal could be the inaugurating gesture of the human apocalypse itself. If I did not do something about it, if I did not stop it right then and there, I would be allowing the annihilation of all that was good and true and meaningful on our planet. I was so overwhelmed by the realization I felt the need to consume my third bowl of chocolate cereal for the day (I would typically admit only two), and this I always did in my study, which I called my suicide den, where I kept all my books, hundreds of them scattered in idiosyncratically designed piles for reasons which I cannot address.It struck me, then, that the passage of my thinking had led me off toward an unexpected detour: while at first I thought I had lost all faith in the human project—and, indeed, I had—I was now, quite ironically, put in the position to save the possibility of the human being by ensuring that no other person would ever read this book. If some of the damage had already been done, and surely it had, I could at the very least stop it dead in its tracks. And so, of course, while some people, a small band of citizens, surely, will have been permanently damaged (and I forever would be one among their number—their leader?), I had the power to prevent this insipid disease from spreading, and in that way, save the possibility of the human being. And yet: I felt a profound sympathy for my fellow comrades. Who were they? Had they all hanged themselves? Perhaps they were spreading their necrosis—no fault of their own—in our little community, irreparably poisoning all with ears to hear. So now, I realized, my labor had not doubled, but grown exponentially: not only would I have to kill Anonymous, this phantom reader-cum-writer, but I would have to kill all who had read this volume—out of pity, and diligence, of course—so that they could not spread their human necrosis as a result of having read Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal by Anonymous.This would be much easier than I had at first anticipated. My only other friend in the world, besides Horacio, was Sherman, the steward of our public library. Now, this might strike one as curious. How could such a prodigious purchaser of books be on good terms with a librarian? Surely, one might think that the average librarian would treat me with a bit of suspicion: I was a profligate and erratic purchaser of books. But no, this was not the case. Sherman was my next-door neighbor. I live in 7-H and he lives in 7-G. In fact, it was Sherman who had convinced me to come to the library in the first place: I was carrying inside a bundle of books that had recently been delivered to me, when I complained about the excess of my habit, in passing. Sherman, ever the perfectly polite neighbor, chuckled and said, “You should stop by the library, then,” he said, “not that you’ll need it, it seems.” I admit to having found this last remark a little distasteful. Not that I would need it? One always needs books. More and more books… For there is nothing but books. (People are disposable. The human project is doomed, after all. But books are something else, and of course literature is better than life.) I forgave him for his careless comment, but I have not forgotten it. In the morning I knocked on Sherman’s door. He had just finished his breakfast and was preparing to leave for work. I sheepishly submitted to him my request: is there any chance he could tell me how many people had rented out Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal, and, if so, could he give me their names? I crafted an excuse: I wanted to do an art project, I said (an art project!): I would photograph, and interview each prior patron who had rented the book, and I would have an individual discussion with each of them. This way, I said, all of these prior patrons will have unwittingly been in a book club, in the future, without knowing it; and by sharing their unique perspective on the book, the art project would demonstrate the importance and trans-historical value of literature, that great unifier of the human project, I said. Once finished, I would collect these interviews in a book, which I would call Solitude. “I’m really not supposed to do that sort of thing,” he said. I could see Sherman was chuffed. Bits of flax seed stuck unattractively to his teeth, and I could hear his toddler child sing a dullard song to herself from the living room. She threw her toy at the toy dog. “But that’s such a great idea. I’m sure our director would agree. We’re always trying to find some way to drum up interest in the library. I would have to get his permission. Come by later, and I’ll see what I can do.”I was thrilled. Little did he know, of course, that he had just quite literally signed several people’s death warrants. For indeed I would seek out each one of these patrons, and need to kill them all. My logic was: if I confronted Anonymous about his scribbles, if I approached this strange idiot man at his house with a copy of this version of Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal and, shaking the slim volume, asked, “Did you do this? Did you mark up this library book?” he would naturally lie. There is no denying he would lie. And so, as a safety precaution, I would have to kill each and every single one of these readers of this version of Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal, to ensure the success of my plan. I would be the last living being poisoned by this text, I would have to suffer that my whole life, but I will have stopped an inchoate bacterium from spreading any further than it needed to, and by doing so, I will have saved the possibility of the person. I returned to my quarters and took a nap. I no longer had to work, because of my lottery winnings, and subsequently had taken on an irregular schedule: I would wake very early in the morning, read 60 or 80 pages of whatever book was currently on my pile, then take my breakfast and sleep for three or four hours. In the late afternoon I would rise, and either visit the park, read more, or begin my long and slow dinner preparations. Then I would eat, and read even more until I felt my eyes grow heavy in their sockets, and sleep for the evening. But today things would be different: I needed the extra rest to gather my strength for my forthcoming travels and revenge plot.As I was leaving my building, I was struck by a horrific thought: had Horacio—who first recommended this book to me after all—acquired this book from the library? Would I have to kill my poor friend, dear Horacio, a wonderful and cherubic man, a stalwart of all that was valuable in the human project, etc.? And, indeed, if he had read this library copy, and had somehow survived its assault, perhaps my calculations were in error? Perhaps it was only I who had been so damaged by Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal by Anonymous, and my entire revenge plot upon which I was to embark was an unforgivable calumny against these innocent souls (save for, of course, Anonymous, who deserved death no matter what). I stood in my building lobby and wept. Please, no! Horacio was sitting on his stool looking at something on his phone. It was surprisingly sunny outside, despite the time of day, though perhaps I had been indoors for too long. I could barely manage a word to him.“Good afternoon, Mr. Sebastián,” he said to me, bright and cheerful as always.“Horacio,” I said, “I have a very important question to ask you. It is of too much importance I can scarcely tell you… Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal. How did you read this book?”“I started on the first page.”“No, no, Horacio… Where… did you get this copy?”“Oh. My cousin lent it to me. He’s getting his degree and had to read it for a creative writing class. He said it was too crazy and made him laugh too much.”“So, you didn’t get it from the library?”“My cousin lent me his copy. Did you like it?”I embraced Horacio and kissed him on the lips. He would be saved! The human project! Ah! “You’re crazy man!” he said, laughing, and pushed me off him.“Horacio! The human project! Ah! I will make you its king, my good man! I will make you the governor of a little ínsula, just like Sancho Panza! Except actually! Ah!”“Thank you, Mr. Sebastián,” he said, and returned to the endeavor of his phone.My walk to the library felt blissful and light. I was doing something important, finally. I had been reading all this while as preparation, I now realized. Literature was the preparation, and I was preparing myself for something. And finally: here it was. The future of the human project, in my hands. I would have to do something awful, something unbelievably violent, depraved, and disgusting, but it would be for something far, far greater than I could have imagined. The possibility of the human.The library was mostly empty. Though I had been inside it but a few days prior, I had somehow forgotten its incredibly high ceilings, its battered bookshelves and threadbare reading chairs, its trademark musty smell—almost like tobacco, though no patron or worker had smoked a cigarette inside its walls for many decades now. Sherman was by the computers, helping an elderly woman with the device. She was pointing at the screen, and yelling at him. Yet his face was the picture of warmth and composure. Sherman, the human project! Ah! I tarried by the front desk.“Sebastián!” Sherman said, once he was finished, approaching me. “I’m glad you could make it. Unfortunately, I have some bad news.”I feared this possibility. The director was onto me, then. He saw through my ruse. He must have taken a glance at Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal, and probably felt sick to his stomach, seeing how marked up it had been, and then realized what an effect something like that could have on a future reader—indeed potentially driving that reader to an unforeseen madness that would transform into bloodlust. He knew what I was after. He had now become my new enemy. The director. I would have to devise a different plan of attack.“I didn’t even have to speak to the director,” Sherman continued. “When I checked the records, it looked like the book had only ever been rented out a single time before you, by one of our long-time regulars, Harold Pinter. Funny about the name. No relation to the writer, of course. Anyway, yeah, Harold sadly passed away last year. He was quite old.”“Passed away?” “Well, he stopped coming in, which we all thought was strange—he was practically here every day—and then Shannon found out he had died in his house. One of his neighbors found him. His wife had died a few years back and he became a real regular, as I was saying. He was pretty lonely. He had a terrible habit of marking up all the books he took out from us. I politely admonished him but he just smiled. I didn’t have the heart to do anything about it. He just wanted to be around people. Poor guy. Don’t know if he had children. Anyway, I double checked and it looks like you were the first person to check out this book since him.”“Are you certain?” I asked. “Sherman, are you absolutely certain no other person has read this copy of Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal?” I was once again nearing tears. The human project. The possibility of the person.“Yeah, it’s a shame,” he said. “No one reads anymore.”
The below-ground swimming pool in our neighbor Robbie Garvin’s backyard was ready. Robbie’s father, the beneficiary of a large insurance settlement, wasted no time improving the Garvins' status in the neighborhood. I heard my parents talking about it; they used terms like ‘not above board’ and ‘possible fraud,’ which I knew nothing about. The pool was heated and had a diving board – enough said.Robbie let on at school that he would throw a start-of-summer pool party on the first Saturday after school was out. He bragged that there would be unlimited food and drink and bikini-clad girls from our junior high. I was beyond stoked for the party.Saturday came. The early summer sun was beating down at noon when I arrived at the pool. The only girls were two eight-year-old neighbors splashing in the shallow end. No food in sight, just a six-pack of store-brand soda. Robbie and two pals started a cannonball contest off the diving board, scaring the little girls from the pool. I sat poolside, drinking warm pop. A sign on the shed where Robbie’s dad kept the pool equipment read: WE DON’T SWIM IN YOUR TOILET—PLEASE DON’T PEE IN OUR POOL. I finished the soda and slipped into the shallow end, lazily back-floating with my eyes closed. As Robbie and the others cannonballed into the heated, chlorinated water, I added to the warmth, letting twelve ounces of fizzy cola stream from my young loins, imagining Robbie and his buddies swimming in our toilet.
I push Ally’s note clean into the corners of my mouth, the motion wet and slow, the ink kissing molar. Finn is in the shower. The bathroom door splintered last week after Mr. Rutabaga ran into it, full force and head-on, in pursuit of a fast spider. We drove him to the on-call vet. He sits now in his doghouse with one less tooth and a tender snout. I can hear Finn’s motions through the wood-chipped cracks: the stumbling as he raises his leg to wash the bottom of his foot, the collapse of water after he pools the drops and cups them to his face. I swallow. The wad is thin, mushed-through, tickles my esophagus. Binder paper goes down smoother than, say, cardstock. And when lined with a three-hole punch, I like to start by pressing my tongue clean through the holes, make a game of it. The shower squeaks off. Steam erupts, slowly escaping.Finn is not technically my boyfriend. The neon “O” in JOHNSON’S BAR was flickering in and out, one night a month or so ago, and he was there standing under it. The glow made the stubble on his chin shift from dark to light. Feeling bold and bright from the pregame and in want of the cig in his hand, I’d gone up to him. Now we see each other intermittently: He knows my roommate by name but I’ve never been introduced to his. We’re doing a dance, where we both don’t talk about the unspoken thing, and I don’t ask because I’m scared to lose the attention. But if someone new were to come up to me, their head halo-d by the club lights, and press their face close to mine, I’d turn away. I feel loyal to Finn. When casualty becomes punctuated by nakedness, it morphs into something else entirely. The intimacy of a mark, sleeping skin-to-skin. It’s a mower to lawn, all my fine prickles picked and collected. The door unlocks downstairs. Must be Gloria with the cake. It’s her birthday today, 23. She’s always been particular about her cake, an 8-inch tres leches from a quiet market in Rockridge. Louis, the baker, delights in this annual cycle. Every year since I’ve known her, she returns with a Happy Birthday, Beautiful Gloria, iced on the cake in Louis’s thin cursive. Gloria sleeps next to me, two twin beds separated by a desk, in a cramped one-bedroom. We’ve been roommates since the 49ers won the Super Bowl, an event which, coupled with Mom’s death, catalyzed my move to SF.Gloria and I have only fought once, after my last boyfriend. He was hard to forget. He left me his childhood stuffed teddy, brown and made of pilling cotton. It took Gloria and I five days to finish and a bottle of Frank’s RedHot. The stuffing was bloating, glue-like. Each piece went down in big gulps, lumping together in our throats, like tens of Adam’s apples. I split the teddy with Gloria because she kissed Reef, once, while we were still dating, and regretted it fully. This betrayal was so shocking that when Gloria first confessed, the sidewalk where they’d kissed erupted and split right down the middle.
–
Gloria places the cake on the table. She’s wearing her favorite dress, all-black with polka dots. She glances at the shoe rack. “Finn is here?” she asks. “He came over early to help set up,” I say. I pad over to our standing cabinet, a heavy wooden thing Gloria found on the side of the street. We dragged it to ours, down Rincon Hill, the concrete smoothing the wooden feet out into patchy bulbs. We keep our party decorations in it, a few nice plates and a sword. For intruders, Gloria said, when she unpacked it. “Are you finally done with Ally?” Gloria asks. I nod Yes. Ally is my community theater director. She left me a note, after she’d given the part of Baker’s Wife to Emma Rose, a preppy girl I hate. Sorry, I know you wanted it, she’d written. Fuck her. Down the hatch she went. When I want to forget someone, I eat and digest whatever they’ve left, things they’ve given me. Gloria is the only one who knows. She’s no stranger to the process; sometimes, she’ll do the same. But it gives her hives and makes her throat itchy, so she’s more selective, has more baggage to carry. It must be hard to walk around so heavy.For me, the gut is its own biome, a paradoxical landscape where digestion means complete erasure. My side of the room is white-wall bare. Everything once meaningful exists instead in my stomach, deep down and feathered by acid. Letters, rings, Mom’s photo album. The hardest was a key, one time. The ridges burned all the way down. I hand Gloria the balloons and we take turns blowing air into them. Finn walks in, his hair all wet. He rubs my shoulder and kisses the skin.
–
Evening and the birthday party is in full swing. Gloria is drunk and so am I. The kitchen light is on, but the rest of the apartment stands dark. I’m chatting in the corner with Hanna, a frilly girl with asthma, who’s in Gloria’s roller derby club. “Hannaconda,” she says, pointing to a word on her sock.“What’s that?” “My roller derby name. I had them specially made.” I big-belly laugh, pressing my glass of wine to my forehead. “What would mine be? Wait, no. Do Finn. What would Finn’s be?”“Who’s Finn?” Hanna asks. I smile and look around, trying to point him out. I see two seconds of a man-body rush into the kitchen and have an urge to follow. “Right there. He’s my guy.” “Finndiana Jones,” Hanna decides, and then I giggle-collapse to the floor, too drunk to leave.Thirty minutes later, Hanna presses me about singing and says, "It’s the perfect time. Gloria is in the kitchen." I light the candles and cup the little flames so they stay lit. I lock eyes with the people around. Press a finger to my lips. The quiet spreads and then it’s only breathing. We stalk over in a mass towards the kitchen. The light is still on and a shadowy blob swells on the tiled floor. I hold the cake out in front of me and turn in, Happy Birthday on the tip of my tongue. But then the blob reveals itself and on a chair, Gloria sits straddling Finn, her fingers cupping his face. He’s looking at her, soft. Then the mass begins the chorus and the two pull away from each other, all guilty. Finn’s eyes sweep down to mine, his gaze troubled, and with the candle flames bouncing the light, he looks like he did the night we met, stubble and all.
–
It’s no shock when the apartment splits in two, right down the desk. The plaster separates and the house-bones shake. The rip is so big, it cracks the ground and halves the dirt, all the way to the center of the Earth. If I lie down and lean over, my stomach flat against the second floor’s hardwood, my head peeking out above the cavern, I can see stalagmites, bats, Hell. I’m working on finding a tarp so that I can cover my half of the apartment without having to see Gloria across the ravine. She’s trying to fashion a bridge to mine, already threw a can on a string and missed. I should call my landlord. Maybe my rent will be less.I haven’t talked to Gloria since she untangled herself from Finn. When he left our place, his shoes hanging loose in his hands, I stood tall and still on the doorstep and told him how much I cared for him. "I’m surprised," he said, his voice low. "I feel like I don’t know you at all. You’re all blank."
–
Before this, Gloria meant trumpets blaring and pop music coloring the background – my weak memory placing her onstage in that dark karaoke bar, all confidence and a soft, lilting voice, on our first night out as roommates. I started work at the seafood house early the next morning, a prim and proper waitress, shucking oysters and recommending white wine to pair with Tilapia. Gloria had gotten to the bar early and signed herself up for karaoke in slot #2. It was a few days before Halloween, the 25th or 26th, and so all the windows were colored with cobwebs. Gloria was in a big bedsheet. Ghost Gloria can sing, I said after, my hands buzzing from applause. She stretched her legs out onto my lap, piling the soft points of her heels into my thigh, and smiled big at the attention, establishing then some sort of need to prove herself worthy. “I’m dressed as my mom,” she laughed, her eyes ablaze. “She haunts me.” I stilled, because I had come here to start again, to try and erase my history. But feeling the alcohol snake its way up my chest and knowing, truly, that memory is inevitable, water to a sinking ship, I coughed and said, "I lost my mom too." And then we spilled open, craft scissors to the hippocampus, remembering things we long fought to forget. A few hours later, we both took to mouth our first memory. For me, a picture frame. For Gloria, a pill bottle. Her mother’s.
–
About a week passes and I’ve got the tarp up. But it’s cold in SF, and the wind presses the sheet outwards, making gaps. Eventually, a paper airplane finds its way in. The front says Please forgive me in Gloria’s careful scrawl. I don’t open it, because otherwise I’ll have to sit in the hurt, like I did when Mom died, all the pieces of her life staring empty and back at me: clothes, a toothbrush, her will. God, it’s so much easier to prepare a feast. I take out the seasonings– pepper and salt, some parsley for a green. I go around the house and start the pile. When I’m done, Gloria’s things fill my room. She is in every crevice, from ceiling to floor. I put on a song, let it boom around, and crawl my way to the top. I start with the paper airplane– crumple it up so it’ll sink down smoother. I take big bites and try to forget. Even with the music blaring, I can’t help but listen to the slippery sounds of it all entering my belly. It tastes cozy. Like warm apple pie.The next day, I’m feeling big. I take Mr. Rutabaga on a walk. As we’re climbing up a rounded hill, I feel something grumbling upwards, from deep in the gut. I let go of the leash. Mr. Rutabaga runs ahead, his body disappearing in the tall grass. After a heavy breath, I heave forward and throw it all up. Salmon against the stream.
Emily spots her strutting up to the hostess stand: a willowy curl of a woman, Asian and raven-haired, white blouse tucked into a black pencil skirt at her narrow waist. Her eyes are sharp as blades, bright as the silver chain about her neck. She grips a Prada handbag that fins from her side and points with a slender finger to a table at the wide bow window, in Emily’s section. Nothing in her face or posture wavers.A man strides in behind her—maybe fifteen years her senior—a graying swoop of hair roofing a scrunched face and thin-framed glasses. He lacks the woman’s flash, sporting a blue button down, slacks, and simple leather shoes. Pocketing the keys to a BMW, he puts a hand on her lithe lower back. It remains there as the hostess weaves them through the sea of green-checkered tables, the woman’s jet stilettos clacking against the herringbone floor. Only once they’re seated does Emily note the vacant space on his wedding-ring finger.She lets the clumsy busboy fill their waters, waits for the ice to settle before gathering herself and approaching. The bow window overlooks a bluff beyond which sand dunes stretch like bloated bellies skyward. Past them are the liquid plain of Lake Michigan and a lowering sun that honeys the crossed thigh poking from the side slit of the woman’s skirt. The leg is smooth and lean-muscled, making Emily remember the donut she downed for breakfast, the way the jeans she’s worn since sophomore year have tightened as of late.She greets them, offers her name, asks, “Anything I can get you folks besides water to drink?”“The demi sec,” the woman says without hesitating. Her voice is low, even. Outside a mass of clouds swells over the lake. “And you, sir?”The man surveys the menu before glancing up at Emily. His cheeks flush when he does, but without wavering, he says, “Do you recommend one merlot over the other?”The woman gives a curt laugh. “Tom, you see how young she is. I bet you can’t even drink yet, honey, can you?” She bores her gaze into Emily, who looks away and feels her face warm. Emily is nineteen. A year out of high school with no more direction than she had last June when deciding to delay the college decision. She dreamt of going into business, growing chic and commanding, like the woman before her. But she never left southwest Michigan. The comment peels her confidence away like the thin shell of a boiled egg. “The 14 Hands blend is popular with our guests,” Emily says when she lifts her chin again.“I’ll have that,” Tom says.Emily nods. “I’ll go put those drink orders in for you.” She starts to turn, but the woman says, “We know what we want to eat.” Emily takes a silent breath. She laces her fingers together and looks at Tom.“You go first, Annie,” he says, scooping a menu from the table.“The swordfish strips,” she says. “Light on the butter. Make sure there’s a lemon on the side. And a garden salad too. Aren’t you gonna write this down?”Emily crosses her arms. “I have a good memory.”“I’ll have the lake perch,” Tom says.“Chips or fries?”He adjusts his glasses. “Do you have sweet potato fries?”“Just the ordinary kind,” Emily says. “Yellow, thin, and crisped.”She feels Annie’s scathing gaze upon her but doesn’t break eye contact with Tom.He gives a bored half-shrug. “That works I guess.”Emily nods and collects the menus. She brings the drinks out minutes later and sets them on the table. Neither of them acknowledges her. Annie rolls up her sleeves, revealing an indigo birthmark on the inside of one forearm, the only blemish on her otherwise flawless skin. Far over the lake, curtains of rain begin to fall.Emily attends to her other table, asking a young couple what they think of the Angus burgers they ordered. “They’re perfect,” the dark-haired man says. His wife offers Emily a kind smile. Their green-eyed daughter mashes the remains of a French fry over the wooden table of her high chair. When Emily waves at her, she gives a high and bell-like laugh.Emily braves a glance at Tom and Annie. The sun has lowered, hovering just above the advancing rain clouds. It casts Annie in a citrus aura and turns the blacktop before the bluff’s edge to dark marble. Their wines trap the light. Annie’s glows like tree resin, Tom’s like blood collected. A tiny lamp stands between the glasses, its shade like an umbrella, unable to shelter more than the salt and pepper shakers. The clouds outside swirl and seem to ripen.Later in the kitchen, Emily retrieves the couple’s plates, ensuring Annie’s holds a cloven lemon. She shoulders them on a serving tray across the dining area to an old stand whose black straps sink from the food’s weight. She serves Tom first, sliding the perch between his flatware. Annie’s swordfish strips encircle a creamy dip in a small, porcelain bowl. Sear marks stripe the lean strips of meat. Sour fruit halves flank them. Emily places the dish before her then offsets the salad plate.“Why didn’t you bring this out first?” Annie demands looking at the crisp arugula. “And where’s the dressing?”Emily’s mouth dries. “My apologies for the delay, ma’am. What kind of dressing can I bring you?”“Honey mustard. But I don’t want it on the side.”“Very well. I’ll take that back.” Emily reaches to retrieve the salad, but Annie slides it from her reach, toward Tom.“This one’ll be on the house then, right?”Emily bites a corner of her lip. Tom ignores them both, forking into his perch. It takes Emily a moment to muster, “Of course.” At her other table, the baby cries, two spaced out sobs that give way to wailing.When Emily passes, the dark-haired man says, “Sorry about the noise.” His wife scoops their daughter from the chair. “Can we snag the check when you have a second?” Mauve shadows show beneath his otherwise gentle eyes. “Thanks!”By the time Emily rings up their orders, pockets a generous twenty-percent tip, and brings Annie her dressed salad, the sun has disappeared, swallowed by the approaching storm. The first fat drops of rain cast liquid streaks across the windows. Annie has already devoured the swordfish strips and cleaned the last of the creamy dip from the cup.“Much better,” Annie says, eyeing the golden-glazed arugula. “With that kind of follow-through, you’ll be more than a server someday, won’t you?” A crooked smile lingers on her face. “I’ll have another glass of wine. And we’ll split the chocolate ganache for dessert.”Emily manages a nod. Her hands start to shake. She wanders through the kitchen and into the walk-in freezer, letting the door clamp shut behind her. She takes two deep breaths and feels the air’s chill. Vanilla ice cream tubs engulf the top shelves. Thick cuts of meat slump across remaining racks. The stainless steel door reflects her blurred figure. Her hips and waist look wider than she remembers.When she emerges, there is the sous chef, scraping silver scales from a fresh-caught walleye, fillet blade tight against the gills. “What the hell were you doing in there?” he demands, already galled about the extra salad. His cheeks stay as red as the raspberries on the chocolate ganache she carries out minutes later with a second glass of demi sec. She sets them both before Annie. Gooey chocolate oozes from the crinkled lava cake. The dining room is quiet now, without the crying baby.“Enjoy,” Emily says without eye contact. She wanders to a corner. The busboy clears the kind couple’s burger plates and hefts away the high chair. The storm outside spews rain. Tom clicks on the tiny lamp, which reflects in Annie’s necklace. She eases her thin figure back in the chair, tracing a pearl nail along the bony shoulder of her blouse. Emily bites her lip.They clean the dessert plate in minutes. Annie takes generous gulps of the sweet wine. Emily stares between her model-thin waist and the crumbling remains of the lava cake. Tom tongues the last of the dark cream with a spoon. With her front teeth, Annie bites a scarlet berry.“Anything else I can get you folks?” Emily asks when she approaches minutes later.Tom’s wine glass is empty, but a rogue tint colors its curved bowl. His eyelids have a slight droop. He looks at Emily’s face and then other parts of her.“The check,” Annie says.When later they saunter toward the door, Tom’s hand rests upon her rear. He gives it a squeeze. On the table, chocolate crumbs pepper their dessert plates. The wine glasses are empty, and the untouched waters condense, forming liquid rings on the checkered cover. Past the undressed salad neither of them touched, Emily discovers the receipt and the too-small tip—not even in cash. She grinds her teeth together. The sky outside is crow-colored. Clouds obscure the moon and stars. Rain patters on the roof with a sound like a hornet swarm.Not wanting to brave the sous chef’s wrath, Emily ventures to the bathroom near the front of the house. She looses a pent-up breath when she finds herself alone, the two stall doors slightly cracked. She thinks about rich Tom pawing Annie’s slim hips and studies herself in the mirror. Her straw-colored hair looks unkempt and her plastic earrings cheap, childish. She tries to stand with Annie’s poise, but instead of a sleek pencil skirt, she wears a server’s apron over broad hips. Blue pens poke from it like hairs from a mole. She grimaces, reapplying lip gloss, when she hears a guttural kecking.“Hello?” she says.The noise sounds again. Emily peers through the far stall’s open door. She sees the stilettos first, pointed like brandished knives toward her. Past an onyx skirt, a ringless hand pulls a mass of dark hair fin-like back from a thin body. A line of vomit needles from cracked lips. Then animal eyes, zipping back and forth, like those of a fish forced from the water. Kneeling, Annie writhes and twists looking sickly. She slides two hooked fingers from her mouth.“Are... are you ok?” Emily asks.Annie leans against the toilet paper dispenser to pull herself upright. When she does her necklace unclasps, peeling from her paling skin, sliding to the tile. There it stays, its tiny links glinting as the gaunt woman stumbles from the stall.“Wait!” Emily calls pointing at the floor.Annie ignores her. She missteps in her stilettos, catching herself on the vanity. She gasps for breath and angles away from Emily and the wide mirror, floundering out the bathroom door.Emily scoops up the shimmering string and follows Annie’s skeletal figure, crying, “Your necklace! You lost your necklace!”Annie doesn’t look back. Her handbag thumps against her ribs as she rushes out the restaurant’s front and leaps into the passenger seat of a waiting BMW. It loops along the bluff’s edge before speeding into the dark and soaking night, leaving Emily in the vestibule, clinging to the cold silver chain.
The Rose Books Reader Vol 1, “Primal Scream,” publishes March 20th, full of “prose that explores characters or narrators somehow on the edge or on the brink, in chrysalis or transition, in various states of emergency or desire, struggling to cope with the realities of our contemporary world in real or surreal ways, with some success or no success at all…” that is “an engagement with emotional extremes or environmental collapse or feelings of bodily entrapment…that is desperate, unhinged, hallucinatory, hormonal. In keeping with Rose Books’ mission—“we believe in taking risks for the sake of beauty[.]’” I asked the contributors to answer a question on the theme:What primal person, place, or thing are you most interested in, and why?
ESTHER ALTER
Transfemininity extrudes from the flesh and tapers into a spear tip aimed at the throat of this awful country that I live in, for I have made my body a political weapon. I am the patriarchy divided by zero, and I will write rage and beauty until you all go fuck yourselves.
KATE BARSS
Birth.
ERIC BOYD
I’d say that creativity’s role in society is becoming more primal. Major labels, studios, and publishers are all flirting with AI while churning out “content” whose greatest value is filling empty space. The screenwriters at Netflix are told by the execs to make sure characters in their productions verbally announce their intentions because they understand most viewers are fucking or folding laundry while the app is on. To combat this I think real art is becoming less obvious, more neurotic. Increasingly feral; imperfectly human. Evidenced even by Rose Books’ call for this anthology, I think there’s a need for artwork which challenges people, even if that means alienating many.I think this is true on the audience's end as well. The worst thing a piece of art can be is “mid.” People want to love things or hate things. They want to care. I read an article the other day about the rise of “anti-fans” who enjoy hating certain stars / films / artists as much as they might enjoy loving them. This mindset ends up flattening most art. Nothing is allowed to breathe anymore. A movie comes out and if it doesn’t make a bazillion dollars on day 1 it’s dead on arrival; if it doesn’t shake you to your very core then it’s bad. You don’t get to think, “Well, I didn’t like that at first but the more I think about it it was kinda good!” We’re living in an artistic age of homeruns or strikeouts, despite the fact that most games are won by a healthy mix of singles and doubles. I’d rather hear songs, see films, and read writing that's good at one or two specific things instead of beating me over the head with its omnipresent greatness, which is usually short lived.
MICHAEL BUCKIUS
The U.S. Interstate Highway System is a primal place. It connects the wide open spaces in this country. In many patches, it’s a strip of concrete surrounded by nothing. And then, a town blooms, barely watered and ragged around the edges. The LED beacons of a truck stop pierce through darkness. Often, there are moments of silence. Crickets. Then the howl of a big rig like a wounded beast. The windows of an old farmhouse rattle. Tragic accidents, big, smoky, and smeared. A clogged artery. Flyover country it’s not. It’s fly under country because everything feels under the radar, attached to a feeling, and not any particular moment in time. Here in the U.S., we have more roads connecting us than any other country on earth, but we remain, in many ways, completely disconnected from each other. The deterioration of these roads is too obvious a metaphor, but it’s there, like a giant billboard promising salvation through Christ.Recently, I visited my hometown of Lancaster, PA. I drove down my old street, stopped in front of the house I grew up in, and took a few photos. Then I curved around the block and turned down the potholed alley I rode my bike through thousands of times. There was one thing that was noticeably different. Thirty years ago almost every backyard was open. Now, nearly every one had a fence built around it. I still rememberwhat it felt liketo ride away from homeas far as my legs could take mepicturing great distances and what promise lay beyond them…
DANIELLE CHELOSKY
Sex.
CHRISTINA D'ANTONI
Sunbathing! Growing up in the early 2000s, every movie seemed to have a poolside montage, girls in threes rubbing on tanning oil, holding their foil sheets towards the sun. Studies show that sunbathing is addictive, a biological mechanism from when people lived in caves. We developed this sun-seeking behavior when our Vitamin D dropped too low.In my writing, my characters tend towards the indoors. It’s where they battle their brains, boil eggs, take a phone call from the toilet, sit and stew. It’s only in moments of sheer desperation that they seek the sun’s rays. I’ll open up their landscape, introduce a lawn or a porch. I like these settings because unlike parks or campgrounds, there’s nothing to do. The sun obliterates all. I’m similar to my characters—as soon as sunlight hits my skin, I remember that apricots exist. Tie-dye, daffodils, sidewalk chalk exists. From there my brain speeds on to sensations: tree-hugging, sipping a fruit-infused iced tea, wearing the good clothes. A friend offering you satsuma slices in the grass, plenty to go around. Sunbathing feels like catching up on lost time, all the days wasted pacing inside. Suddenly your endorphins have you racing towards anything else.I think about that popular painting Morning Sun by Edward Hopper often, especially in the colder months. A woman enjoys the sun’s rays from her bed. There along with the sun patches and her pink dress are the shadows, the worry on her face. The melancholy of the cave. If only she would stick her head out the window, engage in her primal instincts.
NATALIE WARTHER
Berries. Specifically, jumbo blueberries from Trader Joe’s. Just like the ones my ancestors scavenged for. Sort of.Did I pick these berries from a bush? Definitely not. But I did fight valiantly for a spot in the parking lot, which is, in some ways, a primal chore. Man vs man in the wild, etc.What do jumbo blueberries go with? Yogurt. Cereal. Ice cream. Have you ever pitted a date and stuffed it with two berries the size of a racoon’s fist? Because I have. Do I eat too many jumbo blueberries? Maybe. If scanned in an MRI I suspect my insides would light up blue like a bear’s. Or Andrew Huberman’s.What makes them jumbo? Science, probably, or chemicals, which normally I’d be against, but in this case I selectively ignore, given the rich antioxidant content of the fruit, which may or may not be compromised by the jumbofication process. But probably not.
ERIN DORNEY
Noticing—and then picking up—a pretty rock. This is a part of human nature that has existed forever & I love knowing that I'll die before my collection is complete.
KATE DURBIN
I first wrote about Hugh Hefner back in 2011, when I published a series of poems based on The Girls Next Door reality show. The poems are a tour of the Playboy mansion, where the women have all vanished, their rooms occupied only by their objects and the ghostly echoes of something bad that happened. (What that bad thing is, is never named).I wrote the poems years before #metoo, before Holly Madison’s tell-all, and the recent The Secrets of Playboy doc. Back when social media was something very different than what it is now, and tabloid culture reigned. Now I know my intuitions of just how fucked life at the mansion was, how trapped the women there really were–intuitions I picked up on by writing through the show–were spot-on. They’ve been publicly confirmed by the people who actually lived there. And now there is all this new material, in various forms, from the women of Playboy talking about their experiences directly–podcasts, Twitter threads, YouTube channels, books and documentaries, etc.And so I wanted to go back into the mansion again, after poring through all these new materials, and from inside the nightmare of this new Trump era. HUGH HEFNER BEDROOM FURNITURE, my piece, takes its name from the online auction that sold off all of Hef’s stuff after he died (he was a hoarder). It’s a tour of Hef’s bedroom. All the stuff in the poem is Hef’s real stuff. All the things that happened in the poem are the things that actually happened–that, in a way, are still happening.
OWEN EDWARDS
The primal is the first. It precedes rationality and language. It's a sort of energy whose consequents include desire and hunger. The primal is unmediated, amoral, taken for granted but never absent. It sticks around and demands ventilation. The basic needs that drive you around provide a framework for all that thinking that wants to get done. Sometimes you bump along the edges and glimpse where it starts and ends–everything within the pure requirements for life.The word calls to mind a pre-historic animal, a time before civilization. Primates are like wise older siblings, or a part of yourself you forgot but always knew was still kicking around. See an infant monkey eating fruit and lounging in a stream. Noteworthy cases of the primal include when you eat bone-in wings, let desire take over your life, abide power and allure, pick up a heavy object, wander in the woods and come across an animal, or speak without hesitation.Buster Keaton had primal intuition. His movies are direct and chaotic. What he does on the screen is understood without explanation. Keaton pursues love, shelter, money, brute survival. But the gags are meticulous and illusory. He was effortlessly inventive, which makes his work immediate and free. He makes you wanna do some crazy shit. When you're watching him, you almost think he's invincible. (The day before he died of cancer, he played cards with friends and paced restlessly in his room, waiting to go home. He was never told his illness was terminal.) You get a close-up of his pale face. People say he was stoic, but his eyes reveal measures of fear, sadness, and shame. Is that what they call bravery? He just breaks your heart without a word.
JULIET ESCORIA
Myself. Not because I think I am especially interesting or "primal," but because our own behavior is often the most difficult to understand.
JULIA HANNAFIN
Sea glass keeps showing up in my fiction, forged by the ocean and the primal force of its tides. Lately I’ve been seeing less sea glass, more mangled strips and beads of plastic. I miss the soft and clouded pieces I found at the beach as a kid. My mom taught me to watch for sharp edges—if the sides of a piece of sea glass hurt, it was too soon to collect. Back into the waves. I like the idea that force and time can soften us, not do the opposite. Resisting a defensive response to change.ORGhosts. Shadows of death, our maybe most primal experience. We miss the people who die. We fear the ghosts that return. I keep thinking about the ghost perspective—pissed that they’re stuck halfway between this world and the next, unsure why the living are so afraid of them. I most hear of ghosts as unwanted visitors, as if their longing to stick around is to blame. But what if it’s us, the living? If it’s our grief, forcing a natural process to halt? I have more compassion for the ghost, then, as if they must pat our backs as we process what they already know.
JAMES JACOB HATFIELD
I’m interested in primal instincts in regards to emotions and thoughts because it gives my life meaning.There are different definitions of primal. For me, when I hear “primal” I think caveman. Pre-conscious animal. This proto-human base layer.Most notably in the form of knee-jerk internal monologues right before logic and context come in and rewrite them—the split second where your mind is completely naked before deciding what mental attire to wear in response to the weather of this moment.In every interaction I have that small space where I am able to decide how I respond. I can ask myself “who do I want to be in this moment?”In that liminal space between stimuli and response, I am nobody. Which means I have the highest potential in terms of creativity.So in reality, I'm creating a new self for every situation. Which means I have no idea who I am.And the unknown always excites my curiosity. So it’s an endless well of interest.But through practicing awareness these thought protocols can be rerouted and actually reprogram my instincts. Over time, with effort, I can do the “right” or best thing in the moment without expending too much energy, similar to a near-automatic reflex.So technically, through effort and required maintenance, our primal can be updated; we create what is innate in us over time.After I’m done with a project I am ritualess and insane. So I like to use that excess RAM that was dedicated to the recently ended project to update my primal and become post-caveman in small areas, like doing laundry, until the next story comes along.And it should be said, I have far too much time on my hands to think about this. Go read Rose Books Reader. Let’s have fun.
J. KEMP
12/31/18, I made a vow with myself to squeeze accountability from the world. With only 3 letters and 4 numbers, I found out more than just the name of the rotten apple of my eye.Asher wasn’t laughing like he was when we first crossed paths. He was too fixated on how long Ihad waited in the parking lot to answer my simple question of why he waved his middle finger.His wife unloaded all the groceries while he locked himself in their 2014 GMC Sierra that they had owned for 408 days, now 2644 if they still do. The sale price is still more than I make a year.My persistence led to Asher telling Jess to call 911. Instead she just sped off.I stood their let down, like I had finally built enough courage to call the number I dog-eared in the phone book just to have a father get back on to tell me she doesn’t want to talk. I’d always pout briefly then forget it, but not with Asher.With him, I still fantasize about sitting at his desk. He makes little jokes during small talk, our foreplay. My eyes lay on a white mug on his desk that has a big-box insurance logo on it. In the bundle of too many pens, a letter opener calls to me with its shimmer. I cannot take it slow any longer. I make the mistake of asking him why after impalement, he just whimpers while trying to get his hand unstuck.The obsession to help someone who not only doesn’t want help, but also doesn’t even remember you. That is primal, isn’t it?
AMY LYONS
I’m interested in home and in how people decide where to live. I’ve lived in five different states and I am constantly experiencing the tension between wanting to go home and wanting to run away from home.
AMELIA MANGAN
Two days before I sat down to respond to this question, I was bitten by a spider. I'd already made vague plans as to what my response might look like: something quick and clever, something I hoped would make me sound thoughtful and incisive and witty, some funny little quip about the only subjects I ever tackle in my work being Sex and Death.A tiny red eye watches me now from beneath my upper right bicep; this is the arm that leads to my writing hand. Dark pink threads trail from each corner of the eye; this is the venom attempting to trickle down my veins, to embark on a voyage throughout my bloodstream (the attempt will be fruitless: the spider, dead now, was tiny and non-lethal and nothing will happen save my feeling like hell for another day or so before I am in the end returned to myself again: Thoughtful and Incisive and Witty). There is a thin, smudged veil between my brain and my world and my typing fingers; everything seems underwater, up in space, echoing, changed and charged.These altered and transformational states. These sudden shifts in what we see and seem. It occurs to me, at this addled moment, that this is the primal state my work returns to, over and over again: something, or someone, changed and charged. Sex and Death, yes; and venom boiling in the blood.
SHAY MCINTOSH
When they dug up the Egtved Girl, the thing everyone noticed was her outfit. Matching separates in a brown knit: miniskirt, crop top, freeboobing it. Blonde bob, short nails, pretty dykey. Chunky jewelry. All of it vintage—3,000 years old, in fact. She’d opted for a green burial (no embalming, just a hollow tree), but the bog had preserved her anyway. She was buried with some hair accessories and a bucket of beer. She was a teenager, after all. RIP angel, you would have loved Claire’s.As a 20-year-old irresponsibly wearing crop tops to my internship, I got obsessed with the Egtved Girl’s fit. Turns out, in the grand scheme of things, our centuries-long detour through hoop skirts and corsets was just a blip. Don’t lecture me, Dad, you’re eating paleo and I’m dressing Bronze Age.Like all European cool girls, she lives in Copenhagen. She doesn’t even have to pay rent—she’s got her own room in the National Museum. Pay her a visit sometime. She’ll remind you that some things, like a bare midriff, are timeless.
SHELBY NEWSOME
I am most interested in our internal landscapes, the primal and, often, hard-to-decipher feelings that drive our movements through life. As someone who is late-diagnosed neurodivergent, has struggled with mental health, and is a writer, I am in my mind a lot. I’m picking apart my behaviors and emotions, exacerbating my worries—but I know these aren’t unique to me, which is why I’m so drawn to these kinds of characters in my work. I want to see our messy interiority splayed out on the page. I want to understand our idiosyncrasies and how they inform our construction. Because at our cores, we’re all operating with the same set of emotions, regardless of how we let them instruct us. And this intrinsic likeness provides solace and brings about a sense of being less alone.
BREEN NOLAN
The primal part of me is interested in dissecting the idea of who I think I am to uncover what's really there.
JOANNA NOVAK
Bodies of water, man-made or frequented by humans, fascinate me. They appear in my fiction over and over again. In the story I contributed to the Rose Books Reader, the narrator finds herself on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean, on a rocky beach in Brittany. In the story I wrote prior to that, a very dejected husband of a man stews by a hotel pool. For a while now, I've been trying to figure out how to write a certain story set in a bath. What could be more primal than water, analogous as it is to amniotic fluid? I like pools, hot tubs, dark water rides, lakes, rivers, peopled ocean areas, ponds, creeks, waterfalls––all of it. And, while we're talking water, let me recommend Leanne Shapton's wonderful memoir-ish meditation on aqueousness and almosts, Swimming Studies.
GINA NUTT
Nature—the natural world, human nature, all of it. Though isn’t it all intertwined? In the garden, disappointments aren’t personal, growth isn’t hubris; they’re part of a pattern in which death—or hibernation—is the only certainty. Memories of the stray who used to hang out on my patio exist alongside the knowledge that the cat was never mine (RIP Bones). How nature’s indifference reminds us our presence is finite, so too are joy, suffering, relief. I love the gentle, peaceful surprises that transform loneliness into solitude: when I’m out with my dog early in the morning and a rabbit darts out ahead of us; rounding a corner and finding a deer, or several, snacking on bushes. How private acts of observation inspire connections with others: voice note full moon reminders to friends, dividing plants and saving seeds to give away. How curiosity grows into fascination, simple care becomes intention. How worlds weave: nonhuman and human animals, insects, plants, environments. And so, too, do behaviors, consciousness, and being. Harmonious intersections and disastrous collisions; the humbling unpredictability. Longing and desire tangling thick. The moon and tides, so mysterious, grounding, and ancient. Anyway, what’s lonelier than your own voice echoed back when you call out? What’s more hopeful than a seed? Doesn’t survival ask of the living a certain amount of surrender?
ZOË RANSON
I connect to sounds, movements expressions and gestures we make to communicate that ultimately manifests as language. Syntactical curiosity is my daily excavation into how, in poetic forms, we are able to skip over the linking nuts and bolts - those tired instructional manoeuvres that claim to be essential in anchoring an audience - and use experimental form to tesselate and transmit the unconscious.Uncertainty is the usual state Isn’t it possible to win over and deeply connect to other human spirits without them understanding materially where they are? Through an embodied connection to making, I explore methods of portalling to Open Space, a glitch in proceedings that allows: the reader to experience the poemthe listener, or the audience to derive meaning from what is unsaidfor silence to hold - a negative space that connects the individual to something unseen that is both of language and more colossal than it.
BROOKE SEGARRA
The orgasm. It often doesn't stand on decorum and its strength, ferocity, and mysticism often disturbs. I'm fascinated with how close pleasure can look to pain, how pain can lead to pleasure, and how pleasure can shatter pain held in the body, mind, and spirit.
NICOLE SELLEW
I was going to be cheeky and just say sex, but I think that's reductive. Lately I've been obsessed with attention, which Simone Weil calls "the purest and simplest form of generosity." There is no divorcing either attention or sex from the economic conditions of late capitalism, though. It can never be that pure and simple. Engels writes that monogamy is “the first form of the family to be based, not on natural, but on economic conditions – on the victory of private property over primitive, natural communal property.” I would probably define monogamy as deciding that you're only going to pay sexual attention to one person for the rest of your life. Is it primal that we should all live, own, and fuck communally? I don't know. I mean primal in the sense of ancient, but also as prime: best, optimal, excellent. Prime like Amazon Prime. But I’m getting off track.My story in the reader is about a woman in her late twenties having a dalliance with a teen boy, but really she's having a crisis of attention. Young women are sexualized—that's the way in which people pay attention to us. As we age, that attention wanes, and that drives some people crazy. Capital is another way of commanding attention. But attention is so, so slippery. It has this almost mystical quality ("Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” That’s also Simone Weil). But now I’m not sure I even answered the question. I should have just said sex.
CATHERINE SPINO
Breaking apart a rotisserie chicken with my bare hands. Reaching orgasm as a trance state. Large cats. Open wounds. Accidentally putting my car keys in my mouth and the way they tasted. Mold. The first time my gyno measured my cervix. Jackson Pollock’s One: Number 31. Wanting more from a kiss. The fact Mary Shelley lost her virginity on top of her mother’s grave. The body as a piece of meat. Sobs of immense grief. The final scene of The Piano Teacher. Roadkill. The line “Ever seen a human heart? It looks like a fist wrapped in blood.” from Patrick Marber’s Closer. And dreams, always uncontrollable dreams.
MARY ALICE STEWART
My answer—Wile E. Coyote, or my rabbit, Buster, or the ocean, or sun faded, partially mossed over roadside signs, the ones eroded by weather and time, or sickness (of mind, of body, of spirit), or spirituality, or when people sing together.
GINA TOMAINE
Probably the dinosaurs from 1993’s Jurassic Park. Jurassic Park has been my favorite movie since I saw it at the drive-in when I was 6. There was something irradiating about it, something I didn’t understand as a kid but knew I loved. Of course I idolized Laura Dern as Ellie Satler, who sticks her entire arm into a pile of triceratops shit without a thought, rolls her eyes as she walks off into the jungle alone to turn the park’s power back on, saying, “We can discuss sexism in survival situations later,” and finishes Jeff Goldblum as Ian Malcolm’s musing of "God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs…” with her own edit: “Dinosaurs eat man. Women inherit the earth.” But it was more than that. All the dinosaurs in the film are bred by scientists to be female, but halfway through, it’s discovered that they’re gender-bending—they’ve found a way to naturally reproduce together and are breeding baby dinos in the park. “Life, uh, finds a way,” Malcolm notes. The dinosaurs are the movie’s “villains,” in the sense that they’re eating everyone, but they’re also not the villains at all. The dinosaurs, a stand-in for nature, are respected by Malcolm, Grant, and Satler, even as they terrify. There’s a sense of reverence for the unknowability of certainties in the world. Sam Neill as Allan Grant says succinctly, “We’ve decided not to endorse your park.” T-rex roars; nature overcomes the film’s actual villain: Ingen, the billionaire-funded bioengineering start-up, and its lack of humility, loss of touch with humanity, and ineffectual attempts at exerting control and categorization over what is primal—the inherent fluidity, violence, unpredictability, and beauty of everything alive. Life finding a way. Plus, Samuel L. Jackson saying, “Hold onto your butts.”
FELICIA ROSEMARY URSO
There’s nothing more primal than gut instinct. Mine told me to say Aileen Wuornos.
ADAM VOITH
There’s a studio apartment on Boren Avenue at the bottom of Capitol Hill in Seattle where my friend James lived in 1998. I was in Seattle for a few weeks that summer, before moving to California, and spent a lot of time at James’ place.James was starting a record label and running it from a desk in his closet. He rented an extra closet in the common hallway from the landlord to warehouse CDs and 7”s, and his rented mailbox was in a shop on the same block. He still had a day job at another label, but hardly paid attention there anymore.I’m trying to get my head back in that apartment for the novel I’m working on. The place was heavy duty for me in 1998, I was aware of that at the time, and it’s held that weight all these years. I’ve got photos and they almost get me there, especially this pair of Polaroids my buddy Kyle and I took of each other. We’re both leaning out the windows in the front of the apartment. In the frame you see the chipped paint of the widow frame moulding, the classic brick of the building’s façade, and our young heads and skinny torsos, leaning towers of dipshit, surrounded by the Pacific Northwest summer-blue sky. We’re high as fuck, happy as hell, and we’d left the Midwest.
Gina didn’t believe Sam when he said he’d discovered mold inside the air duct. “What do you mean, mold?” she said from the couch, not looking up from her phone. “It’s probably dust.”Sam got down from his perch on the bar stool. “I’m going out,” he said, then went to Walmart and bought painting masks and rubber gloves and vinegar. Within 20 minutes he was back, reexamining the duct in their condo with a flashlight. “It’s everywhere,” Sam said. “Come look.”“That’s okay,” Gina said. She was reading a really interesting New York Times article. Besides, Sam was always on about something. If it wasn’t mold it was chemicals, or bacteria, some foreign agent that would consume his brain and make him unrecognizable to the people he loved if he didn’t root it out and kill it first. He’d recently stopped kissing Gina because she didn’t use mouthwash. Her mouth was a bacteria incubator, he explained. She hadn’t wanted to do anything about it. “No kissing, fine by me,” she’d said, then shut her incubator mouth and went to sleep.Sam put on the white mask and gloves and took off his shirt so it didn’t get contaminated. He looked like a sexed up exterminator. He asked Gina to hand him paper towels, which she did without looking up. Then he scraped mounds of white dust into a trash bag before dousing the whole duct with vinegar. Finally he returned to the ground from up above, sweat glistening on his forehead.“Phew,” Gina said. “Glad it’s over.”“It’s not,” Sam said. The remaining mold was now volatile, loosened from where it had clung to the walls. If he turned the air conditioning back on, it was going to shoot out everywhere and fill their lungs. Did she not realize how dangerous that was? So he left it off. The whole condo became hot and began to smell like vinegar. Finally, Gina looked up from her phone.“Can you turn the air on?”“I just explained why we can’t do that,” Sam said. “We need to get a hotel.”“I’m sure it’s fine,” Gina replied. “If it’s mold then it’s probably not the toxic kind. Most mold is harmless.”“Okay,” Sam said. He went to the bedroom and began to fill his suitcase with clothes.“So you’re leaving me to die then?” Gina said, for even though she had no inclination to join him, she felt vaguely that this was not how boyfriends should behave.“You don’t want to live, you just want me to die with you,” Sam said, then walked out into the night, alone. Gina got up and turned the air on. Nothing flew out, of course. She settled back into her article, where a scientist was explaining why moose numbers were dwindling in Vermont. Even if there is mold, she told herself, I’d rather breathe it in alone than share a hotel bed with him, have another argument and not get any sleep.Sometimes Gina wondered how things had gotten so drab. Sam used to kiss her like he was eating a dense piece of chocolate cake, take her on walks and lift up rocks and show her salamanders he had found, cupping them in his hands as they breathed rapidly, afraid. As she reminisced, her throat began to itch. Psychosomatic, she thought.The next day, Sam came back with a mold remediator, a muscly guy in a wifebeater who seemed like the no-nonsense type.“Oh good,” Gina said. “Are you going to fix it? My boyfriend won’t spend the night until it’s gone.”“A little mold never killed anybody,” the mold remediator said. Finally, someone with sense, Gina thought.The mold remediator told them to leave for an hour while he sprayed a chemical into the duct that would slowly starve the mold. Then it would be good as new.Relieved, they waited, walking around the neighborhood. It was October and still extremely hot. They talked about the lack of seasons, how that made Gina sad but Sam didn’t mind.When they returned, the mold remediator was gone and the condo smelled violently chemical, like a Sharpie.“Please just try,” Gina said to Sam, though the smell had already given her a headache.“I can’t,” Sam replied.Gina opened her mouth to speak again, but before she could, something lurched inside the walls and the air conditioning came on with so much force that the grate flew off. Chunks of white dust shot out all around them like snow, snow that tasted bitter, burning their lungs and eyes. Sam lunged for Gina, who stood frozen under the duct, white flecks landing in her eyelashes and hair. She blinked as if just waking up, then followed him, coughing, down the stairs, into the car, all the way to the hotel, where they showered until they were red and raw and brushed their teeth and gargled mouthwash and spat it out again and again like a lifetime of nightly rituals. Then they put on fresh white hotel bathrobes and closed the curtains and got into bed even though it was the middle of the afternoon. The sheets felt good on their bare, clean skin. After a little while, Sam gave Gina a kiss. As he leaned over her, his minty breath cool against her lips, she wondered for a second if she should refuse him, give him a taste of his own medicine. Oh, what the hell, she thought. There wasn’t much else to do in the dark room. They had no home to go back to and nothing else to destroy, only each other’s bodies, breathing, like the beginning.
You are a tick. You fly through the air on an arc of static electricity, in hopes of landing on something alive and real. Your travel is always a courtesy of others, or an unexpected spark of nature. Purgatory for you is a blade of grass or a dark sock that renders you a shadow in the night as you crawl towards your heaven of soft flesh. You latch onto the shadow of her ankle, monosyllabic in name and purpose. People around here tend to wear socks — she does not. A waft of odor floats up from her shoes, but you are not picky. (It is, in fact, almost attractive to you.)Feared for your promiscuity, you extend the two rods slowly from your mouth — the left with its two hooks, the right with its three. You lost one in a final confrontation with your last lover, a testy deer, who in its final moments, blind and searching, kept trying to scrape its remaining teeth against you, largely in vain (except for your lost hook.) But you only left when you were good and ready.It is difficult to love life so much, or to be so strongly motivated by the primal urges you were born with, that you risk your life with every expression of it, at risk of being burned to a crisp by a lighter, smothered in vaseline, or scraped off and left precariously dangling. To cling, to follow, to have their life in you — there is no more intimate connection. But you are also feared for the intensity of your love.There is a sonic boom in the air that shakes you. You feel the two of you - you and her - falling towards the ground. There is some soft sensation in your body screaming that there is life nearby — she is not alone. There is someone else there. The hope of a new love. You feel a warm shroud of air cover you as he gets closer. Yes, yes! Your body vibrates — there are spikes coming from his mouth too, but they are words, not hooks. Though perhaps you are both embedded in her in some way.For you, time is measured by the number of your lovers. A new life to take on each time- their body, plus you. You do not care for gender or age or species— you love all equally.Sprinkles of dark fall across your body like rain. They are all around you as well — on the floor, on the edge of the light chair. There is one drop dribbling down across the corner of your eye. But they do not smell like the sterile sand that you were born in — they smell hopeful. Beautiful. They smell of life. Of life leaving her. The drop teases you as it caresses your face. If only you had that pink and fatty organ that the animals do, that they lick things up with. At least the taste lingers in your mouth for longer— the taste of love. You imagine her and you swimming in it, swimming in love, kin forever. Your brown shell glistening with it. You will never need to risk your life again for another host, another partner. She will always be there waiting for you. But there is always an urge to move on, always a feeling at some point that it’s been too long. Your little half-a-centimeter body is not big enough to contain and drink in the love of the whole world, but it will try.There are sharp and bright noises coming from her now, buried somewhere deep within her neck, exiting quickly and piercing the air. Maybe there is something else latched inside of her? She is beginning to move now. Quickly. She is beautiful and large with soft steps. She has learned to camouflage herself as well, to disappear. Her presence echoes against the hollow steps as she quickly makes her way up them — you are jostled frantically up and down. She secrets herself away in another room, reflexively, loudly, defiantly slapping the door closed. You hear a click. Just the two of you now. Her blood is thicker now, sweeter now, rushing more quickly. You wish it could always be this way, but soon it slows and she sleeps. Her silence and unknowing lulls you to sleep as well.There is the sound of fumbling and then that high-pitched click again whose sound hurts your body. He is here. You can smell him. Your body begins to loosen, the hooks move back slowly into your mouth and away from her, as they always seem to eventually. They reluctantly linger as they cherish their last grazing of her ankle.There is a softness now, little movements of her mouth are creating suctions of air. Whispers or kisses or something else. The man’s voice is not spiky anymore— it is low and dark and deep. Barely there, but his presence fills the room. (To you, he is the edge of the universe.) She is there too, breathing slower now, blood pumping slower now. (This is what you know from your last taste of her.) Her light ankle is resting on his now as they sprawl across the dark sheets. They remind you of the vein of moonlight cast on the beach that you were born under many lovers ago. (You are full of her now. You do not hunger for her anymore.) You crawl across the desert between them, pulling yourself towards him. You detect some delectable beads of sweat buried within his seagrass hair. In the dull sound of his exhales, you have found the ocean again. You have found someone new to love. (Love is in your nature.)
“I’m not doing a reading for you.”“You do have the cards, though,” Drew sneered. He was laying the deck out in four piles - the way he shuffled Magic.“Yeah,” I said, “but only ‘cause they’re dads.”“And you know how to do it.” He conjoined the sets, his thumbs bending around the feathered edges at first, joking like he wanted to riffle them. I shot him evils and he shot back worse, his nose and eyes scrunching up to mock me. He was like a girl.“Sort of,” I said. I’d never done it for anyone but myself.“‘Cause of your dad,” he reiterated. He positioned the deck on the carpet ceremonially to suggest my position of seer, as if innate.“Go on.” There was a leering satisfaction that flashed on his mouth belonging specifically to the curious and the cruel. “Why not? ‘Cause you can’t or what?”“I don’t appreciate that,” he knew how I was about challenges.In tarot, dad said that the trick is all in the pictures; never to use a book because it makes you look stupid.I laid his old deck the way I remembered: two precise strokes, spreading the cards like butter in two neat lines. I did a halfhearted flourish with my hands after and flushed with embarrassment. I’d performed my little show quite well.Drew told me to wait, got up to lower the dimmer-switch before settling back down, then told me he was ready. I halted him with one hand. I wasn’t. Still seated and without a word I leaned to the side, stretching to root around the rubbish under my bed for a stick of incense. I rarely had a use for the incense I stole from mum, so I never thought to also steal a holder. I balanced the stick in an empty cup and dug up a dirty plate for ashes. Her lighter was already in my blazer. I didn’t smoke. I had it because the idea of being able to provide fire for the kids at school who lit up on their lunch break gave me a bit of a rush.Drew pulled out an inhaler from his own pocket and took a hard-eyed protest puff as the first little flame died off into a steady white plume of patchouli smoke. Ashes started to curve over the plate as the warm curl of orange slowly made its descent. I scrunched up my nose and eyes at Drew like a girl. I told him he had to pick three cards and put them face down and he did. The problem with this game was that I was honestly still too scared to touch dad’s deck, so I also told him that it wouldn’t go right if he wasn’t the one to turn them over. He scoffed.“Why’s that?” he asked.“What do you mean? It’s tradition.” I lied.“Well, ok, but it’s not like it’s going to change the outcome,” he said and flicked the crazy pattern on the back, “the pictures are already in there, aren’t they..? A bit silly, really.”I said if he’s going to be pedantic I wasn’t going to play. Drew flipped his first card, and on it was a drawing of a sweet little pink-nosed cat, all white and sat aside a golden cup with a fish peeking out. The cat was upright for me, which meant its meaning was reversed for Drew. It wasn’t one of the major arcana so I honestly had no fucking idea about it. The title said this cat was the page of chalices. What was cups again? Oh well.“Do I turn the other ones over now or do you do them one by one?” Another quest for the measure of my answer. The mystique relied on the build-up, but I would have seriously preferred to read them all at once. Things never make sense in bits. I thought I might hurt dads feelings if I didn’t do well.“All will be revealed,” I intoned obliquely, and nodded for him to overturn another. Looking up at me was a bent-eared cat pawing the top of a prize-wheel that was dressed in its own strange symbols. This too was reversed.“You’re such a crap fortune teller if you aren’t going to do it one-by-one.”Finally, he turned his last card. It was upright, a tabby falling from a great stone tower in the midst of a raging storm, the deathbound cries seeming to blow from the picture - they echoed and twisted like a banshee around my dark little bedroom.“Fuck my life.”“Fuck your life.”“So what does it mean?” He was looking at the cards instead of me, small eyes seeking, searching. I packed away this expression to keep and open later. I knew it was something he hadn’t meant to do.The essentials were bare. The tower was the only up-facing card, things were not looking up but he knew that, I knew that. Drew was a man of equations and the solutions don’t make themselves. Here we had a science that I had studied. His fate determined an emptied cup and some noxious roulette to spin him to death - possibly. Much of a reading's meaning was in the dressing of it. I thought of the way I was taught these things and placed my hand over Drew’s, where I found it was pressed hard into the carpet. He was as afraid of the mystic as everyone else. With my eyes serious as lit matches and the law in my voice, my finger moved over the cards one by one:“Bad news, bad changes, bad outcome,” I put my face to his. “I’ve just seen into your future. Now you know what’s coming, you know you can change it.”“Bullshit,” he laughed, looking boyish in this low light, “you have not read my future, Liz. It’s a stupid predetermined game made to make money off idiots. Like Ouija boards. It’s confirmation bias, it’s a psychological trick.” He swept that sallow, sweating hand over his lot and adjusted his glasses, “That’s just bad luck, that’s what that is.”“Sure,” I teased, “fine,” and I prodded him on the nose.
While Ollie and I get stoned in his car every morning before school, I use my phone to take online career quizzes. I think in reverse, responding as I believe Mr. Stewart would. My mission is to find the amalgam of answers that triggers the “teacher” verdict. Only then will I know everything to say and do around him. My favorite quiz—and the most thorough—was created by an Ivy League school to assist its undergrads. I log into that one about once a day. Among others, my hypothetical responses produced these career options: CPA, correctional officer, lawyer, architect, and copy editor. What a prospective correctional officer would be doing attending that school is beyond me. In any case, I have yet to see “twelfth-grade AP English teacher” pop up as the answer. Always grumpy before the first bell of the day, Ollie broods and smokes between bites of a fast-food breakfast burrito. If I bother him with a question or to tell him he’s dropped some hot sauce on his car’s cheap upholstery, all I get are grunts or lazy hand signals; so, lately, I’ve been focusing on these quizzes. You read the instructions before beginning any assembly. Yes. You avoid arguing, even when you know you are right. No. You always let someone know if she has a crumb on her face. Yes.You are usually patient when someone is late to an appointment with you. No. You don’t mind getting your hands dirty. No idea. That last one gets me every time. It might be the one that fucks up the algorithm. During each class, if only for ten or our allotted forty-two minutes, Mr. Stewart, the thirty-something academic genius who corrects me with a verbal whip whenever I say which instead of that, lectures from a post directly in front of my desk. The twenty square inches of zipper and fabric and subtle bumps and lumps inside his pants leave me overheated and dimwitted. If he’s speaking, I don’t know it. My interest lies only in his stretched fly, an ass of granite, and a minimalist leather belt that ties it all together. Never has a single crease spoiled the light starch of his fitted dress shirts. His monthly haircut ensures every deep-brown strand is in place. Premature crow’s feet appear when he squints or graces me with one of his infrequent smiles. From afar, I’d look twice. From this close, I can’t look away. “Dan.” Ollie tosses a wad of paper at my cheek. “Knock it off. You’re sucking your pen like a dick.” Mr. Stewart’s head jerks in our direction. “Daniel. Oliver. I can only imagine you’re interrupting me because you have a question. Otherwise—” “Hey, Mr. Stewart, I have a question.” Ollie and I both look to the right at Jesse, who yawns, his hand half-raised with an index finger pointed at our teacher. He wears the same jeans, hoodies, and T-shirts, sometimes three days in a row. He’s consistently stoned, and he always has a fucking question. “Says here,” Jesse announces, “Mr. Hart Crane got drunk and fell off a boat.” He taps his thumb against the back pages of the poetry anthology we’ve been reading. Mr. Stewart stares him down. “What’s your question, Jesse?” “Well, yeah,” he continues, slowly flipping one of his shoes onto its side with the big toe of a socked foot, “the bios are more interesting than the poems. Can we read those first?” “We can,” Mr. Stewart says, “but we will not.”Mr. Stewart believes grammar should be everyone’s thing. When I think about him, I think, me and him, him and I, he and I, fuck it, forget it. He enjoys saying, “I do not understand why, on the verge of adulthood, none of you knows how to put together a sentence.” There’s more to him than his obsession with grammar. We’ve spent a couple months in brief, after-class conversations concerning my future and books. We talk about tennis. Despite playing hungover, disliking the drills, and hating the parts where I need to run, I’m good at it. Most days, he asks me, “Daniel, how did you fare at tennis practice yesterday?” And I always blather, “Good. Pretty good. Really good.” It’s tough gawking at a stashed but still conspicuous penis for almost an hour and then trying to keep pace in conversation with its owner after the bell. All I want to do this year is have sex with him. It is my single goal. With a speck of effort, I’ll conquer tennis at my club and on my school team, keep one sober eye on my handpicked senior schedule, and slide into one of the two schools of my choice in autumn. Having Mr. Stewart will be the sweetener. Audacity has been my stratagem for months—I’ve even flustered him a few times—but aside from some sideways glances and closed-lipped smiles, the flirting is meager, as difficult as trying to budge a piano with my pinkie. After class, Ollie jostles me and kicks my shin. “Move it. You’re like a girl with him.” At six-foot-three, Ollie’s body eclipses mine by four inches and forty pounds, and I take a second to regain composure before he shoves me again. “Why can’t you want the corduroy Chemistry guy? The one with the brown fingernails? English teacher. Such a cliché, man.” Right on time, Mr. Stewart looks my way. “Daniel? A word.” “Unbelievable.” Ollie snorts. “He asks you to stay like every day now. Hurry up.” Ollie heads for the exit as I pack up and amble to my teacher’s desk. Rather than acknowledge me, Mr. Stewart contemplates whatever’s on his laptop. I’m used to this delay; the silence Mr. Stewart and I share while I wait is the preamble to these afternoon one-acts. At the beginning of the year, I would fidget and cough, uncertain if I should speak while he wordlessly tidied his desk or erased the whiteboard. Now I wait calmly and open a bag of homemade turkey jerky from my pocket. Drying meat on a rack for eight hours on a Sunday is the only way my mom knows how to show me she cares. Other than this gift economy, we are no more than roommates. Mr. Stewart remains seated, and, as always, I stand across from him, the width of the desk keeping him three feet out of my reach. As I chew the dried meat, the aroma of the chalky cinnamon candies he enjoys hits me. I confuse his hold-on-a-moment smile for a speak-your-mind smile and forge ahead. “Great suit today.” He lifts his eyes. “How was tennis practice yesterday?” “You know,” I say, “instead of asking me all the time, you could come. See for yourself. Nobody else does.” “Your parents don’t go?” The wheels of his chair squeak as he pushes back from the desk. He places both hands behind his head, stretching and expanding his chest until the shirt might as well be skin. “My mother’s in a world of her own, and my father—” I am distracted when he crosses his legs, resting an ankle on his knee. The landscape is crotch, all the crotch I could want. I force myself to look at his face. “And my father’s dead.” “Oh.” His hands drop to his lap. “I’m sorry. I didn’t—” My one-knuckled knock against his desk shuts him up. “Anyway. I only play tennis because he wanted me to stick with it. That and a partial scholarship. Really, I just want to sit around at home without pants, but it seems wrong to ditch it now.” “May I ask how he died?” I tear at some more jerky with my teeth, and, as I’ve done every one of the last five-hundred times someone’s asked me that, I grunt and huff. A crumb of jerky falls to his desk. When he winces at the morsel, I swipe it to the floor with my thumb. The smudge from my thumb causes a more pronounced wince, which I ignore. “Everyone knows how he died. Shot? Three years ago? Remember that?” “That’s—you’re that Daniel.” He sucks in a quick breath through pursed lips. “I apologize for being indelicate. Why have you never told me?” I glance to the right as kids in the hallway rush past his open door. “It didn’t come up.” “It must have,” he insists, resting his elbows on his desk and craning his neck toward me, as if he’s inviting me to tell him a secret. I hope to put him onto the scent of a new topic. “So, what have you been reading lately?” He drums his fingers on the desk, holding tight to the matter while pondering how he missed that gruesome part of my biography. “What about your mother? She can’t manage to support you at a few matches?” My mother can’t manage much, except boyfriends, and barely even that. “My mom and I have this unspoken arrangement that lets us have almost nothing to do with each other.” I hold up the plastic bag stuffed with jerky. “But she does make me this. So, you know, not all bad.” The crow’s feet deepen with concern. “You understand you can talk to me about it anytime, right?” “That is never going to happen. No offense.” I’d rather not add my desire for Mr. Stewart to the existing tangled knot of emotions about my dad. For the past three years, I’ve chosen only guys who are nothing like my father. There’s complicated shit there—I know it—and I’ll save it for my twenties. “I understand,” Mr. Stewart says and opens his middle drawer. “On a lighter note, I brought you a book.” He produces an inch thick paperback, pristine, black with cubes of primary colors on its cover. “Please. Take it.” When I hesitate, eyeing it like it might be homework, he shakes it once. “Take it. If you like Wilde, you’ll like this.” With a tilt of my head, I acknowledge what we must both know: Oscar Wilde is the gateway drug to the entire gay canon. Although we talk about literature a lot, this is the first time he’s given me something specific and extracurricular to read. I finger the edges of the book. “Who’s Joe Orton?” “Playwright. Give it a try. Let me know what you think.” He lifts his laptop bag onto his desk, slips a hand into the side pocket, and comes up with a new tin of cinnamon candies. His manicured nails work open the plastic at its corner. I quickly check out my hands. They are dirty and rough, the left one scarred from a battle I had with Ollie in fourth grade; he jammed a ballpoint into the meaty flesh between my thumb and forefinger, all over a bike. “So,” I say, slapping the book against my palm, “is this toilet reading or bedtime reading?” The corner of his mouth twitches, as it does when he refuses to laugh, despite his obvious amusement. I suspect he wants to maintain a humorless teacher-pupil dynamic. This time, he gives in to a brief smile. “Daniel, I have to ask. Are you high right now?” “Nope.” I am. “Just the same, some advice is in order. Use Visine. Get your hair out of your eyes. And whose shirt is that you’re wearing? Who is Greg? Have you absconded with his work shirt? Is Greg a plumber?” I touch the patch on my shirt as if this mysterious plumber is close to my heart. First, I know I’m not going to get eye drops; I’ve long since passed giving a shit if I seem baked. Second, it’s been a few days since I looked in the mirror, and fuck that anyway. Last, this shirt has been my wingman so many times, I owe it a hand job. “Mr. Stewart, do you run?” “Why do you ask?” “Because your body looks like you run.” The muscles of his jaw must ache from all the clenching he’s doing right now. “Tenth period is calling you.” Students for his next class have begun to file in. I grin and turn on my heel. I’m not a foot out of the classroom before Ollie snatches my sleeve and drags me down the hallway. “You sounded like an asshole. Why don’t you spend your time on something that can actually go somewhere?”
People say they see their dead moms in blue jays and buttercups, robins and rhododendrons, but mine told me she’d never come back as something so abominably dull, and to keep an eye out for spiders. It’s a bright spring day and mown grass, cut by a neighbor, foams at the edges of the yard like a fresh-pulled pint. I am crouched in the corner of the patio, sifting through a 50L sack of soil that’s been slumped here since she lost the strength to stand. Digging for arachnids and coming up short. Two trowels deep. Late and making us later.I’ve found roly polies by the fistful. Swarms of soil mites piled up like tiny sacs of tears. I’m building a pyre of dead wasps, their crumpled yellow-banded bodies curled around their stingers. They can no longer hurt me but I’m careful not to touch them, scooping them up with a dirt-lined plastic pot because I’m up to my eyes in hurt and I don’t think I could take another sting.“Laura, honey, the service is about to start,” calls my mom’s boyfriend Ritchie, “we gotta go.” I dig faster, abandoning the trowels and clawing holes with my hands. Tiny white perlite balls get caught under my nails. Clumps of dirt cling to the black wool of my skirt. There — I win — I’ve found her — a whole knot of spiders, an entire family, a teeming cluster crawling madly back into the damp dark of the bag. I lift them out, cradle them in my hand like I’m holding a blessing, and shout, “Okay, Richie, I’m ready," then whisper, “Good to see you, Mom. Stay a while.”
