Category — Short Stories

This story was recently published in Alaska Quarterly Review’s 30th Anniversary Issue, Spring/Summer 2012.

Big Enough For Slaughter

Alaska Quarterly Review

My father-in-law bought two calves for the baby. He won’t name them, which I think is a bad sign.

They are black and white bulls that he bought for thirty dollars a piece. The dairy sells off the males and retains the females for milking in the spring. He keeps them in the barn behind the house. He closed them in with fencing made from electric wire.

I used to try to make my husband go out there with me, alone, when we first got married. I thought the barn was incredibly sexy. But he didn’t like it and we never did anything in there. He prefers a proper bed or not at all.

The calves drink their milk in the barn. They drink out of galvanized buckets with rubber nipples and bright, cheery labels: Calf-Teria. Steam rises from the buckets. The baby plays in the hay.

“Show her the milk parlor,” my father-in-law says.

My husband shows me the milk parlor in the back of the barn. I was thinking of an ice cream parlor but this is a windowless stall with built-in levels that zigzag up the wall. It is dark and dirty with a drain in the floor crusted with rust. It’s where my mother-in-law used to milk the goats.

“I was beautiful when he met me,” my mother-in-law tells me whenever she comes to visit. They are divorced now. “But then he worked me to death.” Her face is carved with lines and looks like a side of a suitcase that’s been left out in the sun.

“This is Triangle Head,” my father-in-law says. “And that is Square Head.” He pets the heads of the calves while they nurse. They are bull headed and big eyed. Their eyes bulge, gelatinous and nervous. They make a steady, rhythmic clicking sound as they nurse from the Calf-Teria buckets. The baby throws the hay. He tries to grab one of the calves by the eyeball. The calves nurse: click, click, click.

“Aren’t you too old for this?” I ask. My father-in-law is eighty-three and pigeon-toed, lurching across the field with the Calf-Teria buckets.

“Did you see that?” he says. He points to the electric wire fencing running around the barn. It lies in dangerous, quivering spools on the ground.  “I put that up myself,” he says.

I work in an office downtown.

“How was your weekend?” my boss asks on Monday. I put my lunch on my desk: a sandwich, an apple, a package of crackers, a bag of low-fat biscuits. Turn on my computer. Start the routine. She sits across me from me in an identical grey cube.

“That’s really random,” she says.

“What is?”

“Your story about the cows.”

“My husband’s family lives on a farm.”

“Really?”

We work for the newspaper’s website. My boss has a baby too, a girl that she never sees. My boss is at work when I get there. She’s at work when I leave. I go to meetings and I come out of them. I stare at the computer, at miles and miles of HTML code, a language I don’t really understand.  It’s like staring into the abyss. I think about the baby at daycare. I think about him all the time.

“You can’t quit,” my husband said. “We can’t afford it.”

“But I want to,” I said.

“But you can’t,” he said. He’s a high school English teacher. He says we can’t survive on his salary alone. I’ve done the math. I’ve tried to figure it out. Stretch the money this way and that way, but it never works out. It never covers the basics.

The weather is turning to spring. The sky is the color of eggshells.

I put the baby in the car every morning, fix all his latches and drive across town. He holds on tight when I pick him up and carry him into daycare. He smells like angel food, dusted and sweet.

I walk across the lawn, the baby holding on to my neck, and get my ankles wet from the grass. The walk is the worst part, if you ask me. I walk across the lawn so that I don’t have to walk behind the other mothers. I watch them and think: How could you do that?  Leave your baby behind? And then I go ahead and do the same thing.

I spend Saturday in the sandbox with the baby. We move the sand through our fingers. “Like sand through the hourglass,” my husband says.

He goes inside to turn on some jazz. There are coffee and black plums that we bought at the store. Even the baby eats them.

My father-in-law comes into town for dinner. We sit outside on collapsible chairs. He drinks all the wine in the house.

“I painted Picasso’s daughter once,” he says.

“You did not,” my husband says.

“I did,” my father-in-law says. “She wasn’t a handsome woman. She looked over her shoulder, like this,” he says. He stands up and bats his eyes, coquettish, over his shoulder.

He lived in Italy for the first three years of his marriage. It’s where they got married. My mother-in-law thought she was going to see the world.  They lived in a small apartment off the Spanish Steps. Then she ended up on a farm in Virginia, milking goats.

“How are the calves?” my husband asks.

“Fine,” my father-in-law says. He looks at the street. “Do you all like veal?” he asks. Everybody laughs.

Monday morning, I’m running late. The baby throws all his food on the floor and pitches a fit when I try to put his arms in his jacket. He clings to my neck, tearful, when I drop him off at day care.

“Who’s being a baby?” Debra, our day care provider, says.

She reaches out her arms and the baby goes to her. He rests his head on her shoulder. She rocks him from side to side. There is a din of noise around them: kids playing, yelling, crying.  Dora The Explorer is on the TV, shouting about something. But they are the silent center, my baby and the woman who watches him, rocking from side to side. He wraps his arms around her neck.

I walk into work dazed and it takes me the whole day to figure out, what am I doing?  Who do I need to call?  What’s going on here? Sometimes I’ll spend the whole day, inputting events into the calendar: festivals, concerts, sew ‘n’ sips. It is easy and mindless and stupid.

“Where is the package on farmer’s markets?” my boss says. “And theme parks? What are you doing?” she says. She is fast and busy typing. “Did you spend your whole day on calendar again?”

It took me a year to understand what “packages” meant. It means I’m supposed to write the content for the package. And the HTML code.  I have to make tables, insert columns, close lines.

“Don’t you have a program that will do that?” I ask my boss, every time.

“You have to do it this way,” she says and opens up a whole page of code: brackets and back slashes. Just looking at it makes me feel sick. I don’t know how to write code. I’m a writer, but I was hired to work on the newspaper’s website. Which apparently means I need to write code and not sentences. I have books on my desks, little dictionaries, filled with the stuff, but I still don’t understand it. So I avoid it, do what I know how to do, type in more calendar events. Canoe Run Field Day. Half-off sushi and Wii bowling. Where do they come up with this stuff? They’re so hopeful and promising. Like a date.

“We could move to your father’s,” I say to my husband. To the big white Colonial on the farm.

It’s about an hour and a half drive out of town. Not convenient, but do-able. Some people have worse commutes.

“Don’t start,” my husband says.

“I can’t help it.”

We have the same conversation we have every Sunday night. We go at it in circles, pacing the same steps, working out the same circular logic.

“What do you want me to say?” my husband says.

“I want you to say you’ll fix it.”

“I can’t,” he says.

We tried living on his salary alone, once before, when I tried to make it as a freelancer. We were always short, always overdrawn, always on the brink of financial disaster.

“But I’m his mother,” I say.

“Are you really going to do this?” he says.

“Do what?”

“Ruin everything.”

…

To read the rest of this story, please pick up the Spring/Summer 2012 issue of Alaska Quarterly Review. AQR can be found at most Barnes & Noble bookstores  or through the magazine’s website. Many thanks to AQR for publishing this story.

A short short published in Meridian.

Fine Young Woman
Meridian: The Semi-Annual from the University of Virginia

While your daughter’s in the bathroom, I wipe your counters clean. To keep from looking at you, I wipe the butcher’s block, the stovetop, the rusted metal around the faucet. In your kitchen, this is what you say to me: “What a fine young woman you’re becoming.”

I cannot turn around. I say “Thank you,” to the dirty water in the sink, to the bits of grease and bone between my fingers and say “Thank you.” In my head, what you have just said to me beats like a pulse, “What a fine woman you’re becoming.” Fine woman. That’s me?

Your daughter, ever since I can remember, I followed her into everything — soccer, swimming, gymnastics, Brownies. I signed myself over for her. Because I wanted to be near her. Because I wanted to turn into someone like her. In our Brownie A-line jumpers and brown acorn caps, you said, “Turn around. Spin for me. God, Heartbreakers, you.”

[Read more →]

This was my first published short story.

Miss Richmond’s Beauty Secret
Jane

Miss Richmond says, Jesus, please.  I’m working here.  This is my job, okay?

When I walked into the chorus room at Kennedy High School, Miss Richmond was spraying her bangs into place.  Miss Richmond doesn’t like anybody except for her hair.  The other Miss Virginia contestants were stepping into their swimsuits, swabbing Vaseline on their teeth.  They hung their pageant sashes on the music stands, over the sheet music to Whitney Houston’s, “The Greatest Love of All.”

Miss Richmond says I’ve humiliated her, I’ve hurt her feelings, I’ve stabbed her in the back.  Isn’t that enough? she asks. 

I sit down on the risers while Miss Richmond adjusts the straps to her periwinkle two-piece.  It’s a strip of spandex that twists in the middle, like a crescent bun. 

Miss Richmond says, But aren’t you something?  Look at you.  What’d you do to your hair?  Comb it with a pork chop?

We laugh at this, nervous.  Miss Richmond bares her pearly white teeth, her radiant smile.  Her pageboy, as usual, looks perfect.  Each blond, blow-dried hair a perfect, 90-degree angle.  Miss Richmond and her hair, story of my life.

[Read more →]

This was published in Blackbird, a cool new literary magazine based here in Richmond.  There is also audio of the reading.

The Boss’s Boyfriend
Blackbird 

I thought, One night. Big deal. In and out.

You’ll regret it, I said to myself, but then shuffled that thought to the very back of my brain. It’ll never last between them, I thought. She’ll chase him off, she’ll frighten him, she’ll lose him in a week.

I took the train west to Evanston, to the stop where the mothers get off and wives, where the wrinkled brown man in the newspaper stand winked at me when I climbed down the stairs. Crossing the street, I held my gloves over my ears and my hair jerked in the wind. I walked two blocks to Stephen’s house, reciting the address—Ten Two Twenty, Ten Two Twenty—until I found his large brick townhouse with a gravel driveway of pointed, gray stones.

That first night I said just once, and the next I said just once more. I’ll go back to the ones I’ve known, I said, the ones I loved before. Shaved heads and ropey arms, boys as skinny as girls.

I forgot that’s how it always starts. That you know it’s a lost cause, but still you wait. Even with a man, I thought with a man it would be different. But this place is just the same. You get in and bide your time and tell yourself, He’s falling. He’s falling and just doesn’t know how to say it. 

Read the entire story on Blackbird…

Fans of Whores on the Hill might like “The Girl Who Drank Lye.”  It appeared in Mid-American Review.  Check out this excerpt.

The Girl Who Drank Lye
Mid-American Review

Mary’s left arm was shorter than the right one, Stephanie had asthma, Alyssa’s mom was straight from Korea, I wore corrective glasses, but Shawna was the girl everybody remembered.  Shawna was the girl who drank lye.  

Shawna’s picture was in the McGraw-Hill Health Science book, page sixty-five, down on the right.  Shawna’s dirty blond hair was feathered back and sprayed in wings flanking her face.  She smiled gap-toothed for the camera.  The picture didn’t make much of the black circle scar around her neck.  It was just there, as it was in real life, like a necklace of thin, black twine around Shawna’s sloping throat.  Being the girl who drank lye was like having “BADASS” tattooed across your front gums.  Everybody knew.    

“Do you think I give a shit?”  Shawna asked.  “I drank lye.  Now pony up and hand over your lunch money, bitches.”   [Read more →]

This story was published in the Summer 2008 issue of Glimmer Train.  Please find an excerpt posted here.

The Dearborns Aren’t Home
Glimmer Train

They came bearing flowers in their arms: hyacinth, lilies, hellebores, winter narcissus, bouquets of roses in varying hues, poinsettia plants with pink and green leaves.  They came as families, they came singly, they came in pairs of twos and threes.  They carried handmade cards with stick figure families drawn on them.  They brought chain-link garlands made from strips of colored construction paper and decorated with prayers.  May God watch over you and keep you.  They carried candles, flashlights, and electric lanterns as a light against the night.  They brought freshly baked cookies, cast-off children’s toys, photographs and imitation wedding cakes like the kind that Meg Dearborn used to make.   They brought angels and sparkly stars taken from the tops of their Christmas trees.  They carried their gifts through the blocks and streets to lay them down at the front door of the Dearborn’s house, the family of four found in their basement five days after Christmas, bound at their hands and feet and with their throats slashed.  [Read more →]

Originally published as “LDR” (acronym for “long-distance relationship”) in the anthology Dictionary of Failed Relationships.

Bad Boyfriends
Dictionary of Failed Relationships

My boyfriend told me he won’t hold his breath for me.  Like that’s a surprise.  He’s in Chicago, I’m here in New York.  It wasn’t always this way.  I said, “Oh, yeah, okay.  That’s fine.  That makes sense.”  I hung up the phone and just stared at it.   This doesn’t have to be so serious.  It doesn’t have to be a big deal. 

I actually told him I wanted to marry him.  Don’t ask me what I was thinking.  I heard about girls doing that, on the third date spilling their guts about how their time’s running out and how they want a family and how they want a house and that they think this is love and how they never felt this way before and how you sir, you are the one, you are the love story they’ve been waiting for all these years.

[Read more →]

Published in Quick Fiction.  May be familiar to some of you…

We Eat Hungry
Quick Fiction

“Two tablespoons of cottage cheese,” Astrid says to Mrs. Noelle, the lunch lady with the ratty hairnet.  Astrid palms her a quarter. “You’re a champ.  Really,” she says.

Juli eats a green apple.  I gnaw on spearmint gum.  Lunch only lasts thirty minutes at Sacred Heart Holy Angels.   We’re hungry, but skinny.

We like to see our hipbones.  We like to see our ribs.  Aaron, a skater from Fenwick, pressed his hand, palm flat, from my throat, down my front.  “Like a snake, you are,” he said. 

I wrapped myself around him, blissful, and squeezed him, a little hard.

The cafeteria swarms with noise: tray tables banging together, dishes slung in the sink, girls laughing, swearing.  All of them, chewing on macaroni. 

“Come on,” Astrid says and we spend the rest of the lunch hour behind the Virgin Mary statue, smoking. 

“I like your hair.”

“Yeah?  I streaked it,” Juli says, thumbing the bleached ends.  

Lying in bed, my stomach howls.  I roll over and tuck my knees to my chest.  I see myself getting smaller and smaller, like a seed in the black night soil of the earth.  This is the stars and this is the city.  This is the net of the world and I am waiting deep down inside it.

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