Some writings and where they’ve appeared; some have vanished
Fiction Literary Magazine: HAUNT
“Sometimes they do fall,” the contractor said. He considered the fleck of mortar in her hand.
A short story called Haunt, published by Fiction Literary Magazine, written in a Creole Cottage in New Orleans, in the French Quarter. The piece was never published on line.
Excerpt:
“It’s your home.”
He was drawing Gwen away from a glowing bank of buttons and sensors that controlled the air and light. They were on the first floor of the new house and she was having trouble getting the lights on. He looked into her face. “You wanted a home for us.”
The New Orleans house—the home, she corrected herself—was like most things Joseph acquired. It was striking, unusual, grand even. An open floor plan yawned around them; dark ceilings stretched dozens of feet high, skylights sculpted sunlight; Scandinavian fixtures glowed reservedly. Brick walls rose on all sides. When she stood in the house’s center—its enormous main room overlooked by a skirting mezzanine where they would sleep—she felt she was at the bottom of a dry well looking up into a distant sky.
“My home,” she repeated. She smiled at him and wiped her eyes. It was only the dust.
It was a house—a home—of contradictions, he conceded. She couldn’t know, not being an architect, a graduate of the London Royal Academy, but she had to at least sense how uncommon the space was. She should remember that, after all, it was a house of many ages, unlike their other home (they were to live part of the year in each) in Manhattan. This space carried remnants of each age, couldn’t she see that? Of course she could. Many lives, here in the brick, and here, in the original shutters. Many deaths, too, she said. He was patient with her. They had had a trying year.
Catapult: DROWNING LITTLE THINGS
I heard the mower’s whine cease and a sound like screaming began.
A short memoir about my English father: Drowning Little Things, published by Catapult.
Excerpt:
On summer Sundays my father solemnly mowed the lawn, that American father’s sacred duty. He would trundle out the red push-mower from the garage, where he kept his tools and a chair with a lamp, knot a handkerchief over his mouth, and yank the cord until the machine coughed to life.
While he worked my father wore old racing shorts that were very small. He was an inveterate un-finisher of anything other than mowing, that self-contained task that isolated him so completely. He would readily launch a domestic project like chair-building, never to complete a single chair, finding instead something new and more solitary to take up his time (building shelves for my toys, say) until he tired of that and it, too, languished unfinished. He was good at everything he did but, as my mother told her friend one night on the telephone, “He bores easily.”
The Harvard Review: FREDZA, 1963
She didn’t look so good now. But it was always like that. A girl put on all this fuss, the dress, the eyelashes, the stuff, and you couldn’t tell until you got some of it washed off, saw what was underneath the preening. But she didn’t look ugly, exactly. She just looked young, empty, and when her eyes skipped past him to the passing street signs he saw a hardening there, a manufactured blankness.
A grim short story called Fredza, 1963, published by The Harvard Review about the aftermath of a sexual assault, that became the opening pages of my forthcoming novel.
Excerpt:
Bouncing in the bucket seat. The wind is up, and it’s a boiler day so it’s the abrasive kind, a wind with milk teeth that catch and tear. It whips Fredza’s hair up, now down, forcing it into its own mad spring dance inside the car. But she doesn’t care anymore. It’s wet now anyway, her hair. Let the wind do its thing. Let it. A tooth clicks in its socket.
A bee could get in. She remembers having this thought just hours go, could it be hours, as she toed up the wedge of grass bordering Belle Isle’s blacktop parking lot, arm in arm with Jim. He had left the windows of the Ford Galaxie wide open beyond so that the car could simmer open-eyed in the day. The picnic basket stocked by Fredza’s mother was rocking easily beneath his forearm.
“Won’t the bees get in?” she had said when he picked her up. And he had said something like: “The bees follow the sweet girl, not my car,” and she had laughed and tried not to roll her eyes. But his compliment hadn’t made her feel any better about the possibility of bee incursion, and while he drove out of the small neighborhood, she sat with her hands pressed tightly in her lap and tried to think how to ask him to wind up the windows before they got to the main road, where the wind and the incipient bees would certainly maul her hair.
Evergreen Review: GLASSMASK
High in her garret, Cinderella has a fever.
An erotic fairytale commissioned by The Evergreen Review’s Miracle Jones during COVD. Appropriately called GLASS MASK, and illustrated by the great Janet Bruesselbach.
Excerpt:
Today, Cinderella is much worse. She coughs until she gags. Her impassioned moans have become wheezes. Her thoughts ooze: she will die up here, alone, as ever. She wonders where her fairy godmother has gotten to. Was there a fairy godmother? And if so, has she too gone into quarantine? Even after all her coaching about passion, safety, freedom? Even after getting Cinderella into the ball?
“Safety first,” the fairy said—was it really just a week ago?—as she showed Cinderella what it meant to be careful in a time of disease—how to put on the glittering crystalline mask with its tiny crystal dynamo that purified the air that hung between them like a promise.
The fairy had appeared while Cinderella was alone one blustery afternoon weeks before, claiming she’d known Cinderella’s father. While Cinderella debated whether her mind had manufactured this visitor out of loneliness, the fairy spoke of entitlement and marriage and an imminent forbidden ball where the prince and princess would be seeking mates from among the city’s elite. She promised to help Cinderella escape her garret, promising that she would be safe with the mask.
Guernica: SEAN YSEULT: THE CHICK WITH THE CAMERA
On Music: An interview compilation with Sean Yseult, cofounder of White Zombie.
Read my piece on a rock n’ roll legend and idol of mine, Sean Yseult: The Chick With The Camera, over at Guernica.
Excerpt:
As a Midwestern teen and dependable babysitter, I was the kind of girl you’d expect to listen to bubblegum pop. But the moment my charges were asleep I’d flick on MTV, where the late night shows were increasingly featuring a band called White Zombie. I had to keep the volume low: the driving riffs buzzed and rumbled like a rhythmic, jet-sized yellow jacket.
The best part was her: Sean Yseult, the tiny woman with the glorious head of hair, killing it on the bass guitar without once looking self-conscious or worried. She was laser-focused on her music, far too cool to bother gazing into the camera, and she head-banged her torrent of curls so surely it all took on a brutal elegance. If I tried it I’d have chipped a tooth. I admired her, the way she played, yes, but mainly her sheer presence, the ability to be there, so confident, among all those guys, making those strange, wonderful, angry sounds like it was no big deal. It took a few watches, but I eventually came to appreciate the entire band’s touch of camp, the sly humor, the nod at old horror movies. In the video for “More Human than Human,” the single that won them a Grammy, a fifties-era robot boogies while an evil Abe Lincoln menaces the camera.
Narratively: THAT TIME I TRIED TO MURDER MY DOG
Heydog was all that was left of better days,
Read this confessional from my twenties here at Narratively.
Excerpt:
“Miss? Where are you going?”
I darted past the receptionist with my elderly dachshund, Heydog, tucked under my arm like a deflating football. I passed the photographs of obscenely healthy dogs and a placard reading, “Free Puppy Chow,” which you got each time you spent a grand on veterinary care, and which I’d earned twice. I didn’t stop when a second, more authoritative voice joined hers, “Ms. Menlove?” Instead I pushed out the door and into the gray landscape of the Michigan winter, Heydog wheezing in my arms.
The veterinarian had left me alone to say goodbye to her before the euthanasia, this dun dachshund who had been with me since before my diagnoses of lupus and mixed connective tissue disease, the rancor of my parents’ divorce, and my various burnouts in college. Heydog was all that was left of better days, and now she had congestive heart failure, damaged kidneys, and so much pain she had become a biter.
Joyland: THE TURNPIKE
An early short story based on too many childhood road trips to the south and back.
Read The Turnpike at Joyland Magazine.
Excerpt:
It is summer of 1978, and a woman without a wedding ring drives east on the Will Roger’s Turnpike, the straightest route out of the State of Oklahoma. Drooping grasses and yellowed brush drop away on either side, leaning westward, as if to point her back to where she started. It is early afternoon and her husband will not be home for hours. The woman wears her dark hair long but full. It is a style fashionable to Oklahoma City women, and her eyes, big in her face as a starving child’s, are traced in black liner. White cotton bellbottoms encase her thighs, and an embroidered peasant blouse of red and white covers her slightly sloping shoulders. The memory of a bruise blooms sallow over one cheek. She drives just under the speed limit, worried that the car will overheat in the desert heat.
Handwritten: BETTER SMUT BY HAND
This essay remarks on” the dangers and pleasures of writing with pen and paper. Such words have a way of fluttering away on mysterious wings and leading lives independent of those we imagined for them.“
Excerpt:
Looking at it now, I can see by the physical state of my writing how I was feeling then: frustrated, ashamed, enthusiastic, bored. I can relive my process as it developed, see where my creativity tripped and fell, and the moment it brushed itself off to allow the show to go on…Sure, the paragraph that made it into the published novella is clearer, contains more — but would not have existed at all without the notes. One was the organic, physical product of handwriting. The raw material. The other was processed until it became more effective and organized. That it was processed and finished with the rather sterile act of tapping away on a plastic and metal contraption is significant. A keyboard and a screen have a disciplining effect. Remember my Inner Critic? She was allowed to come home again during this part. Another example:
Leia Menlove 