“My point is this: I wish women could be more like this in other areas of life. I wish we could always support each other without comparing. I wish we could always allow others to be sad without trying to fix it. I wish we could always be happy for someone else without seeing the holes in our own lives. I wish we could always share in another’s gratitude for good fortune instead of poisoning it with regret. I wish we could always laugh together without our mirth coming at the expense of someone else. I wish we could always lift each other up without having to be on top. I wish we could always applaud others’ gifts without pining. I wish we could always freely celebrate our own gifts without feeling the need to play small.”
-K.A., Mile Markers

Okay, literary magazine, listen up: accept me. Accept me because I deserve a break. Accept me because this is my year. Accept me, please, please, please, because I need to know that I am still a writer at the very base of me; I need to know that I am still the superstar I was always promised I would be. It’s vanity, literary magazine. But it matters to the core of me.

I have nothing but unimaginably trite things to say. But I’m closing my eyes and I’m emptying my mind save for joy. I dedicate this to friendship: may it transcend all tethers. I dedicate it to love: in its simplest form, from its highest throne

Please remember, love, I’m more human than most. Remember my hair falls out when I brush it, and my nails sometimes chip and become jagged nubs. Remember most that I have hopes. Remember that they are easily broken, like one hundred vases falling to pieces on a concrete floor.

First Fiction 2011

“Let’s not let anyone tell us that the Internet is going to murder the book, because the automobile has yet to murder the bicycle. The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect invention, and perfection dies hard. What object is more beautiful than a book? And if Keats’ calculation is correct and beauty equals truth, then we need to understand that the right books in our hands are paramount for our survival as a species. There’s this great line by W.S. Merwin that I always carry with me: “But we were not born to survive, only to live.” Books, like love, make living possible.”

“I’ve always believed in a utilitarian function for literature, both reading and writing, because what else can it be for, except to elevate, to salve, to enlarge, to save?”

-William Giraldi

I feel the slow seeping, the pallid slip of a silhouette on the window, like three hundred spiders bursting outward from some unseen campground. I swirl into a blanket, tuck the edges in around my toes, feel the thunder distort my chest, my breathing, my heartbeat. Heartthud. Heartfall. I spend thirty minutes consulting a knot in the wood of the ceiling. Darkness creeps in all around me and I taste blood in my throat, feel my eyes get heavy. I wonder about unhappiness, about writing, about separation, and about the inevitability of the severance of my level mental state. How long have I kept this at bay? How many months, how many years?

Today I needed a bit of scratch paper to jot down a bank routing number. In desperation, I pulled out a journal I failed to keep for more than a month in the fall of 2006. There was a sketch of my first boyfriend there, with the caption: What I like about you: your unwavering prejudice in my favor.

Unwavering prejudice in my favor. Nick Carraway said that of Jay Gatsby. I didn’t even make it up.

I sat there on the phone with the bank teller, who kept reading off numbers and I kept writing Your unwavering prejudice in my favor, until she hung up on me and I had to call back and start the whole ordeal over. Spiders were skidding out from every page of every word I had ever written. Menaces, dirty-limbed and mangy, creeping up along my forearms and spine like little marauders of faithless and brute intellectual superiority. Faithless and brute intellectual superiority. What a lifeless marmalade of insulting crap.

I don’t wonder if I am feeling tortured, or lost, or distorted. No. Instead, I feel myself conceding to the other side of me, the one which does not smile like a cavalier, whom doesn’t toss out jaunty phrases of half-navigated wit. No. Instead, the side with pulled apart hangnails, like open coffins, stony and bare, sitting cross-legged on the floor and proclaiming in horror, “She wants every minute! She means to take it all!”

And with blurred and feverish vision, I’ll stalk off into neighbor’s garden, peevishly pulling at vines and brambles until my mother finds me, hours later, in the front yard with scrapes all down my thighs, on my back and reading some book while clutching a fistful of what looks suspiciously like Poison Oak.

“What is that?” She’ll ask. And I’ll stare.

It will look like rain for the fourth day in a row. Heat lightning will stretch its skeletal fingers above our heads. The lunar howling of far-off dogs will follow her inside, and I’ll watch the distorted finger stroking above, the velvet of the clouds. And when the first raindrop falls, it will feel instead that I was catapulted into it, and that each subsequent droplet will shock me like some obstacle I could not avoid, and therefore deserved.

“Americans! Such faith in the future, where all shall be reconciled. Such compassion toward the past, where all may be forgiven, once understood. Really, you have no comprehension of history. Of how done it is, how historical. One may not redeem a day of it, not a moment of it, with all these empathies and tender discernments. One may visit it only as one visits a graveyard, hat in hand. One may read the inscriptions on the stones. One may not rewrite them.”
-A Mature Student, Tobias Wolff

Sweet pea, what’s all the fuss about?

“May I?” He held the silver dollar up, ruining any potential mystery. I always said yes, though, and he’d pull the coin from behind my ear, amazed by his own trick. “A gathering of geese is a gaggle,” he said. “A gathering of paper is a ream.”

He owned exactly one bike, calling it an outdoors-man’s car. He rode it with no hands to impress me, and I imagine that’s what he was doing when the Canadian geese felt he steered too closely to their goslings and charged him, a gaggle of feathers and webbed feet and rage. Startled, he tipped over the side of the bridge and broke his femur.

“This is not humerus,” he said. He was never quite the same after that.

What Is Left After the Limitation Inquisition: Part I

If there was ever a word for it, I never knew what it was. I started to read the dictionary the same summer I bought two box fans in order to sleep. I got through the J’s before I knew there would be no word. It was not ebullient, not even close. It was closer to inure, but there was more grief to it. I settled on penumbra for as close as I would get. It made little sense to me even then, but then I would turn the fans on high and sleep with my hair tickling my neck and forehead, alive and writhing long after I was, caught in the cross-winds, and I would think of it no more.

That was the summer I learned about love. I’d walk into the kitchen and see the dog and say, “I see you: The Face of Love.” She’d have one paw in her own water dish, unseeing but so trusting, and track footsteps around the kitchen table and out onto the deck. I’d leave a washcloth on the floor in case I felt like dragging it along with my foot behind her, but I liked seeing the dried prints in the afternoon sun, the places she’d been and left behind. We’d spend the early evenings on the porch together, me reading and her napping, ears twitching along with the call of a robin or the lunar howl of neighborhood dogs.

When the sun stretched its last puffy boughs of light, I wanted to go dancing. I wanted to walk the boardwalk in the neighboring town with ice cream. There were evenings I wanted to spend turning pink and flushed in the company of red wine. Sometimes I went for drives around the lake with the windows down, listening to the sounds of dusk, the happy lives of others, the whoosh of passing cars. I allowed myself, in these moments alone, to think of him. I call him the husband in my head, though we were never more than cheap lovers. I only call him that because he dismantled me, put each part of me in a separate container and sealed the lid. I was neither happy nor sad when he left me. He did not tell me I’d find someone else.

“Do you have some time?” He asked. He always asked. “Is this all right?” The words fell flat, like a towel to the ground. And then, “I have a thing at seven, it’s best you don’t stay.” And I would rise up into the rectangular slats of moonlight and he would admire me in a way that assessed each individual part on its own, like a scholar admiring another’s work.

The dog moves stiffly now, and she sleeps most of the time. I give her silly nicknames and we laugh like we used to when we were young. I ask her if she remembers eating the bumblebees in the garden, or when she was attacked by the stray and I carried her home, her blood staining my tee shirt, filling the space between my finger and nail. We were both shaking so hard in the car on the way to the vet, her eyes on me the entire time, The Face of Love, pressing me, begging me for things I could not give. When they took her into the back room I burst into tears and refused to leave the parking lot until every car had gone, until the only movement was the lilting neon Closed sign; the exhausted ‘D’ flickering on and off, panicked and urgent.

I went out to dinner with friends the week before the husband left. We gossiped about our flaky ex-roommate, the one who just started dating that guy she met in her political science lecture. “We can’t be so harsh on her,” one friend said, “We all remember what it felt like to be so in love.” I don’t. I remember broken pieces. I remember feeling shy in my own nakedness. Will I ever be shy again? I remember writing stories in my head, dancing to every Beatles song ever written. I remember the fear more. Love is always more a question than it ever is an answer.

The dog couldn’t climb up the stairs to the front door anymore. I had to help her along. “Don’t get old, Maserati,” I said, “You’ll break my heart.” We laughed at my nickname for her.

I climbed a ladder to the second story of an empty house to make love with the boy I did not want for the last time. I stood in the plumes of dust and sunlight, my dress sticking to my thighs, my sandals disturbing the march of sugar ants, and I looked out the window. The husband stood just to my left, at the far reaches of my peripheral vision, rifling through papers, old prescriptions for medications, military orders.

“This is the very minimum, isn’t it?” He asked, consulting a piece of paper. I looked at us both, the stripped bed frame, the wilting couch in the corner. The desk chair turned its back to us, resolute and militant, staring at the wall. “This doesn’t seem to be like enough to live on. Why is everything so limited?”

I remembered back to when the dog was young. We’d go running on the waterlogged days of early spring, and I’d carry a thermos of coffee in one hand. It was never for me, it was only for the dog. She’d disappear into the trees and I’d pour a little taste into the lid and she’d come bounding back to me from wherever she’d been, her wet and happy smile on, her tongue out in anticipation. We’d run along the shore of the lake, our feet slipping over the half-melted snow, and into the clearing of the cow pastures over the hill. And there we’d bounce together and apart, disappear into the tall grass and call out to one another. And when I thought I’d lost her, I’d pour a bit of coffee into the lid and she’d come surging from the underbrush, The Face of Love, covered in burrs and mud, steam rising from her open mouth and into the March air. It was the language we shared: the love of movement, of loss and rediscovery, the endless bouncing off of one another, until we collapsed in the grass, our breath rising up and saying, enough, enough. It was enough.