here - Outpost19

Nobody stomping on your chest, zapping
you with excessive voltage, shoving tubes
this way and that. A quiet death without
fuss or muss • Even after watching Vertigo
fifty-plus times, I have no mental picture
of him. Why is Stewart chasing this man?
We will never know. • In his own nearly
eight decades, Patrick Fitzmike confided in
very few men, and never in women, which
is partly explained by the bond he and
his mother, a woof and warp of mutual
deprivations. • The marriage ceremony
OUTPOST19
ORIGINAL
PROVOCATIVE
READING
was brief and disappointing. Esther had
been thinking of it as something like
the graduation she had missed in June,
something official that would mark the start
of her new life. But as the justice of the
peace mumbled his few words, with Vilmos
and his stern, blonde, Middle Western wife
acting as witnesses, and Alexander sleeping
in his carriage in a corner, she could see that
she had expected too much. • Kama wanted
to look away but couldn’t resist staring. She
guessed they were sisters. Rope tied their
hands and linked them together. • when
summer came, our mother would open up
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current frontlist
5 critically acclaimed titles
with coverage from the los angeles times, o: the oprah
magazine, Cnn, the advocate, vol. 1 brooklyn, the brooklyn
Rail, atticus Review, large-hearted boy and many others
becoming westerly — Jamie brisick
a book of uncommon Prayer — matthew vollmer, ed.
like a song: essays — michelle herman
Tyler’s Last — David Winner
welcome to Christiania — Fred leebron
spring/summer 2016
8 new titles in paperback and ebook
author events in ny, Chicago, la, boston, miami,
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hope for a Cool Pillow — margaret overton
the marble army — gisele Firmino
kama — terese brasen
devotion — michelle herman
madeleine e. — gabriel blackwell
Patrick Fitzmike and mike Fitzpatrick — larry smith
adherence — ben nickol
California Prose directory 2016 — sarah labrie, editor
the backlist
19 titles in paperback and ebook
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Becoming Westerly: Surf Champion Peter Drouyn’s
transformation into westerly windina
Jamie brisick
280 pages
$16.00 paperback 9781937402747
July 2015
in the sixties and seventies, australian peter drouyn was one of
the world’s greatest surfers. he
pioneered an aggressive approach
called “power surfing,” introduced
the man-on-man competition format,
and charged giant waves in hawaii.
A Zelig figure, he took on many
roles—method actor, surf resort
owner, wave stadium inventor, and
modeling school founder to name
but a few. about ten years ago the
most unexpected change occurred:
Peter became Westerly. “It was like a
supernova,” remembers Westerly. “It
just kicked in one night and bang, Peter was gone and Westerly was there.”
Beginning with her 2012 trip to Bangkok for gender reassignment surgery, becoming Westerly traces peter drouyn’s
odyssey from pre-teen prodigy to global surf god to embittered has-been who struggles to rise again as the glamorous,
phoenix-like, sixty-four-year-old Westerly.
reviews: los angeles times, cnn, times literary supplment,
The Oregonian, The Advocate, Lambda Literary, Huck, Mr
porter and numerous surf magazines
advance praise: paul theroux, andrew solomon, William
Finnegan, William Lychack, Peter Maguire, Richard McCann,
Charles Bock, Jim Krusoe, James Frey, Deanne Stillman
film adaptation produced by beau Willimon of house of cards
currently in post-production
November 2012
“Do I look all right?” asks Westerly Windina for what must be the
fifth time in the last hour.
Hunched forward in seat 39F of Thai Airways flight 474, she
looks vulnerable, shrunken. Her platinum blonde hair curls around
her furrowed face. Her mascaraed, smoky eyes beg for validation.
She wears white swing shoes, white hip-hugger capri pants, a
frilly powder blue cardigan—the sort of outfit Marilyn Monroe
might have worn on a Pan Am flight in the fifties.
“Stunning, Westerly. You look absolutely stunning.”
“Aw, c’mon, Jamie. You can’t just say it. You’ve got to look me
in the eyes and mean it.”
This is the thing about Westerly. She’s insecure. She needs constant reassurance. And the more you feed it, the bigger her appetite
grows. But it’s more than that. It’s a power play. It’s oneupmanship.
She’s a spoiled Southern belle very purposely dropping her
handkerchief in the mud and taking great delight in seeing me dive
for it.
I gaze up from my book. “You look beautiful, Westerly.”
She smiles warmly. “Oh, that was nice! That was like Peter
O’Toole or Cary Grant. That was perfect.”
The game’s been going on for three years now. In 2009 I traveled to Australia to interview Ms. Westerly Windina, formerly Peter
Drouyn, champion surfer. What started as a 5,000-word profile for
The Surfer’s Journal has swollen into the greatest love/hate relationship of my entire life—under the guise of a documentary film.
Westerly is en route to Bangkok, where a certain scalpel-wielding Dr. Chettawut awaits her. I am, as she calls it, her “wingman.”
She opens her purse and out spills a couple of drawers’ worth
of cheap cosmetics. A waft of perfumes that belong to fifty years
ago hits me in the face.
“Can you get that?” she says of a tube of lipstick that is easily
within her reach.
Without looking up I grab it off the floor, pass it to her.
When a stewardess hands her headphones, she pretends to be unable to find the plughole glaring at her from the inside of the armrest.
I help her with that, too.
Now she’s humming along to whatever song’s playing and
rocking just enough to shoulder bump me and make it impossible
for me to read.
We’ve yet to leave the ground and it feels like we’ve been traveling for ten hours.
A jingle comes over the speakers. First in Thai, then in English,
a recorded, babyish female voice explains how to fasten seatbelts,
where the emergency exits are located, how to strap on oxygen
masks and life jackets. All of this is pantomimed by the porcelainskinned stewardess standing at the end of our row.
“Look at that femininity,” whispers Westerly. “Look at how
graceful and delicate she is. That’s what I keep trying to tell you,
Jamie. A woman’s touch is finer than 16,000 magic carpets from
Aladdin’s lamp! It can change the world.”
A few minutes later the engines fire up and we barrel down
the runway. The cabin vibrates, the overhead compartments quake.
Westerly’s sun-beaten, manicured hands clutch the armrest.
Her ruby-red lips quiver slightly. Her eyes go glassy. As the plane
angles skyward she wipes away a tear.
The trip almost didn’t happen. Days before Nick, the director of
photography, and I were scheduled to fly first to Brisbane, then on
to Bangkok with Westerly, I called her from my home in New York
to confirm our itinerary.
“Aw, look, Jamie,” she said despondently, “I’m thinking I
might put the surgery off for a bit.”
“Why? What’s happening?”
“Well, I’ve been trying to get a bloody answer out of you guys
for months.”
“An answer to what?”
“The showcase finale.”
The idea of the showcase finale first surfaced in December
2011, when my co-director Alan White and I were in Australia
shooting a sizzle reel of Westerly. A sizzle reel is a sort of teaser
used to acquire funding for a film. While interviewing Westerly at
her home she insisted on singing us a song. It was a slow, melodramatic version of “River of No Return,” much of it delivered witheyes shut and hand on heart. When she finished we applauded.
She proceeded to tell us her plans for the film’s climax scene,
in which she would “sing, dance and tell a few jokes” in front of a
large audience. “We’ll see,” said Alan.
That we’ll see snowballed into the showcase finale.
“The showcase finale is the most crucial element of the film.
You’ve got to understand this, Jamie. The story is not about Peter.
Peter’s gone. Peter was a caterpillar who turned into a butterfly.
And without a showcase finale, we’re nowhere.”
“Wait a minute, Westerly. Now you’re misquoting yourself. Before it was ‘Peter was a caterpillar, who turned into a butterfly, but
she can’t fly without her operation.’ You’ve been obsessing over
your operation for as long as I’ve known you. You’ve begged me
to help you find someone to help you out financially. I do that, and
now you tack on this showcase finale.”
“This is my last hope, Jamie. This is for my son. Without a
platform to showcase my talents I’ll just be Peter with a vagina!”
She went on and on about the great stress she was under. I
told her to relax, that the film did not hinge on her surgery, that
we were interested in her story regardless. She said she needed a
definitive answer about the showcase finale. I told her I’d talk to
the team and get back to her within twenty-four hours. That night
she sent a group email to us Westerly filmmakers stating that “the
showcase finale will reveal the resurrected goddess Westerly Windina magnified tenfold by her completion.” She made us promise
in writing that the showcase finale would happen. Then she sent
a second email with a Microsoft Word attachment that went as
follows:
The Westerly Windina SHOWCASE FIN ALE
Starring the new singing and comedy sensation:
WESTERLY WIN DIN A
See this amazing lady break
all the boundaries of live performance:
she’s a new star for everyone:
a performer for all generations!
A vision and voice that will knock you out!
She will change you forever!
A Book of Uncommon Prayer
edited by matthew vollmer
234 pages
$18.50 paperback 9781937402761
may 2015
an anthology of everyday invocations
edited by matthew vollmer.
A benefit project for 826 Valencia,
inspired by the anglican tradition,
with original work by 64 authors:
dan albergotti, kate angus, hadara
bar-nadav, jensen beach, a. k. benninghofen, Nathan Blake, Gabriel
Blackwell, George Bishop, Jr., Wendy
brenner, nic brown, scott cheshire,
Jaime Clarke, Sean Conaway, Stanley
Crawford, Michelle Kyoko Crowson,
Christy Crutchfield, Weston Cutter,
Chad Davidson, Gabe Durham, Mieke
Eerkens, Clyde Edgerton, Matthew
Gavin Frank, Amy Fusselman, Jonterri Gadson, V. V. Ganeshananthan, William Giraldi, Ani Gjika, Eve Grubin, John
Haskell, Bob Hicok, Caitlin Horrocks, Marie Howe, Leslie
jamison, lauren jensen, Will kaufman, rob kenagy, lee
klein, catherine lacey, j. robert lennon, ariel lewiton, nate
liederbach, samuel ligon, robert lopez, courtney maum,
Aaron McCollough, Charles McLeod, Erika Meitner, Brenda
Miller, Rick Moody, Liz Moore, Dylan Nice, Brian Oliu, Alicia Jo
rabins, dawn raffel, Wendy rawlings, ryan ridge, joseph
Salvatore, Benjamin Samuel, Scott Sanders, Ravi Shankar,
Susan B. A. Somers-Willett, Amber Sparks, Sasha Steensen,
Sarah Strickley, Ian Stansel, Christian TeBordo, Robert Uren,
& matthew vollmer
A Creed
We believe in one God or another, the God of Heaven and Hell,
provider of divine scripture, an unequivocal God of expectation
and punishment, His word final, infallible. Or we believe in no
such thing, in many things.
We believe in Stuff. Through our stuff we seek salvation. Sedans
ensnared in backyard weeds, small businesses -- brokerage firm,
used car lot, bike shop -- and beer steins. Or G.I. Joes. We believe
G.I. Joe rose from his packaging in a smaller form, that we might
talk.
Joe isn’t what he used to be.
Yeah, now he has muscles.
We believe in Food: fourth pork chop and sneaked bites before
bed, no matter gout, never mind cholesterol. Or microwaved
leftovers during after-school cartoons and whole bags of Cool
Ranch in one afternoon.
And Drink: Miller Genuine Draft or Dr. Pepper by the twelve
pack.
We believe in Music, in boozing with The Platters or smoking to
In Utero. In nostalgic late-night clarinet twice each year or halflearned guitar behind a closed bedroom door.
We believe in Burdens. For our sake our worlds weigh upon us,
that we might suffer, might lash out, might forever distrust, dislike ourselves and each other. To stresses and disappointments we
turn, the better to hurt as we most deeply believe we deserve to
hurt.
We believe in Work. We assemble Chinese tractors in a garage full
of fenders and frames hauled from Houston, spend a summer eating lunch specials at a small diner, talking shop over Possum Pie.
But you are nothing without too much work to do, and I have
school and, soon, a son of my own.
We believe in Signs, in hiking Arkansas’ Mount Nebo and asking
God to reveal Himself. Opening our eyes, we accept as affirmation the unlikely genius of a timely Walking Stick.
Or we take such faith as a sign in itself.
We believe in Independence, squeezing lime into coozied beer
on the Fourth, playing catch with our sons in the pool before
debating, again, the fate of our nation, our jokes lighting fuses
that burn to the bomb, blow us apart, make birthday phone calls
briefer.
We believe in the Father we won’t live to be, a man who guides
and teaches, calmly, with devotion. At your grandson’s blessing,
you regret not leading me to God and I thank God you didn’t as
men bend over my child and strangely pray.
A Bidding Prayer for Those Who Pray
To be used before reading.
(mostly) GOOD People, I bid your prayers for the blessed company of all faithful people who pray; that it may please the Reader to
confirm and strengthen it in purity of heart, in holiness of life, and
perfectness of play, and to restore to it the witness of visible unity
among those who yearn for Saturday mail and those who ache to
sink the winning free throw in a championship game one only ever
imagines to be playing while shooting at the hoop with a chain
link net behind the church; and more especially for that branch of
those who long for wings not just for show or to imply one can fly,
but to prove; whereof we are all members with late fees that once
walked the near extinct aisles of video stores trying to remember
the movie they reminded themselves they needed to see again or
for the first time, but forgot; that in all things may work according
to some goodness behind a curtain, serve said entity faithfully, and
worship what it means to worship acceptably without fail.
Like A Song: Essays
Michelle Herman
278 pages
$16.00 paperback 9781937402723
March 2015
From activist choruses and discarded musicals to the science of
singing and the different ways music can define what’s essential. . .
Six essays by Michelle Herman
“A collection of six quietly transgressive essays about music
that ultimately asks, Why speak when you can sing?”
— O: The Oprah Magazine
Michelle Herman is the author of the novels Devotion, Missing
and Dog, the collection of novellas A New and Glorious Life,
and two previous essay collections -- The Middle of Everything
and Stories We Tell Ourselves (longlisted for the 2014 PEN/
Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay), as well
as a book for children, A Girl’s Guide to Life. Born and raised
in Brooklyn, she has lived for many years in Columbus, Ohio,
where she directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Ohio
State.
Performance
My daughter sings in the shower. She sings in the backseat of the
car, at the table waiting for her soup to cool at lunchtime, while
walking the dog or changing the bedding in her guinea pigs’ cage.
She sings along with the stereo and she sings a cappella; she sings
songs she knows by heart and songs she’s determined to teach herself, sheet music in hand. She sings the same line of the same song
over and over again until she’s sure she’s got it right.
She has made up her mind—“this time for real,” she tells me
over dinner—what she is going to be when she grows up. She is
going to be a pop star.
She is serious about this. She is serious, always, about everything.
It is 2003. Grace is ten years old, and she has three times before made such pronouncements. The first, when she was eighteen
months old, was the plan to be a farmer (actually, she insisted she
already was a farmer—on an apprentice basis, I suppose). Afterwards, for a time, when her father would say, teasingly, “So, you’re
a farmer, are you?” she’d say, “No, I used”—but she pronounced
it oohst—“to be a farmer. Now I am not sure what I am.” She
sounded wistful. “You’ll figure it out,” I told her. Her father rolled
his eyes, but I couldn’t help reassuring her. Even at two, I could
see, it worried her to be rudderless.
By the age of three, she had settled on paleontology.
Dinosaurs had been a big part of her life since before she was
a year old—her first complex phrase had been armored plates—
but now, she made it clear, she was through playing around. She
might have been majoring in dinosaurs for the hours she put in
over the next few years, grouping and regrouping her collection
of authentic-looking model dinosaurs by era, eating habits, size,
speed, and types of armor, poring over what grew to be two long
shelves full of dinosaur books, and writing her own speculative—
andspeculatively spelled—accounts of dinosaur behavior/coloration/ extinction.
That was the kind of little girl she was. An alter kop, my grandmother would have called her—a child with an old head.
When she was six and a half, we made a trip to Chicago, and she
watched the paleontologists at work behind plate glass in the Field
Museum. A sign posted there (So you want to be a paleontologist?)
listed the courses a prospective paleontologist should take in college—mathematics, sciences, foreign languages, art, writing—and
Grace asked me if all of these could be taken at Ohio State, where
I’d been teaching all her life. I told her they could. “Phew,” she
said, and pantomimed wiping her brow, as if she were making a
joke. But then she turned serious. “I’ve got to tell you, I’m just not
crazy about the idea of going away to college.”
I laughed and put my arm around her. “Well, it’ll be a while,
sweetie.”
“Not that long,” she said darkly.
Before I had her, I’d always thought that time seemed longer—seemed endless—to children. But my daughter thought like
an old person. She thought like my own grandmother, whom she’d
never known. Time flies away, my grandmother used to say. She’d
flap one hand like a bird flying around her as she sat at the kitchen
table. Just like that—the hand dropped to her lap, out of sight,
and then she would shrug—it goes. I couldn’t imagine what she
was talking about. Time was no thing with feathers. Time was a
boulder to be pushed uphill. Days passed every morning while I
waited for my mother to wake up and join me in the living room,
where I’d been watching Farmer Brown cartoons since dawn. But
my daughter would have understood my grandmother perfectly,
would have sighed and nodded and sipped her own cup of hot
water and lemon.
“Maybe for graduate school,” I said. “You never know.”
“I doubt it.” She sounded grim.
Because that was also the kind of kid she was. An alter kop,
yes—but at the same time showing no sign of readiness, let alone
eagerness, for the separation from her parents that other children
her age were starting to make, or at least to think about making.
Not even in the distant future—or what might have seemed distant to another child—could she imagine a life apart from us.
Midway through second grade, she decided, not without regret, that she was more interested in live animals than long-dead
ones. She packed up her collection of model dinosaurs, CD-ROMs
about dinosaurs, dinosaurfact games, and dinosaur skeleton puzzles, and rearranged her books to make room for the new ones she
began to collect in light of her new vocation: zoology.
This time she was old enough to check out the course offerings on Ohio State’s website herself, if not quite old enough to
take it in stride—she was tearful, then outraged—when she discovered that zoology was one of the few subjects one could not
major in at Ohio State.
“You know, Grace,” I said, “you might want to leave home in
nine or ten years.”
“Yeah, right,” she said.
tyler’s last
david Winner
275 pages
$12.00 paperback 9781937402785
october 2015
an aging criminal reminiscent of
patricia highsmith’s the talented mr.
ripley receives threatening phone
calls from a man who claims to be cal
thornton, the young heir he thought
he’d killed decades before on the island of stromboli. meanwhile, a dying
thriller writer based on the famous lesbian author fights off an old girlfriend’s
smothering advances while stalking a
young female performance artist, who
was also once her lover, in a haze of
violent obsession. tyler’s last is an
homage to highsmith, the last years of
her life, her work’s obsessions and the
twisting mythology that has tied them together. it is also the
name of the novel she’s racing to finish, a final goodbye to her
down-and-out protagonist, and the Doppelgangers that stalk
him. both stories come together in normandy and in senegal
in search of redemption for characters who have good reason
to expect nothing close.
“fans of patricia highsmith will be enthralled by david Winner’s perverse homage to the author and her milieu. this novel
casts a narcotic spell, leaving one savaged as well as tremendously impressed.”
— elizabeth mckenzie, the portable veblen
“it’s riveting and funny, a sort of dazzling movie script that
is a novel that involves another book within it. . . but with the
advantage of a novel that alludes to literary models, as well.
its language is hipster shorthand for readers to absorb as they
become spectators to the extravaganza, as the book, itself,
expands into its political implications. tyler is certainly the last
person I would ever want to sit next to on an airplane.”
— ann beattie, the state We’re in
eptember 5, 2001
4:00 PM
Tyler
“My wife has gone to Marrakesh with her little French girlfriend, my car has broken down, and the villa we’ve taken for the
summer is right up this hill.” Tyler repeats what he plans to say if
he runs into someone.
He limps over a plastic bag overflowing with garbage and a
dead seagull, also odorous with decomposition. The uneven stones
make him stumble into the bushes where that heady eucalyptus
smell has been replaced by a long history of middle-class Spanish
urine. Jangled from the long walk back from his poste restante and disappointed that there hasn’t been even one postcard from Ornella,
he stares blankly at the shrubbery before willing himself forward.
The path, which starts a few feet up the hill from the last restaurant on the beach, pains his knees and strains his lungs. If someone were to crop up, he doesn’t have to explain why he’s here, in
this dreary Spanish beach town, when he’s generally summered—
falled, wintered, and springed at Bel Vento, just below Naples on
the craggy Amalfi coast. No one has to know that he’d had to sell
it in order for him and Delauney to return money to their investors
before their long-running scheme was publically exposed. Tyler
can just smile tranquilly, wave his cane, and continue up the hill.
He builds momentum, despite his ailments, a faint breeze caressing his cheeks. But relief from the boiling heat just makes him
fret about the cooler Italian summers and the obsessive financial
cops who’d stolen them away.
Blood pounds so dangerously through his veins that he has
to stop to catch his breath. He calms himself in the usual way,
by remembering his arrival on the continent, after ditching those
dreary digs back in Queens, back in the early days of the Kennedy
administration. Cal in Sicily flits through his mind, of course, a
business that had ended badly. But the sun had shone so brightly,
the water so blue, the martinis so cool in the winsome way of one’s
first time abroad. America and its bedevilments had been banished
from his life.
A loud mechanical rumbling interrupts Tyler’s reverie. The
speeding Alfa Romeo would have knocked the remaining life out
of him if he hadn’t slipped off into the bushes. Which is all pretty
offensive, and now one of his favorite Italian shirts is entangled in
vines. It rips slightly when he gets himself back on the road, and
his underarms are soaked in sweat. When Ornella had been so
desperate to marry him in the 70’s, only months into their leisurely
liaison, he had driven his own Alfa and had no stains under his
arms.
He lowers his head and stares at the ground as he approaches
what passes for home, but those hooligans are still out guzzling
lager on the veranda next door.
“Cheers, mate,” slurs the louder, fatter one, wearing ridiculous
American-style long short pants and a painful-looking sunburn.
Tyler hardly feels cheerful and is certainly not their mate. How
they so effectively ruled the world, he can hardly imagine, as their
loutish lower orders have no notion how to hold their drink.
He raises his head and looks murderously back at them. When
he was younger, the flat-edge razor he kept in his breast pocket
would scare off any miscreant. But he’s now too old to risk unnecessary tussles.
“Fucking poof,” says the fatty, “haven’t seen your old lady
lately, have we, who she banging now?”
A moment later, feeling notably worse for wear, Tyler enters
one of Delauney’s spare villas, into which he’d moved with Ornella
after losing Bel Vento, enjoying its cool, dark (if gloomy) refuge
from the blazing heat. A martini with a twist would hit the spot
but a quick tug on the vodka is more convenient on such a lonely
nervewrack of a day.
He grabs the bottle, but tipping it into his mouth feels crass
and alcoholic, so he pours it into a jigger and from the jigger into
a highball before tossing it down.
The slight elation from his first drink of the day is enhanced
by the happy sound of the telephone, La Moglie, his wife, Ornella.
He rushes across the room but slows down about halfway in
order to enjoy the anticipation. As he reaches for the receiver, a
pleasant image of Marrakesh fills his mind, the first stop on the
Tour Nostalgique de L’Afrique Colonial his wife has taken with her
little French lover. La Moglie drinks mint tea on the balcony of the
Hotel Foucault, gazes at the snake charmers, beggars, and tourist
item vendors of the djemaa el fna and suddenly misses him. Dominique, the girlfriend, is pretty in her small-faced way, but Ornella
must finally have tired of her frilly conversation.
“Ornella, mia cara!” he booms ridiculously on the phone,
sounding like the vulgar American he might have remained had he
stayed in the United States.
The silence on the other line alarms him. Is there something
wrong with the connection or with Ornella herself, he wonders,
the thought of having to go after her making his knees ache.
There are plenty of people with perfectly terrible feelings
about him, the Delauney investors to whom he still owes money,
for one. Many would harm La Moglie if they could locate her in
Africa, but why would they have waited until now? Her romantic
idyll has been going on for weeks.
“Ornella,” he asks warily, “sei tu?”
“Nope,” goes an American voice, middle-aged and patrician.
“Non sono, Ornella.”
Something insidiously familiar, a tad sarcastic in the tone, slips
through Tyler’s skin into his innards, making him burp and fart.
“Who the hell are you?” Tyler demands. If it isn’t La Moglie,
he really can’t be bothered. A jigger or two more and a nap now
are in order.
“Un bruciato,” goes the voice, sounding suddenly weary.
“A burned one,” it repeats in case he hasn’t understood.
Tyler can’t quite make sense of it, and an unpleasant sensation
in the back of his throat is starting just where he can’t scratch it.
“I was on fire when you left me,” the gruesome voice goes on,
“but you couldn’t burn me away.”
Welcome to Christiania
Fred Leebon
97 pages
$12.00 paperback 9781937402761
February 2016
In Christiania, Copenhagen’s anarchist
village and infamous tourist destination, a Pusher Street regular nears the
end of the line. With locals decamping
and outsiders encroaching, he can
no longer subsist on hash sales and a
chillum. but even hard up and hungry,
he sees lost love in the moon, revels
in a comrade’s garbled rants, tangles
with the Big Man and, as winter gets
the best of him, still believes a grimy
commune can be heaven on earth.
“Fred Leebron is one of the best writers working today. If you
haven’t read him yet, this beautifully written novel is the one to
get first... You’ll be amazed at how much life he has packed
into this short yet emotionally expansive book.”
— Jenny Offill
“This is a sharp, intense hit of fiction from a major talent.”
— Peter Ho Davies
“WELCOME TO CHRISTIANIA is a marvelous, perceptive
prose poem about endless drift; we can all recognize ourselves as travelers in the same danse macabre. Fred Leebron
has written a funny, tingling nightmare. He has his own rare gift.”
— Jerome Charyn
Fred Leebron has published several novels and numerous
short stories, and has received both a Pushcart Prize and an
O. Henry Award; he is also co-editor of Postmodern American
Fiction: A Norton Anthology and co-author of Creating Fiction:
A Writer’s Companion. He directs writing programs in Charlotte, Roanoke, Europe, Latin America, and Gettysburg.
One
These people who think they are something, they are really
not. They come and go wrapped like gypsies at a carnival, sounding
like artists, smelling of mildew. I can’t take them anymore.
Yesterday I sat in the bakery, eating bread. Everyone kept
coming in: Jens and Vincent and Carla and Flavia and people
whose names I didn’t even know. Their pants had pockets on the
thighs and shins and buttocks. Their skirts swished over flowered
longjohns. I couldn’t take it, so I left.
On Pusher Street all the tables were taken. It felt awful to
stand there without a table to protect me. And it was too warm to
peddle in the Common Kitchen, so I didn’t try to sell anything. I
went home and fell asleep.
I am sick today. Sick with paranoia. When I get like this, I
usually take a whore and feel better. But not today. Today I will lie
in bed and think until I can think no more. Let me tell you what
I think.
I think I am nothing. I think if I let them, my own hands
would strangle me. Sometimes when I pick my nose my fingers
stiffen and plunge further up, bleeding me until I stop them, stop
myself.
I am here not because I want to be, but because I have to be.
Don’t get me wrong. This place is no prison. It is a...
Sometimes I am coherent. I can think like a rock, I think so
clearly. But mostly, oh, it’s the paranoia. Every time I feel on the
verge of a deep revelation, I fall into it. It swallows me like a mud
pit. I am choked and can say nothing.
Unlike all the other pushers, I have no dog. I am my own dog.
Maybe I should say how I got into this...If I can get it out, then
maybe I can get out.
I was looking around. The world is not the place it used to be.
I have read books that say the world is the most incredible place
ever. Well, it’s not. Nothing there is incredible. Everything there
has happened, and nothing is left.
So I was looking around, looking for it. The usual places:
the Andes, Ledakh, Katmandhu, Tibet, the Bush. I couldn’t find
anything. Nothing.
I was in Copenhagen, on my way to the Faero Islands, and a
ruby-haired wench selling jewelry on the Stroeget told me about
this place. I came.
In the beginning, it was incredible. You walked the streets of
Copenhagen, dulled by gray buildings, bakeries wrapped in glass
and steel, supermarkets beneath flat white-trimmed sale signs,
clothing stores thronged with wool-coated hangers; and suddenly
you stepped through a gate, and you were here. Christiania. It was
like going back in time and going forward, too, at once.
I cannot describe it, except...
No, description requires too much revelation, and I am falling
into it, falling back into myself struggling in the mud pit. I will try
later, all at once, without waiting, without leading up to it.
Two
I cannot stand it here any longer. The people are in a socializing
frenzy, asking each other to dinner or tea. I did not come here for
company. I came here for solitude. We should live in separate caves
and meet only at restricted times—not for dinner and never over
tea.
We all live here to be different. Some of us are more different than others. Otto says it cannot go on like this. He occupies
the hammock in front of the Grocer’s. In the winter he has only
his long beard and tweed overcoat to keep him warm. He will not
come live with me. I have not asked him, because I know he will
refuse. He is so big and full of paranoia. I love him.
When I worked at the bakery he loved me, too. I gave him
fresh bread for free. The work was hard, though, from two in the
morning until ten at night. No one wanted to have fun. They only
wanted to make money. Money, money, money. We were supposed
to be a collective. Christiania was supposed to be a commune.
None of it happened.
Oh yes. We all made the same money at the bakery. We overcharged and cut costs whenever possible. It made me a little sick,
but the people made me sicker. Everyone wanted to make the bread
“really nice,” make it look good, so it would sell well. The pastries
would be sprayed with swirls of chocolate and vanilla, topped with
strawberry caps and pineapple rings. The french bread would rise
an arm’s length and look as golden as sunstruck sand. It would all
taste like cardboard. They only thought of selling. Baker whores.
I quit and went to see the Big Man. The Big Man has office
hours at Woodstock every afternoon from two to four. He is a
shriveled worm of a man, obscured by german shepherds and doberman pinschers.
I waited my turn. It was in the summer and the stench of piss
was foul. Loud music rang in my ears, and by the time I got introduced, I could not hear myself think.
“Let me see your hands,” the Big Man said.
I laid them on the table like pieces of ivory. The dogs ignored
me.
“You can always tell a man by his hands,” the Big Man said.
“Where are you from?”
I told him.
“If you are caught the worst thing will be some days in jail and
then deportation. Scare you?”
I shook my head, but it did. I had been here for a year, and
hadn’t left Christiania once. I didn’t know whether I could live
outside it. But I shook my head.
He told me something about how much I should sell, and that
he would keep his eye on me. He did not scare me. There are only
a thousand of us living here, no escape from anybody’s eyes. The
favorite pastime is gossip. At the bakery, after money, it was all I
ever heard of conversation.
So I’ve been pushing for another two years...But here, what is
time? Old Otto doesn’t even know how long he’s been here.
Today is like any other day. The tourists are everywhere. Old
people out for a stroll, high school expeditions, undercover policemen. They treat us like an open-air museum.
But we are more like a town after a bomb has dropped. Most
of our buildings lie in ruins. All of us suffer weird traumas. We
have no lights for the nighttime.
In the winter bonfires burn on our streets.
Our violent fields heave in fruitless humps....
Hope for A Cool Pillow
Margaret Overton
171 pages
$16.00 paperback 9781937402527
March 2016
Kirkus Reviews (11/15/15):
“A moving argument for the reform of end-of-life care.In
2010, as her mother declined from dementia, anesthesiologist Overton (Good in a Crisis, 2012) enrolled in a nine-month
Executive Education course at the Harvard Business School
called Managing Healthcare Delivery. She was searching for
answers about the failures of the health care system, particularly about ways in which practitioners treat dying patients. In
a patient’s last year of life, she discovered, “nearly one in three
had surgery”; in the last month, “nearly one out of five”; and in
the last week, “nearly one out of ten….Those are astounding
numbers,” she admits, and believes the profit motive—on the
parts of drug companies and hospitals—is driving unnecessary and expensive interventions. Patients who undergo such
treatment do not live longer than those in hospice, where the
cost is about one-third of that in hospitals. Interwoven with her
reflections on the Harvard course and her own medical work,
the author sensitively recounts her parents’ last years. Her
father endured bouts of chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery
for metastasized cancer, each time told by physicians that he
would not suffer. But he did: “is lying easier than telling people
the truth?” Overton asks. “We routinely make people suffer for
no clear benefit except to ourselves,” she writes, and communicate in “euphemisms and circumlocutions.” Eventually, her
father experienced excellent hospice care, but her mother had
a less positive experience. With hospice now “big business,”
Overton strongly recommends comparison shopping. She also
advocates setting up medical directives, making wishes known
to loved ones, and being aware of such organizations as Compassion & Choices and the Final Exit Network. Based on her
personal and professional experiences, the author is convinced
that neither legislation alone nor the health care industry can
solve its complex problems. Capitalism, she concludes has “ruined healthcare.” A timely, informed contribution to the ongoing
debate over our nation’s health care policies.”
Margaret Overton’s Hope for A Cool Pillow is a passionate
argument for planning end-of-life care. As physician, daughter
and student of American health care, Overton pulls from all corners, showing us the emotional, financial and physical costs of
not being prepared. Her daily rounds reveal harrowing consequences, her studies at Harvard highlight the industry’s limits,
and her own aging parents make her case universal. Deeply
felt, frankly told, this book will challenge you -- and then help
you -- make your own choices about end-of-life care.
“Margaret Overton’s Hope for A Cool Pillow is a passionate
argument for planning end-of-life care. As physician, daughter
and student of American health care, Overton pulls from all corners, showing us the emotional, financial and physical costs of
not being prepared. Her daily rounds reveal harrowing consequences, her studies at Harvard highlight the industry’s limits,
and her own aging parents make her case universal. Deeply
felt, frankly told, this book will challenge you—and then help
you—make your own choices about end-of-life care.”
— James McManus, author of The Education of a Poker
Player
Outreach to broadcast networks, national reviews, indie journals
and health advocates/affinity groups. Events in NYC and Chicago
(Printer’s Row). Publicist: Beth Parker PR
EXCERPT
One
On the first day of my first clinical rotation in the third year of
medical school, I was assigned my first patient. Her name was
Esther. An internal medicine resident told me to insert a urinary
catheter into Esther, who hadn’t peed in a day or so.
Placing the catheter would mark another first. But the problem
proved murkier: how to make the transition from a normal social
interaction to elbowing apart the knees of a stranger and mucking
about in her nether region. The whole concept seemed intrusive,
certainly an invasion of her privacy. I hadn’t learned the necessary
etiquette from gross anatomy, physical diagnosis, or Emily Post.
So I called my mother from the nursing station. Her knowledge of
decorum was encyclopedic.
“You got me, honey,” Mom said. “I can’t help you with this
one.”
Esther was a hundred and two but she looked lovely
nonetheless, sitting up straight in her hospital bed, her hair a white
halo surrounding a gently grooved face. I recognized the “Q” sign
pretty quickly: open mouth slashed at five o’clock by a protruding
tongue. I had read that this usually indicated deathi. I looked for
some movement of her chest but it remained perfectly still. Was it
possible that the resident might have sent me to place a catheter in
a dead person? Apparently it was not only possible.
Scrambled eggs marred Esther’s otherwise tidy hospital gown.
Someone must have tried to feed her, not noticing she couldn’t
swallow, not recognizing she had passed.
That morning, on rounds, her geriatrician had announced: “All
my patients are do not resuscitate unless otherwise specified.” So I did
not perform CPR.
From the end of the bed I marveled at her quiet aplomb. This is
the way to go, I realized. Nobody stomping on your chest, zapping
you with excessive voltage, shoving tubes this way and that. A quiet
death without fuss or muss. Esther, wearing a pink satin bed jacket,
had slipped away peacefully; she had gone doggedly gentle into
that good night.
~
My own mother died on September 22nd in the year 2010. I like to
think she chose that particular day for reasons of her own—it was
the birthday of someone who had displeased her immensely—
but death makes it impossible to verify my hypothesis. She was a
disciplined and principled woman who stayed true to her beliefs
throughout a long life, which ended consistent with her trusted
maxim: enough is enough. Had there been a coupon for a coffin—and
she’d had her wits about her—I think she would have clipped it. I
loved her for that and so much more.
The funeral proceedings took place in the traditional Roman
Catholic fashion, with a mass and burial on the day following a
wake complete with open casket. I used to think the open casket
a barbaric tradition that should be consigned to the past, much
like bloodletting for consumption or trephination for mental
disorders. It seemed a creepy holdover from a different century.
When my father died in 1998, he was almost unrecognizable from
the ravages of cancer. Something in me—either doctor or ad hoc
decorator—wanted to cover it up. I had suggested to Mom that
perhaps we close the casket.
“No,” she said firmly at the time, “I want to be able to see him
just one more day.”
I never understood the open casket until Mom died. Then I
needed to be with her, to gaze at her face one more day.
Gibbons Funeral Home, the stalwart if temporary mainstay
for the recently departed that graces my hometown of Elmhurst,
Illinois, had done a terrific job preparing her hair and makeup. Mom didn’t look a day over eighty. My sisters Erica, Beth,
Bonnie and I had chosen a suit she’d particularly liked, one that
complemented her coloring. We added a cheerful scarf that I
had bought her. We picked out her favorite rosary and a pair of
coordinating earrings. She looked good, if not well. She certainly
did not seem ninety-three. My sisters and I felt confident that
Mom would have been thrilled with her posthumous appearance.
I’d never given too much thought to cosmetizing, which is the art
of making the dead appear better than dead, almost alive really, just
kind of still. Or perhaps I’d thought of it in terms of outcome, not
in terms of process. It must be a difficult profession, certainly not
for everyone. I don’t think I’d want to do it, but I’ve learned from
experience that I can do just about anything if I have to.
A surprising number of people showed up for the wake and
the funeral. When you’re ninety-three, you can’t expect too many
mourners unless you’re famous. Most of your contemporaries are
long gone. But Mom still had a few friends who paid their respects.
Those who couldn’t attend had their children come in their stead.
Friends of mine, friends of my sisters’, even friends of our kids
came to say good-bye to our mother, Lydia Overton. She’d left an
impression. I’m not sure you can ask for more than that.
The wake was odd in the manner that wakes usually are, but
nothing truly weird happened. Not at the wake anyway. Nobody
grabbed any dead body parts or fell to the floor in prostration.
I’ve been at wakes where some distant relatives hauled the dead
person up and out of the casket, hugged him, and carried on. I’ve
attended wakes where the family hired a professional to wail. That
was definitely awkward and personally discomfiting. My family,
for certain, doesn’t emote much. Our funerals are civil affairs;
the weeping is silent, mostly contained. But still, there we were,
standing around a dead body in a casket, making polite small
talk about this and that and it was unnerving and frankly pretty
damn exhausting trying to pretend it was all just normal, not too
devastating really. People I hadn’t seen in ages—people I didn’t
even like—came by to say hello. Or good-bye, as it were. Some hugs
and kisses. I kept glancing over my shoulder at Mom. It would be
my last day with her. Forever. I studied her profile surreptitiously
in between visits with other mourners. What if I developed facial
agnosia and forgot what she looked like once she was buried? How
could pictures ever prove adequate? I wasn’t ready for this, and
yet she was more than ready. And she was so much more than
her image, right? How could a two-dimensional figure evoke the
full magnitude of the woman? I was glad to have that one extra
day. I needed it. But what I really needed was the mom I’d had
years before, when both she and her mind were present in the
same room at the same time and we could all have a meaningful
discussion. That’s the woman I wanted, right here and right now. I
wanted her laughter and wisdom; I wanted her insight. But those
were long gone.
I kneeled in front of the casket and pretended to pray so I
didn’t have to talk to anyone. I wanted time alone with her.
Mom looked the same in repose as she had each day in recent
memory—a slight, beneficent smile affixed to her face. The smile
was her default setting, placed there more to reassure than to signal
underlying happiness or contentment. Dementia misleads you that
way. It’s the great teaser, using the expression of equanimity to
hide the tragedy of a soul’s inching disappearance. But in death
her dementia kept its distance; the still silence almost allowed me
to forget the previous six years. She was, once again, the brilliant
mother who’d taught me to read before I started kindergarten.
She’d taught me to cook too, not well, unfortunately, but rather to
enjoy the science lab of the kitchen, the science of making do with
whatever. Together we experimented with Tollhouse cookies, using
butter in differing quantities, baking at differing temperatures, then
noting the differences in shape and texture of the cookies. How
chewy they turned out. We made fudge, divinity and mincemeat
pies at Christmas, banana cream pies for birthdays, and applecrisps in the fall. I stayed in my bedroom emerging only with fleshcolored nose-plugs when she cooked sauerkraut for my father, or
split pea soup for the family. I’d hated her vegetable soup, though it
smelled terrific. I refused to learn that recipe. What was I thinking?
There were other lessons she taught me, like how to take things
apart before sending them to the repair shop. Always turn the power
off and then on before you decide something is broken. Check your connections,
check your electrical source, your circuit breakers or fuses, and check your
wires; learn how to do basic maintenance on all major appliances simply by
following the instructions provided in the manuals—that’s what they’re there
for. If the toilet doesn’t flush, take off the top and study the mechanism. It’s
incredibly simple. Replace the flapper if it doesn’t seat properly, they’re sold
at the hardware store, you know. Change your filters; clean the lint trap; let’s
follow the hot and cold water lines; you have to know your home. Why hire
somebody to do what you can do yourself?
My daughter Ruthann placed a warm hand on my shoulder. I’d
been kneeling a long time.
“Do you want to go get something to drink? There’s food
in the other room.” I stood up, my legs stiff and sore. I looked
around. More visitors had gathered. I vaguely recognized most. I
should say hello, thank them for coming. Mom would have wanted
me to be a gracious hostess, on this occasion as on any other.
“I’m going to sit for a while,” I said. “Maybe later.”
“Are you okay?” she asked and studied my face. I nodded and
sank into an upholstered chair.
It wasn’t just home maintenance she’d taught me. Mom
preached from the practical to the heartfelt: High heels will ruin your
feet; spend money on decent shoes because when your feet hurt, you hurt all
over. Clean underwear went without saying. Stand up straight, practice
yoga, stretch every day. Send thank-you notes and sympathy cards. Put some
thought into what you write. Go to wakes; call friends who’ve lost a loved one,
and don’t just call the week after the funeral, but keep calling. The second year
is harder than the first. All of life was a lesson and I trotted along at
her heels. She made everything interesting, whether it was how to
cut and sew a Vogue pattern, how to hit a golf ball on a downhill
lie, or how to choose a ripe pineapple. She taught me how to listen,
and how to wonder. She taught me how to focus.
It wasn’t that I didn’t see this coming. I’d seen it coming for a
long time. Maybe that was the problem. The long slow decline was
over. And now, what should have been relief turned out to feel like
nothing of the sort. Why does grief take us by surprise?
She gave birth to me and then instilled me with everything
she knew. What’s the opposite of unfurl? That’s how her life
ended. She folded up. I stood and moved into the crowd. I tried
to socialize and make everyone feel welcome, just as my mother
would have done.
The funeral showcased the Gibbons’ family expertise. The
Roman Catholic mass, the drive to the cemetery, and the burial
all constituted a precise symphony of tradition and symbolism,
each movement perfectly executed by a team with longstanding
experience and comfort in their roles. We had only to follow
their instructions and our dead would be interred. Wear black,
remember lipstick, place tissues in your pocket. Make the sign of
the cross and mouth the words to the twenty-third psalm. One
final day and this strange but comforting ritual would be complete.
Her suffering had ended. Long live suffering. And then, as the
graveside service concluded and the mourners began to disperse,
Mom’s caregiver walked over to the casket and gave full, vibrant
voice to her grief, a grief that was completely out of tune with our
longstanding civility and repression.
Mom’s caregiver was Vicki, a sunny and capable woman in
her sixties from the Philippines. She lived-in during the last year
of Mom’s life, sleeping on the sofa in the living room, spending
twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week with Mom except for
a few days a month when one of her sisters would come to relieve
her. Vicki cleaned Mom, dressed Mom, fed Mom. She put make-up
on Mom and plucked her eyebrows. She sang to her. She watched
an amazing amount of television with Mom, and got her hooked
on Dancing with the Stars and Filipino Karaoke. Vicki’s singing voice
made my ears bleed, but Mom loved it. And when Mom died,
Vicki grieved, not in the tidy and quiet way of our family, but in
the loud and messy way of her own.
It was in that awkward moment at the cemetery, a moment
of pure finality and utter solitude—after the prayers had been
said, when the visitors began ambling back to their cars, when I
felt the slim fragments of religious belief slip further away from
me—that Vicki draped herself over the casket and howled. Her
chest heaved and her unrestrained sobs filled the dry autumn
space of St. Mary’s Catholic Cemetery, from which I could see,
in the distance to the south, my childhood home. Between my old
house and my parents’ graves lay the Elmhurst College campus,
with its grassy playing fields and nondescript dorms. There used
to be tennis courts dividing the graves from the fields and my back
yard, but they’d been removed to accommodate more parking. I
remembered hitting balls there with Mom, when I was twelve or
so. She didn’t play well, but she adored Rod Laver. I rubbed my
arms. The day was cool for early fall. I think it had rained and
yet everything seemed surprisingly arid. “Dust thou art and unto
dust thou shalt return.” True enough. All cried out, I felt like a
piece of fruit made indestructible by some appliance you might
buy from the Home Shopping Network, use once, then forget about.
Apricot jerky, perhaps, or an apple chip. I watched Vicki sob and
understood that her emotion was purer than mine. She’d known
Mom a brief but intense period of time; she’d had the last measure
of Mom, distilled to its essence.
Perhaps this was a cultural problem. I knew from my work that
different cultures prepare themselves differently, or not at all. It’s
complicated. But who doesn’t anticipate death in the elderly? Life
ends. That’s the only thing we can agree on. Certainly knowing that
simple fact should help us prepare. It’s shocking when it does not.
After a moment, I went to Vicki. My sisters joined me. Because
that’s how we do things. I placed a hand on her back. She turned
and hugged me, hugged each of us. I would never be like Vicki, I
thought; I would never have the luxury of such rich clear feeling
expressed publicly and precisely. I come from different stock.
My sisters and I descend from a long line of women who tough
it out, suck it up, and huff ambivalence with every breath. My
grandmother taught my mother, her mother taught her, my mother
taught me. We are American women, the lot of us, daughters
of more than one revolution; we’ve buried loved ones in these
plains since the 1600’s. Stoicism comes easily to the ambivalent.
My mother’s family had been poor and depressingly dour until
this past generation. That’s when Dad and his cronies arrived,
pumped up on ambition fed by the Great War, seeking and finding
opportunities and giving us the chance we needed to laugh, at long
last. I gazed at the overcast sky that had only begun to break. Faint
streaks of blue split the gray, promising something beyond the
gloom of the day. It felt like a little gift, a heavenly surprise. Thank
you, Mom.
My daughters Beatrice and Ruthann put their arms through
mine and together we walked to the car. We would have a luncheon
for my mother at the club where she’d played golf for over fifty
years. Still, I marveled at Vicki’s public display. It seemed like
performance art: a statement of high anguish. I didn’t know
what to make of it. Her loss was genuine—she’d cried before,
big heaving sobs. But I kept my sobs in. My sisters kept theirs in.
Silence best held the grief I understood.
THE MARBLE ARMY
Gisele Firmino
120 pages
$16.00 paperback 9781937402839
March 2016
Essential reading for the 2016 Rio Olympics. On the humid
pampas of Brazil, the hardworking Fonte family leaves their
home when the military takes over the local mine. Uprooted
to Porto Alegre, father Antonio struggles in the crowded city,
while Pablo, the oldest son, gets swept into the resistance
movement. With Pablo’s disappearance, Rose, their mother,
holds the family close, defying the unthinkable, while Luca, the
youngest, comes of age in a household shadowed by oppression. Spanning the ‘60s through the ‘80s, THE MARBLE ARMY
is tightly told, from haunting points of view, a lyrical testament
to the families transformed by one of history’s most unforgiving
regimes.
“Gisele Firmino’s debut novel is an exquisite, intimate epic
about family, injustice and resistance, set during one of the
darkest chapters of Latin America’s history. With precise
prose, heartfelt observations and unforgettable characters and
scenes, she transports us to a time and place we need to see
and know.”
— Héctor Tobar, The Barbarian Nurseries
“Gisele Firmino’s gorgeous debut novel The Marble Army is a
fierce lyrical tribute to the families that lived through the 1964
Brazilian coup d’état and its painful aftermath. Both a stark
and unwavering look into the way violence, fear, and silence
poisons a culture, and a delicate homage to the way life, despite it all, somehow finds a way to flourish, The Marble Army
is a true novel of witness. Ultimately, this stunning first book
is a powerful love song to those that believe hope cannot be
stamped out.”
— Ada Limon, Sharks in the Rivers
“Part dream-novel, part political thriller, and entirely engrossing, THE MARBLE ARMY marks the debut of a truly gifted
young writer.Hers is a rare and enviable talent.”
— Pinckney Benedict, Miracle Boy and Other Stories
“It’s hard to imagine that anyone could distill the experience
of ordinary Brazilian people through three decades of brutal
military dictatorship into a single novel. But in THE MARBLE
ARMY Gisele Firmino does so, cleaving to the plight of Luca
and his family as they navigate these tragic and momentous
years. She brings to life intimately and lyrically what it can be
too easy to forget: that history happens to real people, and
that what is lost under such oppression—the voice and life of
a generation—can be irrevocable. This is a masterful debut,
multi-faceted, expertly assured, and beautifully written.”
— Naeem Murr, The Perfect Man
Gisele Firmino earned a BA from Pepperdine University and
an MFA in Fiction from Queens University of Charlotte. Born
and raised in the south of Brazil, Gisele’s writing has appeared in such journals as Expressionists and Rose & Thorn.
She works as a freelance translator and lyricist and is also the
founding locale coordinator for Queens University’s MFA in
Creative Writing: Latin America. She currently divides her time
between Brazil and the United States. THE MARBLE ARMY is
her first novel.
Outreach to national and indie reviews. Events in Miami, NYC and LA.
Ongoing social media support.
EXCERPT
OUR ONLY HOME was in Minas do Leão.
The house was a salmon colored, two-story cube, with
windows on all four sides, which made us feel as though we knew
all there was to know about our town and its people. My mother’s
favorite was the kitchen window, framing the meadow, the mine
and beyond.
The first floor was never furnished except for about ten
mismatched chairs, a side table and an old mattress, which sat in
what was supposed to be our living room. All chairs were arranged
in a kind of a semicircle by the fireplace. Pablo and I were the only
ones who used the mattress to sit on while playing games, or just
hanging out. But we lived on the second floor.
Like every other house in town, its foundation consisted of
wood planks holding it above the ground by about a foot or so,
the wood flooring was nailed to these planks, not always leveled.
Although this system gave a little bounce to our walk, it provided
no insulation whatsoever, and very often we’d pluck the weeds
that made their way through the seams; half-black, half-bright
green intruders. This closeness to the freezing black dirt sent chills
through our spines pushing us up to the second floor. But we were
gaúchos; physically enduring the cold winter was just as expected as
the daily rice and beans.
But when summer came, our mother would open up the first
floor, arrange flowers throughout, and we’d have picnics on the
living room floor as we tried to dodge the heat from upstairs.
Chopped watermelon and colonial cheese for Pablo and me, chilled
quail eggs and pickles for our parents. With all its strangeness, it
was the perfect house to grow up in.
One afternoon I was sitting as close as one could possibly sit
to the fireplace without getting burnt, when I heard something
thumping downstairs. The sounds were loud against the hollow
hardwood floor and seemed to move around as if a giant had
invaded our slanted home.
“What’s going on?” my mother asked from the kitchen sink.
“Luca!” I heard Pablo’s voice coming from the first floor.
Pablo had been in the tool shed the whole day. I had tried to
keep him company for a while, but the cold was unbearable. At
one point he must have come in without us noticing him. He called
me again, screeching even more. At fifteen, his voice was changing.
But always self-conscious, Pablo would manage to control it as
much as humanly possible.
“Luca! Vem cá! Rápido!” he kept calling, his words mingled with
the thump sounds.
“What are you doing down there, Pablo?” my mother said as
she patted her hands against her apron. But before she could say
anything else I ran downstairs.
Pablo stood almost a whole meter taller, laughing, and strutting
around on top of wooden stilts he had just made. With his long
skinny arms draped over them, his feet as high as my waist, he
looked like the king of somewhere.
Although he struggled for balance, it seemed as though he’d
done this before. I had never seen stilts, and was baffled by his
ability to walk around with them. The sun bled through the window
curtains, and specks of dust glittered as they swayed within a beam
of light, aiming at Pablo’s knees. He smiled with pride; his thin
body looking even leaner at that height.
“If you’re cold, you need to move around. Sitting by the
fireplace won’t help you one bit!” He managed to look at me for a
moment, a twinkle in his hazel eyes. But he was quickly forced to
focus on what he was doing.
The stilts were regular two by fours sanded smoothly, thinning
at the bottom, and curved on top where Pablo glued foam to
protect our armpits. They were perfect!
I heard my mother’s steps approaching, and before she could
see us and say no, I asked Pablo if I could try them. My limbs were
shaking from the cold and the rush of anxiety as I realized what I
was about to do.
Pablo jumped down from the stilts, and held them straight up
for me. His smile was reassuring.
“Here, put one foot here first, put your hand right here,” he
said as he placed my hand as high as I could reach. “Now pull
yourself up. There,” he said.
I was taller than him.
“Now put the other foot here,” he said, pointing at the other
stilt. I did.
“Pablo! I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Our mother stood on
the bottom step watching us apprehensively. Her hands tugged her
apron against the cold.
“I got you, Luca.” He looked me right in the eye. “Don’t you
worry. I got you.”
I glanced at our mother, and she smiled with confidence. She
knew Pablo had things under control, and I wondered if I would
someday feel what it was like for people to trust you the way she
trusted him.
“Focus, Luc,” he said. “I’m going to let go now. But I’m close.
Don’t worry. I’ve got you.”
I didn’t worry. But I stayed in place, terrified by the thought
of taking my first step. I knew Pablo would catch me if something
were to happen, but I just wanted to get it right.
“You have to walk, or else you’ll fall,” said Pablo, clutching the
stilts with his chapped hands.
“I will. I will.” I tried taking one step but the stilt got stuck on
one of the creases on the floor, and my foot came off of it. But
before I could consider the idea of falling, Pablo was there to hold
the stilts straight up.
“Oh, I don’t know, Pablo,” our mother said.
“Luca, look at me.” Pablo didn’t so much as glance at her.
“You have to shift your weight from side to side. These legs aren’t
yours. You have to make them yours. Lift them with your hands,
and make them walk for you.”
He let go of one stilt.
“It’s fine. You can do it. I know you can,” he added.
And just like that I was on my own. I walked around with Pablo
behind me. Our mother watched us as we giggled and couldn’t
contain her smile. The hollow wood floor responded to every step
I took, giving in a little, shouting back at me each time I touched
base. Pablo gradually distanced himself as I gained confidence and
looked at my face instead of my feet. His smile was as big as mine
must have been.
…
Only three weeks before the dictatorship came to us, there was
a big party inaugurating the street that led to the mine. It was a
dirt path, really, created within the meadow from all the workers
coming and going to their daily shifts. The party would officially
turn that path into a street, one that would be named after my
father.
Our mother had busied around the house all afternoon with
about ten rollers in her hair, leaving behind a trail of powder
makeup smell and rose perfume. Her steps were louder than usual
against the hollow wood flooring, giving away her excitement.
“Tuck your shirt in, Pablo, and please, please comb your hair,
honey,” she announced as she walked past us toward the small
front balcony facing the main street. Mãe was always humming
something, singing parts of songs we didn’t really know except
from listening to her. I used to think they reflected her mood, as if
they could say the things she chose to keep to herself. On that day
though she sang the same song, over and over.
“Se essa rua, se essa rua fosse minha
Eu mandava, eu mandava ladrilhar
Com pedrinhas, com pedrinhas de brilhante
Para o meu, para o meu amor passar.”
Outside, women carried big casseroles covered with handpainted dishcloths, while men swept sidewalks, fixed tables with
bricks and wood planks, and children buzzed around them like
flies, seeking attention.
“Yes! Big day for us!” our mother yelled from the balcony as she
pretended to check on the flowerpots instead of the commotion.
“We’re so honored!” she said, clasping her hands together, like
a character in a Victorian novel.
She took one last look at the street and headed back in. Pablo
and I were both sitting by the radio, eating chocolate cigarettes
our mother had given us. They came in a pack just like regular
cigarettes, wrapped individually. We pretended to listen to the
news as we copied the way our father squinted when he took a
drag, and how he crossed one leg over the other and leaned back
before exhaling, his bare belly more and more noticeable when he
relaxed. Then we’d eat it and move on to the next cigarette.
On her way back to her room, our mother stopped to watch
us. She took out one of my chocolates and tucked it over her ear,
pushing one of her rollers back.
“Long day today,” she said with a rasp as she took a seat. “You
boys keep quiet, will you?” She forced each word onto the next, the
way our father did. Mãe reached for the radio to turn the volume
up. “Aaahh…There’s so much coal in this place, there’s work for
your grandchildren here.”
She looked straight at us, her shoulders hunched, her brows
knitted in a frown, but she couldn’t keep the deep tone for too
long. Our mother took the cigarette out, pinching it between her
delicate thumb and forefinger, her nails painted a deep bright
orange for the party. She looked at the cigarette in between her
fingers for a moment but broke out with laughter before she could
get through the gesture.
We were being bobos. Pablo finished another cigarette, turned
the volume down, flicked his hair back, and looked at our mother.
“Mãe, can I please just wear it like this? This is how you’re
supposed to wear your hair nowadays.” Our mother stared at Pablo
for a few seconds, considering his plea. “Por favor?”
“Does Rita like it like that?” she asked.
“What? I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Pablo shoved
a chocolate into his mouth, his cheeks slightly pink.
“Doesn’t Rita mind when you wear it messy like that?” she
insisted.
“Mãe,” Pablo pleaded.
“Sure, honey. You’re handsome no matter what.” She glanced
at her nails. “Besides, we’re visionaries, aren’t we? At least that’s
what people say.”
While we were home, counting down the minutes to the big
party, our father was working as if this was just another day. Mãe
grabbed a glass of water from the kitchen and stepped again onto
the balcony to water her lilies, taking another glimpse at the street
below.
“Such a beautiful day! I can’t believe how it cleared up! It will
sure be muddy, though,” she said as she headed back to the kitchen.
“I just hope your father gives himself enough time to clean up.”
Her voice echoed through the hallway.
KAMA
Terese Brasen
190 pages
$16.00 paperback 9781937402877
March 2016
Kama is a young woman living in a Viking settlement midway between Constantinople and southern Denmark in 900
AD. Her father is the son of King Gnupa, her mother a former
slave. Tragic events set Kama on a journey to fulfill her destiny
in Hedeby. Crossing the Baltic Sea to reach her grandmother,
Queen Astrid, she heroically withstands the brutal laws and
rites that govern and tyrannize women. Kama is not a historical novel, although many aspects are true—including the ritual
slaying of slave girls.
“KAMA is a marvel of storytelling, mixing impressive erudition
with compelling action. In Terese Brasen’s distant mirror, a
gritty, unflinching view of tenth century Europe casts a haunting reflection on violence against women in our 21st century.
Kama’s turbulent quest is a timeless tale of enslavement and
empowerment.”
— Jake Lamar, author of Bourgeois Blues and Rendezvous
Eighteenth
Terese Brasen studied Old Norse, the language of the Vikings,
as well as Scandinavian literature, during her undergraduate years. She earned her MFA from Pennsylvania’s Cedar
Crest College, through the Pan-European Program in Creative
Writing. She holds Swiss and Canadian passports, is fluent in
Outreach to national and indie reviews. Events in Montreal, NYC
and LA. Ongoing social media support.
EXCERPT
SUN MONTH KIEV 934 CE
From the steps of the Big House where the two girls sat, it was
possible to see past the market commotion through the open city
gates to the brown trail that sloped towards the blue water, where
the ships had docked.
The horses came first—only five this time. At the gates, the
riders stopped and dismounted before the statue of the god Freyr.
Kama couldn’t hear the voices but she knew the prayer her father
and his men would offer: “O my Lord, I have come from a far land
and have with me slave girls, furs, spices, wine, cloth, swords and
silver. Send me a merchant who will buy from me whatever I wish
and will not dispute anything.”
The horses crossed in front. Their elegant legs stepped over the
stones. Hooves clanged against the ground right in front. So close.
An acrid smell like urine mixed with peppermint fanned over the
porch.
Kama closed her eyes.
The routine comings and goings along the Dnieper River told
her she was safe. A system existed. The gods determined day and
night, ice and fire, but men like her father cared for the kingdom
of middle earth.
Now a steady procession trudged up the trail. Stooped backs
supported heavy packages. Teams handled boxes, one person each
side grasping the goods that would soon attract curious buyers.
Past the Big House, the market square was almost empty but
already noisy with scraping, clamoring and hammering, as the side
shed opened and closed, as boards and sawhorses were dragged
in place and stalls assembled, as hammers tacked burlaps skirts to
table edges.
“Inga,” Asa yelled.
“What now?” Inga shouted to her stepmother. She needed to
distance herself from the shapeless form who reeked of fish. Inga
spat out a sunflower shell. In the fall, Asa collected decapitated
sunflower heads and stored them as winter bird feed. Now a withered gray flower rested on Inga’s lap, and one by one, she was picking the seeds from the pockets, placing them between her teeth,
cracking them open and spitting the discarded casing on the gravel
just past her boots.
“Get your ass over here and give me a hand,” Asa said.
“Do it yourself.”
“What if I have to take a pee?”
“Pee yourself like you always do.”
Inga was pushing back at the woman who had raised her and
claimed her as a daughter. The two were clearly not related. A net
hid Asa’s mousy hair. Fish blood stained her apron. But Inga was
all Asa had to talk about. She hoped to convince customers who
stopped by her stall that Asa was brave and mysterious—not just
a fishmonger.
Asa would say. “What have Freyr and his ugly sister Freyja done
for us lately? Wake up and smell the bullshit. You need to keep
your eyes open. One eye open, one eye shut, so it’s actually looking inside. That’s what I do, and that’s why I know when I’m being
bullshitted. Not to be boastful. Just saying there’s more than meets
the eye, and it could do you good to close one eye from time to
time—like I do—and look at what’s down below, where there’s a
shit load of layers until you get right to the bottom, where there’s
real deep-down-under gods that don’t move about, but just stay
put. Those are the gods I sing to. I close one eye and listen and
then my body starts shaking and I let it all out, singing.
“So there I was, just like normal—old Asa down by the river,
eyes closed, shaking and singing—when screaming pierced the
darkness. Let me tell you, these weren’t ordinary screams. Gave
me the chills. Knew something wasn’t right. And that’s when I
found her, lying right there on the rocks, a newborn child wailing.
Which of course isn’t unusual, but this was different. This little
one was meant to be among the living, so I picked her up, took her
home and raised her as my own. Called her Inga because that was
mother’s name. Runs in the family.
“The world’s full of assholes who believe Freyja’s going to take
her revenge because I took a child sacrificed to her, but Freyja’s a
shit bag and I showed her.”
Asa’s stories cast shame over the foundling. Critical eyes questioned Inga’s right to wander the streets of Kiev. “Makes me
uncomfortable even having her around,” the women would say.
“What kind of person picks up a stranger’s child? Bad luck, as far
as I am concerned. There’s a reason children are left on the rocks.
Who doesn’t know that? What belongs to Freyja is Freyja’s.”
At her stall, Asa began chanting, “Asa, the fishmonger gets no
thanks, gets no thanks.”
“Why should I give you thanks?” Inga called, as she spat out a
sunflower shell.
“I saved you. I did.”
“Who says I wanted saving?”
And then Inga grumbled to Kama, “Can’t wait to be out of
here.” Both girls agreed on that for different reasons—Inga because she clearly belonged somewhere else, Kama because Kiev
was a temporary home.
Now the morning was truly beginning. The sun ascended. Heat
touched Kama’s linen shift. Vendors stacked opened crates under
tables and sang, calling on the now steady influx of visitors to try a
spoonful of honey, taste a candy or sample a new tea. Asa tended
to her customers, slipping pickerel into sacs, wielding her knife to
slice away fish heads and fillet white meat, guarding the hot grill
where pike sizzled. Kama felt Inga’s tension and wanted to subdue
it, because today should belong to Kama, daughter of Sigtrygg,
who was the son of Gnupa and Astrid the Dane. Today Kama’s
father, Earl Sigtrygg, had landed in Kiev. He and his men would
rest here in the Big House for several months before setting off
for Hedeby, but Inga couldn’t let go of her anger. Her brooding
was dark and loud. She stared intensely at busy Asa, knowing that
stories about her spiced up every purchase and enquiry.
“Forget her,” Kama said.
“Can’t.”
“She’s a stupid bitch.”
“Who’re you calling a bitch?” Inga said.
“Thought you said she was.”
“I can call her that, you can’t.”
Before they sorted out their differences, the tall girl found by
the river tossed the sunflower and jumped to her feet. Her warrior
frame shoved through the crowd. Kama sprang up and rushed towards her. She needed to stop Inga. But Inga was already at Asa’s
table, pushing a full pail of Bream until the shocked staring fish
lay in a puddle on the gravel. Dirty brine splashed over patrons. A
chorus of excited screaming erupted.
Kama grabbed Inga’s arm. Out of the market. Run. Through
the front gates. Down the trail to the river.
The girls stopped to breathe in the Dnieper. It saw so much in
passing, which accounted for its moods. Now it was blue, brighter
than any sky. The waves were frolicking white foam. The ships had
risked storms and difficult passage, and the playful and glistening
surface seemed to celebrate a long successful journey.
Many people still called it the Danu, an old word that meant
deep river. As far as the girls knew, this was the only river. It flowed
from one end of Midgard to the other. It swam with nourishing
fish and connected all people. Rains came and went, but the river
was constant. Ice hid it during winter, but under the white slabs,
water continuously flowed.
The parade from the ships to the gates continued, but the real
activity stretched along the bank. The river had become a bath.
Normally, grooming took place in the Big House, but the number of filthy men who had spilled from the ships necessitated
a different solution, and the slave girls had set up shop on the
flat wet stones that lined the Danu. Kama and Inga crouched to
watch. There appeared to be several phases. The slave women tore
the dirty attire from the sailors, examined the garments and then
tossed them either on a smoldering fire or on a wash pile for charwomen to soak and smash against stones. Stripped of their blackened clothing, the men sat in rows on a long log, where a different
set of women applied soap to hair and skin. The crews then displayed their bravery by charging full speed into the cold current.
Even now after many days under the warming sun, icy streams
mixed into the flow, and there was much yelling as sailors splashed.
Soapy lather pooled and washed away. The final preparations took
place farther down the bank where servants toweled the men and
then brought new tunics, before trimming, snipping and combing.
The Big House was probably already loud with mead drinking. Men liked to amuse themselves with wrestling and taunting
the girls whose job it was to give them pleasure. Not that Kama
knew. She stayed away from hall during homecomings. But there
were stories. Tova, one of the townhouse women, bragged that,
before she had earned her freedom, she had been one of the most
desired, which was hard to imagine with her wide back and hips.
Kama then became aware of a different collection of stones
and logs where a separate cleansing ritual was taking place. Seated
on the river-worn wood were children, younger than Kama and
Inga, it seemed. Kama and Inga stood and took several steps toward the gathering, so they could perhaps see the faces and hear
the exchange. They were close enough to observe without being
seen. Kama counted five bodies. The girls were darker skinned,
like Kama’s mother. Black hair cascaded over their shoulders and
chests—a row of tiny bodies with veils of untamable curls. Kama
wanted to look away but couldn’t resist staring. She guessed they
were sisters. Rope tied their hands and linked them together....
DEVOTION
Michelle Herman
190 pages
$16.00 paperback 9781937402815
March 2016
An affair with a much older voice teacher leads a young girl
into early marriage, leaving behind her Brooklyn family and
friends for a new life shadowed by her husband’s Old World
expectations. Decades later, with her child now pursuing an
art career in New York, mother and son come to terms with
the quiet intimacy they’ve both resented and cultivated. With
shades of Woolf and Bellow, Devotion is a story of family,
solitude, and self-expression, where old and new values ripple
across generations.
“Michelle Herman’s beautifully written and wise novel probes
the crucial and enduring questions of how we choose our
paths in life. Her naive heroine marries in haste and learns, at
leisure, the many facets of love, its disappointments as well as
its unexpected rewards. A pleasure to read.”
— Lynne Sharon Schwartz, This Is Where We Came In and
A Lynn Sharon Schwartz Reader
“Michelle Herman knows the truth.”
— Kathryn Harrison
Michelle is the author of Like A Song: Essays, published by
Outpost19 and Dog, a novel soon to be reissued in print
from Outpost19. Longlisted for the 2014 PEN/DiamonsteinSpielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for Stories We Tell
Ourselves, she is also the author of The Middle of Everything
(essays), Missing (a novel), and A Girl’s Guide to Life (a book
for children). Born and raised in Brooklyn, she has lived for
many years in Columbus, Ohio, where she directs the MFA
Program in Creative Writing at Ohio State.
Outreach to national and indie reviews. Events in Colmbus, NYC,
LA and SF. Special focus on book clubs.
EXCERPT
one
Esther Savaris was halfway through her senior year of high school,
a pretty girl, seventeen years old and still growing (according to the
doctor, who had known her all her life—who had delivered her into
her life—and who, on the morning she turned up in his office,
tearful and pleading with him to keep this visit a secret from her
mother, measured her as if she really were still just a child and then
announced that she had grown three-quarters of an inch since
her last visit), when she ran away with János Bartha, her singing
teacher, who was nearly seventy then, and by whom Esther, Dr.
Azogue had confirmed, was three months pregnant.
When she turned eighteen, Bartha married her. By then, they
were thirteen hundred miles away from Esther’s family and the
studio on Ocean Parkway where Bartha had been giving singing
lessons for more than twenty years—as far away as Esther had ever
been from Brighton Beach, from the apartment she had lived in
all her life above her parents’ candy store, from Abraham Lincoln
High School and the glee club, the girls’ chorus, the Drama Society,
and her girlfriends (there were no boyfriends; she was not allowed
to date, not until after her high school graduation—“and now I’ll
never be allowed,” she had said cheerfully to Bartha, trying to cheer
him up, for he was grim and silent as he sat beside her on the train
that was to carry them halfway across the country): they were in
Omaha, Nebraska, where there was a cousin, Vilmos Bartha, who
had offered to help them get settled. It was October, 1965. The
baby, Alexander, was fourteen weeks old.
The marriage ceremony was brief and disappointing. Esther
had been thinking of it as something like the graduation she had
missed in June, something official that would mark the start of her
new life. But as the justice of the peace mumbled his few words,
with Vilmos and his stern, blonde, Middle Western wife acting as
witnesses, and Alexander sleeping in his carriage in a corner, she
could see that she had expected too much.
Nothing had changed. It was like a magic trick at a birthday
party, when the magician, who was really just somebody’s uncle
or next-door neighbor, said Abracadabra but nothing happened.
Then some of the children would laugh, and others would shift
around uncomfortably in their folding chairs and sneak glances at
one another: Was this supposed to happen? Was this a joke?
Toward the end of the ceremony, Esther almost asked, “Is
that it? Are you sure?” It seemed to her that the justice of the
peace, a plump little man with a long fringe of uncombed reddish
hair, in a too-tight brown suit, no tie, and black, exhausted-looking
penny loafers (a penny in the left shoe only, Esther noticed; the
right one was empty), looked as if he might be absent-minded,
as if he really might have left out some important part. Even the
exchange of vows, so familiar to her from movies and novels, went
by too quickly. The promises that she agreed to make seemed as
routine as the pledge of allegiance she had recited every schoolday
morning of her life. It did not seem possible that she was meant
to take them seriously.
To have and to hold, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness,
in health.
But if she didn’t take them seriously, she worried, she could
not expect that she would be taken seriously. And this was the
point, after all. Proving that she knew what she was doing, that
she was a serious person. Because even Bartha seemed sometimes
in doubt of her ability to understand what she “had done.” As if
she were too stupid to see clearly the results of her own choices!
“Stupid, no,” he had said when she’d made this accusation, in the
first days after they’d arrived in Omaha. “Not stupid in the least—
indeed, too smart, some would insist, to give away your future
as you have.” “Not give,” she told him. “You must mean throw
away.” At that time she was still in the habit of correcting him
when he misused—when she assumed he had misused—an idiom
in English. Lately she had come to think that he said, always, what
he meant, and if it sounded odd it wasn’t his fault but the fault of
her own listening, that language (usage, as it was so unpleasantly
called in school) was more complex and interesting than she had
been taught.
This was her chance to make it clear that she had made
decisions, that she had not just let things happen, and also that she
was willing, that she wanted, to stick by them.
And his chance to prove the same.
This was a startling thought, because it had never crossed
her mind before that Bartha had anything to prove (and prove
to whom? she asked herself. Only himself, since she had never
doubted him—since it had never crossed her mind, either, that he
might not have known what he was doing).
It was all done with now. They were on the street outside the
office of the justice of the peace, and Vilmos was shaking Bartha’s
hand and beaming. His wife, the imperious Clara, was looking
bored and impatient. “We must make a celebration!” Vilmos said.
“Clara and I will take you to lunch! Where shall we go? Esther,
what is your choice?”
“You choose,” Esther said. “Wherever you like will be good.”
Bartha looked at her curiously. She usually claimed to like
eating at restaurants, and she liked being asked which restaurant—
and more often than not Bartha forgot to ask her, and then she
would have to point this out to him later. But she couldn’t think
about restaurants now. She was busy with the idea that had come
to her—that today’s ceremony was nothing but the two of them,
her and Bartha both, proving that they were serious, that they were
grown up. She remembered what her father had said (not said, but
bellowed, fists pounding the kitchen table) on the night she broke
the news of her pregnancy, of her relationship with Bartha itself.
The night before they’d fled. “Half a century he’s got on you! He
should know better, should know how to act, how to be. A grown
man, an elderly man, and he’s acting like an idiot boy.”
No—she would not let herself think of her father.
Not her father. Not anyone. No one but the two of them. No
one else mattered. There was no one to whom it was necessary to
prove anything—no one but themselves.
No one in all the world except Vilmos and Clara and Mr. One
Penny even knew that this marriage had taken place. And no one
but she and Bartha—and perhaps Vilmos, who, out of kindness,
would insist he did too—cared that it had taken place.
It struck her now that this must be why people had elaborate,
extravagant weddings. They forced other people to care. (And even
if the fifty or a hundred or more relatives and friends attending,
all dressed up and bearing gifts, could not in fact be made to truly
care, the commotion was sufficient so that the private cares of the
two people at the center of it seemed to be important, at least for a
few hours.)
It was not as if she’d wanted, even if she’d had a choice, that
other kind of wedding—what her friends at home would have
called a real wedding, with a white lace dress and veil, music and
flowers and a tall, many-tiered white cake, a ring-bearer and a
flower girl and bridesmaids in taffeta, dancing until past midnight,
and finally a fat leather-covered book of photographs on the
coffee table. But all in all, this wedding, in that too-small, poorly
heated, poorly lit, windowless room in what passed for an office
building in Nebraska (both she and Bartha had made jokes about
this on their way in, and Vilmos had smiled and sighed and rolled
his eyes, as he did every time they made their “New York bigshot
joke remarks,” and Clara had, also as usual, been offended), this
wedding had less resembled the private commencement exercises
she had had in mind than it did the meeting she’d had with her
“guidance counselor” the first week of senior year, when she was
lectured briefly in the woman’s tiny office, under a fluorescent light
that buzzed and flickered, about the importance of choosing the
right college and then asked a few irrelevant, obviously memorized
questions, the answers to which the counselor did not even bother
to pretend to listen to before she wished Esther luck with her
applications and called for the next senior waiting on the bench
in the hallway, who shrugged and rolled her eyes at Esther as she
passed.
How foolish she had felt for being disappointed, for having
hoped for anything resembling guidance.
The restaurant Vilmos chose, the Bohemian Café, was a favorite
of Vilmos and Bartha’s. The four of them settled themselves
into a booth there, and Esther readjusted the baby (still sleeping,
miraculously, although now in her arms), laying him across her lap,
her left hand tucked beneath his head, her right hand on his chest
so that she could feel the lift and fall.
Vilmos accepted a menu from a waitress in a Czech costume
even as he smacked one hand on the table. “Wine!” he said. “I
believe wine is called for on such a day. Shall we all have some?”
“Wine?” Clara said. “At this hour?”
A menu was set before Esther but she did not pick it up. She
watched Vilmos, who smiled a little, nodding, then answered his
own question, “Yes, I believe we will have some wine.”
Ever since she’d met them, Esther had been waiting for Vilmos
to get angry with Clara. He never even seemed to be annoyed.
Esther couldn’t understand it, and she watched him carefully now
as he turned to Bartha: “And some dumplings, too? For everyone?
Because they’re homemade here, you know, and they’re not bad.
You’ve tried them, János, have you not?”
“Of course,” said Bartha. “And you’re right, they’re not bad.
But the noodles also are homemade, and they are better than the
dumplings.”
“Esther?” Vilmos said. “Do you also prefer the noodles?”
Esther nodded. It made no difference to her....
MADELEINE E.
Gabriel Blackwell
190 pages
$16.00 paperback 9781937402945
Jun3 2016
A series of fragments, from criticism to fiction, on the subject
of Alfred Hitchcock and Vertigo. A masterful construction and
a deeply seductive reading experience.
Gabriel Blackwell is the author of three books: Shadow Man
(CCM, 2012), Critique of Pure Reason (Noemi, 2013), and The
Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men (CCM, 2013).
His fictions and essays have appeared in many issues of Conjunctions, in Tin House, Post Road, Puerto del Sol, DIAGRAM,
Artifice, The Kenyon Review Online, Unstuck, and elsewhere.
With Matthew Olzmann, he edits The Collagist. He is currently
the inaugural Emerging Writer Instructor at the University of
Special focus on film journals and critics with potential event tie-ins.
Outreach to national and indie reviews. Events in NYC and LA.
Ongoing social media.
EXCERPT
Prelude| The Rooftops
…
We have only a short time to please the living, all eternity to please
the dead.
(Sophocles, Antigone)
…
God has given you one face and you make yourselves another.
(Shakespeare, Hamlet)
…
[EXT. San Francisco Roof Tops (DUSK)]
…
We open already in pursuit of something ineffable: the outline of
a man Jimmy Stewart is chasing. We briefly see this man’s face in
soft focus and shadowed, but, because we are not ready for it (how
could we be? we have no context; we could ask “Will this be a main
character?” but our next question would then be, “In what?”) and
because we never see it again, it might as well never have been
shown. Can you remember what he looked like? Even after watching Vertigo fifty-plus times, I have no mental picture of him. Why
is Stewart chasing this man? We will never know.
…
In Philip K. Dick’s novel A Scanner Darkly, “Fred” (a pseudonym),
an undercover police officer whose identity is kept disguised by
something called a “scramble suit,” investigates himself, the person inside of the “scramble suit,” Bob Arctor, a drug addict living with two other users, one of whom has informed on Arctor,
precipitating Arctor’s investigation of himself. To make matters
worse, Arctor has been given an adulterated form of the drug Substance D, “Slow Death,” which is causing his brain’s hemispheres
to operate independently of each other, so that, as his investigation
of himself progresses, he begins to see himself as someone else:
“Bob Arctor,” suspect, as opposed to Bob Arctor, self. It is at this
point in the book that the informant’s identity is revealed, to Arctor and to us, but, though things appear to be coming to a head,
Dick chooses to then turn Arctor into a vegetable, incapable of
even the most rudimentary investigation, and has the book follow
him into this new passive state. The ensuing chapters are pastoral,
as placid as the preceding fantasy was paranoid. It is an unusual
choice, to say the least. Reading it, I felt sure each of the last twenty pages would bring a return to the frantic suspicion of the first
two hundred, instilling in the reader, me, some sense of wholeness,
of closure. Instead, I got banal scenes in a rehab center and on a
farm, scenes that could have come from any of a thousand other
novels, I felt, just not this one. And though in those scenes we find
out what Arctor was supposed to find out, it is, for these last pages,
as though we are reading some other book entirely, as though we
have escaped from one narrative into another.
I was reminded of the end of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of
Dust, in which Waugh’s protagonist, Tony Last, in the middle of
a nasty divorce in England—which story we have been following
for two hundred pages—decides to go on an expedition to Brazil
for which he has no real background. Such a turn of events would
seem strange enough in the context of the story we’ve been following, but things get even stranger when Tony’s guide disappears,
stranding him in the jungle. Tony nearly dies from disease and starvation, but is rescued by a man known as “Mr. Todd” who keeps
Tony alive on the condition that Tony read Dickens aloud to him.
The chapter had originally been a short story of Waugh’s, “The
Man Who Loved Dickens,” and it is hard not to see its metamorphosis into the denouement of A Handful of Dust—a domestic
drama if ever there was one, and as far away from an adventure
tale as a book could be—as an utterly bizarre, grotesque deformation of the deus ex machina.
That term, deus ex machina, comes from Horace’s Ars Poetica,
where Horace uses it as a criticism of the manner in which many
Greek dramas were resolved. It may refer to an actual machine
(machina) called a mekhane, used to lower actors onto the stage or
allow them to fly above it. The terrified actor, partially blinded by
his prosopon and strung up above a stage (made of stone, it should
be remembered), attached to a system of pulleys and beams creaking from overuse, awaiting his one appearance on stage, destined
to provide the play with the only sense of resolution or closure
possible. He will need to get his feet under him and keep his chiton
out of his own way if he is to have any hope of appearing godlike,
not splitting his lip, shattering his kneecap, or losing yet another
tooth. He opens his eyes: his own thin, frail ankles, the sock just
barely clinging to his toes, straining to slip off and float slowly to
the stage, the stage below, other actors crossing below him, trained
not to notice this weight suspended above their heads—he must
have hung there and wondered how it could possibly go well.
…
Some children born with damage to one of the brain’s hemispheres show few or even no developmental difficulties; hemispherectomies (the removal of one of the brain’s hemispheres) are
almost exclusively performed on children because children have a
much higher degree of something called “neuroplasticity” than do
adults. Because of this neuroplasticity, the missing hemisphere’s
usual functions can be accomplished by the remaining hemisphere.
Difficulties seem to arise much more often later in life, when a
hemisphere that has already been assigned certain functions is
damaged. Cases where one of an adult’s hemispheres is damaged
have led to anosognosia (the inability to recognize one’s own disabilities), aphasia (word-memory loss), and prosopagnosia (face
blindness), as well as a host of other disorders. Whatever faculty
has been disturbed by the damage cannot be replicated in the other
hemisphere, or else can only be tortuously, circuitously replicated
there. Again, though, damage to the same area of the brain, provided it occurs early enough in life, may not have any effect at all.
One can only miss what one has already experienced.
…
A Scanner Darkly’s “scramble suit” projects a seemingly infinite
number of different facial features in front of the wearer’s face,
one at a time but constantly changing, in randomized combinations. Though the intention is to hide the identity of the person
inside the suit, the effect must also be extraordinarily unnerving—
anyone who has seen Conan O’Brien’s “If They Mated” will know
just how disturbing facial features from different people brought
together in the same face can be. Imagine it: always changing, always throwing up new combinations. How could you even talk to
such a thing? Because these facial features have been taken from
living (and once-living) human beings, their number cannot be infinite. Mathematically, it is a certainty: the “scramble suit,” if allowed
to go on operating long enough, will eventually betray its wearer.
At some point in time, all of his/her features will be displayed,
together. Perhaps the real intention isn’t to hide the wearer’s face at
all—even though it would only be displayed for an instant, surely
that would be enough time to cement the suspicions of anyone
who knew the person inside the suit. Perhaps the real intention is
to make that area of the body so hideous, so inhuman, that no one
would ever think to look at it long enough to notice such a thing.
…
To a mind accustomed either to a predominantly psychological literary form, like the modern novel, or to a classical style of regular
and logical narrative development, the sequence of scenes in a play
by Shakespeare is likely to appear capricious and arbitrary. Like the
relations between the various episodes within an individual scene,
the relations between scenes are often determined by other than
narrative concerns, and we will have no difficulty following the
logic of a Shakespearean play if we keep this in mind.
(Mark Rose, Shakespearean Design)
…
I renewed my driver’s license just before my thirty-fifth birthday.
I had originally received the license seven years earlier, when I
moved to Oregon. I was in considerably better shape then, and
clean-shaven. The person taking my picture had allowed me to
keep my glasses on. Now, with a beard and a face showing the extra pounds of seven years of bad habits, I was asked to remove my
glasses. The man behind the digital camera took my picture, and,
just as I was about to leave, he asked me to please sit back down
so that he could take another. I did so. He still looked concerned.
Joking, I asked him, “What’s the matter? Am I blurry today?” He
said no, but the computer, comparing this new picture of me to
the one taken seven years earlier, did not believe that I was me. My
identity could not be confirmed. It would need further corroboration. He called for a supervisor. Who was I? What name should
go on the license, if I was not me anymore? Could it still be considered a “renewal,” if they determined that I was some other me?
Would I have to pay the “new license” fee?
patrick fitzmike and mike fitzpatrick
larry smith
86 pages
$12.00 paperback 9781937402938
jun3 2016
inspired by the lives and careers of cardinal francis spellman
and Cardinal Richard Cushing, Larry Smith’s Patrick Fitzmike
and Mike Fitzpatrick evokes the political turmoil, sexual torment, and moral crises that have beset the catholic church
and defined our era. It is an unrelenting fiction replete with
popes and presidents, parish priests and broadway chorus
boys. Rich in its complex prose and dark humor, this narrative offers up the spiritual antipodes of human experience,
from the lofty machinations of global potentates to the naked
prayers of a sinful desperate saint.
Larry Smith has published widely as a fiction writer, a poet
and an essayist. His fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart
prize and has appeared in mcsweeney’s quarterly concern,
low rent, exquisite corpse, curbside splendor, fictionnow,
pank, and numerous other journals. his poetry has been published in descant (canada) and elimae, among other journals,
and his articles and essays have appeared in modern fiction
Studies, Social Text, and elsewhere. He keeps a website at
larrysmithfiction.com and lives in New Jersey.
outreach to national and indie reviews. events in nyC, nJ and boston. ongoing social media support.
part of our ongoing short-ish series of novellas and extended
essays. outpost19.com/shortish
P atr ick Fit z mi k e:
Unce r tain B egi n n i n gs
There is no great sense of loss for those with limited expectations. Vague ache there may have been to contemplate the life
of other boys who were also sons; inchoate envy of some sort
was what if anything he likely felt to see many of those other
boys even actually become, as the years went by, less the sons
of and more the friends and fond companions of the men, even
of the reprobate men; become less their sons eventually than
loving doters on and helpers of the drunken penurious men or
the flashing piratical rogues of whom great stories were told in
their neighborhoods. Some sons became the veritable lieutenants of yet another breed of fathers who were the world’s pious familial stalwarts building out small fiefdoms or occasional
empires from the small towns like the one he was born to or, no
differently, from their brick stone or cobblestone South End or
Back Bay tenement composts. And all he had really ever envied was not the doting or the embraces or the tacit reciprocities but simply that they had something, whatever it was, he did
not and could never.
Patrick Fitzmike expected nothing whatsoever from Brendan Fitzmike; not once that he himself could recall did he await
a warm favor or lament one never coming during the ninetynine years (literally) that his father lived on this earth. If as he
saw other fathers embrace their boys in pride or only for the
joy of embracing, it could not be said he’d ever taken Brendan’s harshness too personally. His two younger brothers fared
no better, after all, while both his two younger sisters came to
marry men who in their own ways he could sense were just so
cold in their bones if less so in their manner.
“I’m proud,” he said shaking his son’s hand when Patrick
became Archbishop.
“Not, ‘I’m very proud of you, son,’ or even ‘I’m very proud
of you, Patrick,’” as he once confided without bitterness to Bern
Scheidman. “Just a plain old ‘I’m proud.’ When I became Cardinal, all he said then was ‘Congratulations.’”
In his own nearly eight decades, Patrick Fitzmike confided
in very few men, and never in women, which is partly explained
by the bond he and his mother, a woof and warp of mutual deprivations, shared at such unutterable levels that to talk about
it with her or to talk about such with anyone would have been
impossible and could have been harmful even to attempt. He
felt the desert, the thirst she with no overt demanding or even
direct asking yet no less irresistibly besought her children to
slake. He did so, his brothers and sisters did so too, but he
was the oldest child, and the one who bore the burden of all his
father had left undone, which was everything. There were times
he felt her yearning so abundantly, the last thing he’d do when
confronted with such distress was to speak at all, as to do so
might reveal him to her as a desiccated vessel himself, and so
by such self-disclosure desolate her yet again and further. The
less he said, the better she got through each day.
Sixty years later, he could still smell her in the neat beige
drapery that defined his apartment. He went to confession
twice a week without fail throughout his early career, once a
week without fail through the rest of it. Two Popes were among
his confessors, which caused him some misgivings on occasion but he was able to reassure himself because, as far as he
could tell, both Ratti and Pacelli did always honor the sanctity
of his confessions. Pacelli, of course, was his dear friend and
comrade but, considering some of Pacelli’s other dear friends
and comrades, you couldn’t always be sure what he might not
have to resort to under any given circumstance.
adherence
Ben Nickol
143 pages
$12.00 paperback 9781937402952
june 2016
a charismatic friend leads a man to reconsider his marriage,
his career and his faith in himself. a story of divergent paths-one is a writer, the other is in finance--both men are pushed
to the limits of their convictions by the contrasts between them
and around them. andrew struggles in a marriage with suburban freedoms, while bradley’s bestseller fame is fueled by
socially-charged work. Set throughout Chicago and shadowed
by race and class, this short novel is a rich portrait of the public and private divides that define American life.
Ben Nickol’s stories and essays have appeared in Alaska
Quarterly Review, Redivider, Boulevard, Fugue, CutBank, Canoe & Kayak and elsewhere, and his previous book is Where
the Wind Can Find It (2015), a collection of short fiction from
queen’s ferry press. he’s the recipient of an individual artist
Fellowship from the Arkansas Arts Council, and his nonfiction
has been cited as notable work in Best American Sports Writing. he lives in montana.
outreach to national and indie reviews. events in helena, ny
and sF. ongoing social media support.
part of our ongoing short-ish series of novellas and extended
essays. outpost19.com/shortish
I
I can know Bradley’s arrival in Chicago without having seen it.
The air is gray, interacting with gray concrete, the grayness of pigeons, and is potent, for him, with far more than rain. He walks
off the platform at Washington Street and follows Wells to the
river, where the traffic is a sweeping hush and Merchandise Mart,
in its hulking splendor, presides over dark water, his view of it
flecked with birds.
Cab fare should be out of the question. Bradley has no money,
nor will ever—even when eventually he makes money it will bead
like oil and roll from his hands. But he flags one, and they cross
the LaSalle bridge, tires thumping beneath them. Like a child, he
cranes his face at the window, the city flitting by in a gray variance
of lateral speeds, the near velocity of traffic against the farther
stroll of pedestrians, the towers churning south at a rate just perceptible to his eye, like a migration of shadows. The city vanishes,
and they bend through the park. He slides to the other window to
see it, then slides back and watches the shore, the white breakers
crashing against it.
They take Fullerton and sail along the harbor, the boats in that
grayness battened and still, as if their owners had moved on to
other lives, forgetting sunlit days on the water, with their children
near, forgetting Chicago. His apartment, which he hasn’t seen before today, is a studio in a stone building on Diversey. He leased it
after seeing photographs, its high windows and rickety pipework,
its claw tub and radiator, striking notes in that lovely minor key
Chicago must already have registered for him, the key he scaled his
life against, or else he wouldn’t have moved there. There should
be luggage, stacks of boxes—he’s moving in. But he has only the
frame backpack he wore earlier that year, when he walked forty
miles to the lakeshore and camped in the dunes instead of prepping for exams. For cash, he has what remains of his student loans,
minus the twenty he peels off for the driver.
The cab departs, and Bradley stands at Diversey and Pine
Grove, leaning into his pack. Traffic streams by, some cyclists
coursing through it like fingers of surf. Pedestrians veer wide of
his pack and continue up the sidewalk, the wind in their skirts,
their hair. It’s begun to rain, and connecting all of it, all the city’s
breath and synchronicity, the gray light falling to deeper grays, the
dark stone of his building, is a membrane of poignancy Bradley
knows only by its pressure, its swelling.
He drops his pack in his apartment, then waits out the rain at
a bar in the basement, asking strangers about their lives.
I don’t see him until days later. At Dominic’s downtown, at a table
on the patio, he sits with his hands in his lap, watching the lunch
crowd pass on the sidewalk. I observe, as I cross the patio, his sandy hair and freckles, his checkered shirt, the arm of his sunglasses
folded over his pocket. Bradley dresses like a child, and appears a
child, against that sea of shirtsleeves and ties. But like anything on
a sea, he floats, he is above. He spots me, his chin lifting, followed
by his hand, his wave hello not unlike a wave goodbye, a man saluting taillights.
I reach for my chair, but he’s out of his. He steps around and
slips an arm under mine. I may be the only suit in Chicago that
morning, and certainly am the only suit on that patio, to be lifted
off his feet, his laces dangling.
“All right,” I say.
Bradley jostles me a little, like an admiring uncle. “There he is.”
Nowhere I place my hands—on his chest, his shoulder—is
anything but effete, and so I let them hang, which is oafish and no
less effete. The other tables watch, or pretend not to. He jostles me
again and I laugh, “Put me down.”
He smooches my cheek, then sets me down and swipes a hand
at my rumpled shirt. We take our chairs.
“You made it in,” I say.
Instead of acknowledging that, he lifts his gaze at the glass
towering over us, somewhere in which floats my office. “So this is
it, this is the place.”
I know what the building looks like, but with Bradley studying
it I pivot in my chair and study with him. The tower’s impossibly
high—to take in its breadth I have to lean back against the table—
and of a blueish glass, off which tumble shards of light. I turn
back around, “That’s it.”
CALIFORNIA PROSE DIRECTORY 2016:
NEW WRITING FROM THE GOLDEN STATE
edited by Sarah LaBrie
326 pages
$18.50 paperback 9781937402556
An anthology of short fiction and
non-fiction about life in California,
now in its third year. J. Ryan Stradal
edited the 2014 edition. In 2013,
the series was conceived and edited by Charles McLeod.
The 2016 edition features work by:
Kyle Boelte
John Brantingham
Carina Chocano
Meghan Daum
Nathan Deuel
Ann Friedman
Vanessa Hua
Jay Caspian Kang
Adam Klein
Summer Block Kumar
Jillian Lauren
Lisa Locascio
Kevin Magruder
Lou Mathews
Rae Paris
Michah Perks
Zachary Pincus-Roth
Lilibet Snellings
Matthew Specktor
A. A. Srinivasan
Matt Summell
Ronaldo Wilson
Melissa Yancy
Yvonne Zima
Outreach to regional and indie reviews. Events in LA and SF.
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