Myfanwy Collins

In December the snow was so deep that deer knocked over the birdfeeder and denuded the shrubs at the front of Eve’s house, eating even the rhododendron leaves, all other forms of nourishment lost to them, covered over with white.

Hesitant sun poked through the evergreens and spiked the snowy yard that morning. It was mild. In the 30s. Earlier she heard footsteps squeaking up the snow covered drive—a man come to invade her house and kill her. But when she got up to check she found the dog in the hallway, his nails scratching against the tile from his dreaming movement.

Outside there was no man, but trees. Beyond the trees there were roofs, which throughout the region had fallen prey to ice dams. The eaves, heavy with ice and snow from rapid thaws and freezes and snows, were dammed so that behind them icy water backed up onto the roof and threatened to seep through into the house proper.

Ceilings caved in. Walls leaked. Nasty business.

Eve noticed the first drips in the window casings in the upstairs bedrooms. Soon the walls beaded and splotched. Her house was sweating on the inside.

She pawed through the tiny local phone book and settled on Fixit General Contractors. A man answered. “Talbot,” he said. She understood this was his name.

She spoke, breathless. Something weird was happening with her house. Water seemed to be coming from everywhere. Through her walls. Like a sign from God. Or the Virgin Mary. One of the stains might actually be in the shape of the Virgin Fucking Mary. She couldn’t tell for sure. Oh god, she needed help. Help. Could someone help? Please? She was a woman alone in these wild mountains. She needed help. Help me, goddamn it!

“I’ll be out this afternoon,” he said.

“I need you now.” In response, she heard him shuffling papers on a desk or table. Clearing his throat. The air moved in and out of his nose with precision. “The water is everywhere.”

“I’ll be there after lunch,” he said and hung up. Eve would have been infuriated if she hadn’t been so grateful. All she needed to do was wait until after lunch.

When Talbot arrived, Eve was standing in the driveway. She wore a bright orange down vest over a black sweater and jeans. Her dog’s leash rested in one hand and a toilet plunger in the other. “Thank god you’re here,” she said as he got out of his truck.

He nodded and eyed the roof. Icicles hung down several feet and a good foot of snow was backed up. It was a mess. “I’ll just get my ladder,” he said.

“What should I do?” Eve said. She twirled the toilet plunger in her hand as if it were an umbrella. The dog sank down and chewed on the crusty snow.

“Might as well go inside and wait. It’s going to take me a while.”

Each time he descended the ladder, she was there gawking at him through the front window, plunger in hand. Later, when they knew each other better, he asked her about the plunger. “I don’t own a baseball bat,” she said.

“So you were going to plunge my face off if I tried anything funny?” he asked.

“You got it.”

But he hadn’t tried anything funny. Instead he went about his work and thought about her. It wasn’t that she was so pretty. She was a good looking woman, sure. Strong jaw, clear eyes. But there were plenty of good looking women in the world. Hell, they even had some good looking women born and bred right there in the North Country.

He liked women, but in a fearful way. Partly because he was shy, but mostly because of his secret. Talbot still slept with a pacifier. He’d never been able to give it up and the only other person who knew his secret was his mother and she took this secret to her grave, God bless her.

This secret had kept him from doing just about everything he’d ever wanted to do—go to college, find a nice wife, have kids. None of it had happened because he could not bear to give up his pacifier. He’d sooner have died. And since he couldn’t give it up, he couldn’t foresee how he could ever sleep in a room with another human being. Just the thought of it filled him with a shame so blistering that his cheeks would redden and his hands would shake. And the shame made him crave the nipple—so supple and comforting against his tongue. He didn’t think there was anything else in the world that could make him feel so satisfied.

Eve ended up at the lake because it seemed to her there was nowhere else to go. Rather, there was nowhere else she could imagine herself being without wanting to peel her skin off strip by strip. It had been a childhood vacation spot. A place of memories—not necessarily happy, but not sad either. It was this middle ground she sought after Chet left her.

The last time she’d seen him was at the reflecting pool at the Christian Science Center. It was early June and stifling. Grimy children ran in and out of the fountain—some in bathing suits, some in shorts and t-shirts, others in underwear. Their weary parents sat on the sidelines, out of the spray, grateful for a chance to get their kids cooled off.

Eve waited for Chet on one of the stone benches. Above the traffic noise of Huntington Ave and Mass Ave and Boylston, she heard the whine of his motorcycle. He was going fast and he knew she would know he was and that it would irritate her. She gritted her teeth.

He was free to do whatever he wanted now. They were no longer together. She’d made that clear. Even though he was the one physically leaving—taking off cross-country on his bike—she was the one who left. Or at least that’s what she told herself. And this was the last good bye. He’d already moved all of his shit into the basement of his sister’s house in Framingham and now all that was left was for him to turn over the key to her condo.

He snuck up behind her, sweaty palms covering her eyes. “Ha, ha,” Eve said. He slid his hands away from her eyes and she smelled the lingering tobacco and motor oil from his skin and something else: the unique himness of him.

She was making a mistake.

He straddled the bench and sat facing her profile. He slipped the key into her hand. “You could have mailed it,” she said, turning the key over and over in her palm with the flick of her fingers.

He stood and took her by the hand and pulled her up next to him and then he bent her over backward and kissed her in a dramatic, winning way. He always had loved an audience. The kiss lingered and he reached a hand down the waistband of her thin cotton skirt and snapped the elastic of her underpants.

And then all that was left was the whine of his bike over the traffic. It was only later as she waited alone for the #39 bus that she realized he’d not said a word.

So she was at the lake and he was gone. She pictured him traveling west, his bike blazing past fields of sunflowers, tall grass, gazelles, and prairie dogs.

Before there was such a thing as online shopping, Talbot had to travel for his pacifiers. He had driven up to 150 miles to cover his tracks and always he ended up buying more than just the pacifier—he’d get diapers or a few toys as well, which he ended up leaving behind in a the bag in a shopping cart, hoping some needy parent would find them.

Sure, he had tried to quit, but always this ended in sleep deprivation and wild mood swings. He had toyed with the idea of hypnosis or something like that, but how could he do it when he’d have to tell the person hypnotizing him what he wanted to give up?

It seemed easier, then, to just carry on as he was and to resign himself to the fact that this was his life and that he would go out the way he came in, alone.

But then there was the worry. What if he died suddenly or what if he went mad or was paralyzed and needed to be cared for? People would enter his home, invade his sanctuary. He would be discovered. His secret found out.

Eve sold her condo in Jamaica Plain, put most of her belongings in storage, bought a little four-season cottage on the lake sight unseen and headed north, unsure of who and what she would find there. She remembered people from her childhood summers. She remembered Francesca, who had a moustache and sold penny candy in her store and how Eve was mesmerized by her, so much so that her mother had to warn her not to stare. “There’ll be no treats for you if you gawk at that poor woman,” Eve’s mother said.

Of course, as an adult she ached for Francesca. Why had she not bleached the thing? Waxed it? Eve herself knew how easy it was to hide one’s womanly deformities. And whenever she was lax about her grooming, she always had Chet to remind her, plucking at the stray black hairs growing up from her nipples.

The shame.

Men knew no such shame. She was convinced of this. All of their hair, all of their burps and farts and blood and fat, all of their many excretions, were just as they were meant to be.

Oh sure, they had erections, but these were easily covered over and dealt with. When had a man ever had to worry about blood in his underpants or, heaven forbid, seeping through the crotch of his white capris? When?

Up north she would be shameless. She would live alone in her small house and let the hair around her nipples flourish. It was a new beginning.

The house came furnished—a hodge-podge of maple furniture from the 50s. It would do. The view was, as promised, spectacular—mountains, sky, water. In the summer she would practice yoga on the dock as the sun rose and drink a glass of wine in that same spot at sunset.

It was electric baseboard heat, which would be expensive, but she had savings enough left over from her condo and she was sure she’d find a job. Teaching or something. Maybe she could write ads for a local paper? She hadn’t really thought it all through, but something would come along. Until then, she would settle into her house and wait for winter. It was September when she moved in. Chet had been gone for 63 days.

Never mind.

September was golden and red and burning orange. It was warm afternoons and chilly nights. However, September did not prepare her for December. The sun behind the mountains by 4. The dark mornings.

She had never known such silence—so quiet you could hear the ice groan as it froze. So quiet you could hear the cold settling onto the branches and filling up the cracks in the clapboards of the house. So quiet.

The dog showed up on Halloween. Eve put out a jack o’lantern and bought candy, but no children showed up. Before she went to bed that night she stepped outside to blow out the candle in the pumpkin when she noticed a dog sitting outside of the range of the porch light. He looked to be a shepherd mix. A sturdy dog, but skinny, sickly, stray. Normally she would have been terrified of such a creature, remembering any number of large dogs which chased her and her sister as children, but she craved.

She had always considered herself a loner when she lived in the city, but now this, this was really being alone and she didn’t like it. The wind was not enough. “I need more,” she surprised herself by saying out loud one night as she lay in the dark waiting for sleep. “More, more.” Repeating made it prayer rather than desperate plea in the darkness. More, more.

She bent and blew out the candle and met the dog’s gaze. “You might as well come in, then,” she said. He didn’t move. Was she dreaming him?

“Come,” she said and thinking better of it, “Come, boy,” unsure of his sex. She opened the door and showed him the way in with the swoop of her arm. He stood. She stepped over the threshold and then he did come trotting in, falling in a heap on the doormat, lifting his head only to lap some water and devour the can of tuna she put out for him. More, more.

He told her that the walls would need work. “Might need to replace the drywall.” Eve nodded, unsure whether this was true or not. She had never paid much attention to things—how they were constructed. That was Chet’s job. He was the one who walked through her condo with the inspector before she signed the papers. She hadn’t even known an inspection was necessary. “It’s just something you’ve got to do, Babe,” Chet said. And so she had.

She thought of him on his bike, rolling on, the wheel spinning into oblivion, as she nodded. She wanted to send him a message so that he might send one back and tell her what to do. “What do you think I should do?” she asked Talbot.

“Water can do a lot of damage,” he said, ominously. Eve nodded. She had heard from Chet—postcards forwarded to her from her old address. They were all from southern states, not what she expected. They were signed only with his name, no love or miss you. Just Chet. She got the feeling he wrote the same thing on all of the postcards he sent and he knew she would know that. It was a chastisement.

She had ridden on the back of Chet’s bike down to Providence once, weaving in and out of traffic on 93. On the way down, she’d been tense, her hands bunched into fists around his waist. But on the way home she’d been so tired that she fell asleep for a few minutes, her body trusting that he would keep them moving forward. She had been drifting, the air flying past and around her helmet, her body suspended—it was that place between life and death. An out of body experience. Had she seen light? When she woke she realized with horror that she could have killed them—leaned this way, fallen that way. But they had not died.

“Let’s fix the walls,” she said. Talbot nodded. She had made the right decision.

Talbot owned two bi-planes, each built from a kit. One of the planes he flew regularly in the summer; the other—he would tell his passengers once they were well above the ground—was at the bottom of the lake. Ha. Ha.

As a child Talbot jumped off cliffs, from tree limbs, arms and legs flailing from bridges into rivers below. There was something about the way his body connected with air. He had sky dived the one time and then decided to get his pilot’s license, which is what led to the biplanes.

When he was in the air, his secret was forgotten. And then there was the precious release when the pontoons hit the water, glided briefly, made contact. The landing, the takeoff, those were the moments of reaching the sublime, when he imagined a white button in the back of his brain shattering and splintering into exquisite release. He was young again, his father throwing him over and over into the air, the sun shifting and shadowing his father from behind. He had trust that he would not fall.

January was black and snow and then there was February—darkness leading to darkness leading to blue sparkles in the noon time. She had never really known winter before this. “Is every winter this way?” she asked Talbot. He was there several times a week, fixing her walls, her ceilings, projects that seemed to be taking longer than they should, but she was glad. He filled up the time between morning and night.

“What way?” he asked. He had a few corny jokes and some long, droll stories about local people she did not know, but other than that she found him difficult to converse with.

“So fucking cold,” she said. She hadn’t had opportunity to swear much since Chet left. It felt good and she was testing the water to see how he would react.

“I suppose,” he said. She leaned in the doorway of the room he was working on—her spare bedroom—and lifted her right foot up and hooked it behind her left leg. Had she offended him?

“I’ll take you up in my plane this summer if you like.” His offer drifted out in the air between them, purple and strange. She wasn’t sure what to say. It implied their knowing each other would extend beyond this season—that outside of his working for her, they would meet and enjoy time together.

He had not turned from his work but had stopped hammering, waiting—hovering in anticipation—for her to say something. She opened her mouth, but could not speak. She breathed in, out. He took up hammering.

One month before Chet left, he asked her to meet him at his work. He took her into South Boston, down to the loading docks. They’d been there before when they first met. He brought her over the chain link and onto a cement slab one night—they had a picnic, watched the murky water shiver as they drank wine right from the bottle. She’d been scared of climbing the fence, disobeying the warnings. They were trespassing. Later in their relationship, he’d come to mock her fear, always edging her forward until her toes were in space and she was falling off a cliff. And forward she would move, never wanting him to think she was not worthy of him, flawed and fearful though she was.

He led her back to that spot. It was a muggy evening in May, and still light. “Remember this?” he said, grabbing two fistfuls of fence.

“Sure,” she said.

He dug a foot in and started to climb. “Come on,” he said.

“I don’t want to.”

“Don’t be that way.” He hoisted himself up another foot. “Come with me.”

Eve crossed her arms, looked around to make sure no one saw them. She thought she might scale the fence, give in to his goading one last time. Show him that she was worthy. In the distance she heard laughter, horns honking. A breeze brought in a waft of rotting fish, kelp. Chet pulled himself up and over the fence, stood on the other side of it facing her. She didn’t move. Noted, instead, that his face was the fearful one. If she didn’t follow him, who was he then?

“Aren’t you coming?” he said.

After Talbot made his offer and could not take it back, the idea grew so large in his mind that he could think of nothing but taking Eve up in his plane. Before sleep he ran through the movie of how he would land near her dock and take her by surprise while she was sunbathing.

She would wrap a towel around her hips like a sarong and allow him to attach the belts around her when she sat in the passenger seat. He imagined the hot smoothness of her skin beneath his fingers as they glided over it.

He would see the water dividing beneath them as they took off, the sun shooting through the windows. She would turn and smile.

Talbot would point out the mountains on the horizon, the dark center, leading to the russet edges of the tannin-laced water. The dark green of the trees and the paler, more vibrant green of the fields. The orange sail on a catamaran, small now and far away.

He would say, Do you love it up here?

Yes.

Back on the ground, he would help her out of the plane and she would suspend in his arms, her mouth reaching for his. And when she kissed him, her tongue would linger on his tongue and he would suck on it so gently that she would not even notice he’d done it. Everything would fall away then, fall backwards and upwards. The gentle suckling. The white button opening up.

It was spring. Nearly a year since Chet had left. Talbot made a joke about a sunken plane. She did not react. She heard the whine of the plane engines, felt the vibration of air over wings.

Instead of seeing mountains and sky and water from the plane window, Eve saw herself turning from the chain link fence and walking back along the pier as streetlights flickered on in the distance. Behind her she heard the jingle of Chet scaling the fence, the slap of the soles of his Converse as he ran in the opposite direction.

The sky above her was a prairie divided by road. Hot black tarmac, a wheel pushing forward.

by Myfanwy Collins

by Kirsty Logan

Renfield lives down a narrow alley above the bar where he works. The bar is called Stereo. Renfield has a theory that every city in the world has a bar called Stereo. He doesn’t travel much, but he has Googled it. Montreal, Alicante, Frankfurt, and Saint-Petersburg all have bars called Stereo. Renfield still eats bugs.

On his morning off, Renfield walks through Glasgow. He orders fish and chips with a mug of sugary tea. He picks at the food, moving it around so it looks like he has eaten some. He suspects that hunters are watching and the appearance of normality means survival. He goes to Argos and flips through the catalogue. He browses the classics section in Waterstones. He watches the pigeons fight over shreds of battered sausage and the tourists photographing them. His destination is the Necropolis, but it is important for this to seem accidental because of the hunters. Renfield knows that the dead must have their hearts burned. He is not sure whether this counts as a crime. He knows that hearts sing through the flames.

In the bar, Renfield is a fixed point. The customers in the bar swarm and buzz, but Renfield keeps his place behind the counter. He pulls pints quickly and cleanly. After closing, Renfield locks the bar and climbs the stairs to his flat. It has three rooms including the bathroom. This is where he eats the birds. His kitchen window is small but has no blinds, and his neighbours can see in. The bathroom window is dimpled glass and shows only blurs of dark and light. He is no longer sure whether the birds are helping his life force to grow. He thought they might heal his broken neck, but their small bones catching in his throat just made it feel worse. To hide his neck Renfield wears high-collared shirts and sometimes even a neck brace. He says this is because he fell off his motorcycle. None of Renfield’s customers or fellow bartenders can imagine Renfield on a motorcycle. He does not look like he could be trusted with an object traveling at 100mph.

Renfield tries to live a simple life. He still fears that he will disintegrate. He keeps a stethoscope next to the kettle and every morning while his tea brews he checks that his heart is still beating. He leaves work early and visits Western Infirmary’s A&E department trying to find the person who stole his pulmonary artery. He runs away when the nurses approach him. He suspects that his body, used to human tissue consumption, is metabolising him from the inside.

The hospital is next to the Necropolis, and this makes it difficult for Renfield. He knows that the hunters are watching him. He knows that the dead are beginning to twitch. He can feel them under his feet, making the bowels of the city shake. Renfield leans his shoulder against the wall of the Western Infirmary and tries to understand the morse code of the shuffling bodies. He thinks it cannot be a crime, this thing that he needs to do. Then he thinks that maybe it is a crime. Renfield does not want to go back to prison.

When he gets home it is nearly time for his shift at the bar, but he leaves his front door unlocked in case his upstairs neighbour wants to drink his spinal fluid. He sometimes thinks that everyone has gone to the other side and the only thing to do is to become like them. He wonders whether it is possible to buy a bow and arrow in Glasgow. It’s easy to buy ox livers from the butcher. As long as he uses a plate and cutlery, he can even eat them at the kitchen table where the neighbours can see. It’s normal to eat internal organs because everybody remembers their mothers serving up tripe. Renfield does not like the feeling of blood on his teeth.

Renfield does not talk much in the bar. He pulls pints and measures out three colours of wine. He restocks the peanuts. Always quickly, always cleanly. He thinks about going away, escaping the frozen drizzled clusters of Europe, the Cyrillic letters shushing at the edges of his mind. He thinks about the cracked red earth of Australia spreading so far and so flat that it curves away under the horizon. He thinks about sun glinting off snow and the silence of wooden walls against the Canadian mountains. But the steady siren of the Necropolis will still reach him from across the seas. He lines the pints up neatly on the bar, punctuates the row with a packet of salt and vinegar crisps.

Renfield knows that the dead must be burned. He knows that limbs never stop twitching. He knows that the burning hearts will sing out his name. He knows that he will starve if he goes back to prison because he will have nothing to tempt the birds to his window. He does not like the way that insect shells dig into his gums.

After his shift at the bar, Renfield locks up. He posts the keys through the letterbox for his boss to find in the morning and he climbs the stairs to his flat. In the kitchen Renfield finds that a bird is still fluttering in the trap he set. He digs his thumbnail into the bird’s skin-soft throat. He waits for the blood to dry on his knuckles and then he flexes them slowly. It is too dark to see, but he imagines the rusted flakes piling by his feet. He thinks about how he could not breathe in jail, about bars between him and the sky, about tempting bugs into the tears in his mattress. The hearts have begun to beat under the city and Renfield can feel the vibrations coming through the floor. They make something deep in his belly shrink. There is no more time.

The flames are redder than the sunset and the hearts have already begun singing his name.

by bl pawelek

(an FMC original)

In ten words (no more, no less), describe Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine

BT: Boy meets girl. Sparks fly. Things implode. Things change. Done?

Five Questions Here:

1 – Tell me another lyric title you thought of for your book.

BT: Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right. I was in a Dylan mode and everything sounded right.

2 – What is the one thing you dig about Bob Dylan?

BT: He tells stories about relationships that are somehow sad, funny, political and sweeping, yet still taut, all at once. He also reminds me of my dad. Sorry, that’s two things.

3 – So, who is who on the cover?

BT: From left to right: Geoff. Jen. Paul. Rhonda.

4 – What is the best and worst thing about dating in New York City?

BT: As a former New Yorker, the best thing about dating in New York City is that you get to date in New York City, the greatest city in the world. And as someone who now lives in Chicago, the worst thing about dating in New York City is that you have to date in New York City, a place the incredibly obnoxious locals consider the best city in the world, despite endlessly clear evidence to the contrary. What is that evidence you ask? We’re not allowed to say, it should just be obvious.

5 – (p29) So, are you Bob, Jones, Edwin, Descartes, or Oscar?

BT: On a good day, I probably fall between Bob’s very dude-like thinking and Descarte’s wishfully intellectual approach to providing sound advice. But after three drinks I am very Oscar.

Five Questions There:

6 – Do you think Geoff and Jen will last past page 200?

BT: I hope so, it’s possible, even probable, but it will be hard for them until at least page 700 or so of the imaginary ongoing story I hope someone, somewhere is attempting to write, because by then they will know enough about themselves to really make it work.

7 – What was the best pickup line you had for a girl?

BT: I was never good at this, persistence and alcohol were always my strengths. But many years ago, my best almost line, meaning I said it to someone I hadn’t really seen in some time, but then didn’t actually follow-up on their surprisingly positive reaction was, “I apologize for staring at your breasts, but I can’t help myself, their amazing. Did they look like that when we used to know each other?”

8 – Do you consider yourself a writer of romance novels?

BT: I’m going to be borderline cheesy here, but I consider myself a writer of confusion and coping, and so in that way, yes, romance for sure, but also death, loss, compulsion, friendship, humor and sex as well.

9 – Have you ever thought of making this into a screenplay?

BT: Sort of. I’m always thinking about what else I might work on, and I know I would really enjoy doing something like this, but I think I need someone to want me to first, because there is too much to do otherwise that seems more likely to be successful. That said, I did pick my cast for the proposed movie version of the book per the request of the fine folks at StoryCasting.com – and so I am ready when, and if, the request comes.

10 – You are one of the funniest writers I know. Hit me with your best joke.

BT: First off thank you, that’s a big compliment, and just to confirm, it doesn’t take much more than that to get me into bed, so really, you’re in. I should say though, that I think of myself in more of the Patton Oswalt meandering funny storytelling vein. Wow, that was grandiose of me. But as not to avoid this further here is the first joke I ever loved and on some level the joke that probably impacts much of what I say and do: A guy wanders into a convention hall at a hotel he’s staying in and sits down after hearing everyone inside is laughing. A dude near him yells out, number 72, and everyone continues to laugh. The guy says to the guy next to him, what was that about? The guy next to him says, we’re comedians and this is our annual convention. Since we’ve memorized every joke we just yell out the numbers now. The guy says really, I can do that and yells out, number twenty-seven. No one laughs. Nothing. He looks at his neighbor, and says, what was that, no one laughed. The guy next to him says, yeah, well, it’s all in the delivery.

In ten words, describe your next project.

BT: Interns. Neighbors. Babies. Marriage. Work. Friends. And The Hold Steady.

___________________________________________________________

more at http://xkcd.com/

by Edan Lepucki

When I was young I lived next door to a horse. The man who owned the animal came every day to ride and feed him, and to clean out his stall at the edge of the property. My mother said the horse had been living there forever, long before there were laws to forbid that kind of thing, back when vacant plots of land could go undeveloped for years. I knew from school that the horse had once been a colt, uneasy on his legs, and before that, in his mother’s belly, folded up like a somersault. Like people, horses were mammals. The horse next door wasn’t human, but he had big, sad eyes like one.

Rachel and I had an argument and I took a bath. I shaved my legs and left the little black hairs to pepper the tub. The argument had been about the lock on the front door; she was upset because I’d forgotten, again, to deadbolt it before coming to bed. “We’re two women living alone,” she said. “This is the big city.” She threw up her hands in that way she does when she’s mad, like she’s an actress onstage, playing angry. “Who knows what could happen?”

Like most of our fights, it was silly. Later on, after we’d made up, Rachel played me some opera and told me she just wanted us to be safe, and happy. I said I’d work on it.

Rachel used to be married to a singer, a classically trained one named Brett Brettigan. He cheated on her twice, first with an old friend of hers and then with the upstairs neighbor. Since the divorce, though, they’ve tried to forge a friendship.

Sometimes Brett Brettigan calls from his condo in Westwood, and when I answer he asks if my roommate is home. Rachel doesn’t want him to know the truth about us because he might tell her family. She says she’s waiting for her grandmother to die before she breaks the news to the rest of them. “What am I,” I ask her, “some kind of terminal disease?” But I’m only pretending to be offended. Before Rachel and I began dating, I’d never so much as kissed another woman.

Nevertheless, when Brett Brettigan calls, I want to say to him: Don’t you miss the way your ex-wife smells when she comes in from the garden? You know what I mean, Brett: that gardening scent of hers—equal parts sweat, perfume and soil. And don’t you miss the way those wisps of hair cling to her neck after a long day of weeding? Couldn’t you just lick that soft, salty space beneath her ponytail, before traveling down her neck?

The horse next door was white, with a few gray spots scattered here and there along his back. My father said a horse was measured in hands, and that the one next door probably measured about 16 or so. I was very young when my father told me this, and I didn’t understand what he meant. Was there a person who traveled from farm to ranch to riding school, laying his palms along the warm velvet surfaces of every stallion and mare he could find? How big were his hands, and why was he chosen, and what happened when he retired, or died? I was too young to know the answers to these questions, but too old to ask them aloud.

The first time I touched a boy, I crossed and re-crossed his 17-year-old body with my 15-year-old hands. I pretended I was a professional. This boy wasn’t a horse, but he could have been from the way he nuzzled and bucked, from the way I described and defined his body with my own. I counted under my breath, 10, 11, as I moved my hands across the boy’s chest and down his arms, skating delicately over his nervous parts until he hummed like water before it boils. We were in his bedroom on a Sunday afternoon in March. We closed the blinds.

To keep the squirrels away from the vegetable patch, Rachel strung dried chili peppers onto fishing line and stretched it across the lip of the garden. She explained that humans were the only animals who enjoyed the pain of chili peppers, and that the squirrels would try them once and stay away for months afterward. I was skeptical at first, and was surprised when it worked. While the squirrels nursed their wounds, Rachel and I ate tomato and basil salads every night for weeks.

Before Rachel, I assumed that if I ever slept with a woman, I’d find it overwhelmingly foreign. I figured I’d do it once, if at all, as an experiment, like the milk and ginger ale combinations my friends and I would make each other drink in junior high. Something to try for the sake of trying. Exhilarating in its newness, sure, but a joke too. Disgusting even.

But it wasn’t like that at all. The first time, Rachel and I shared a bottle of wine on her back porch. We’d met a few months before, soon after I’d moved to L.A., and although I’d memorized her birthday and her phone number, I didn’t expect anything to happen. She’d been married, after all, and I didn’t think I’d be bold enough to make the first move. But we were alone at her house, and drunk, and then I took my foot and rubbed my toes along her muscled calf. I stood up to retrieve another bottle of wine and Rachel stopped me by putting a hand on my waist. I remember I was wearing a linen dress, a gift from my mother, and it fell loosely around my body, ending just above the knees. Rachel flashed me those eyes, which I later came to understand as a sign of drunkenness, and she slid her hand down my waist and along my hip, until she hit the hem of my dress. She paused there a moment, then reached underneath. The movement of her hand felt like when a butterfly lands on your arm. You think: Wow. And then: Please stay where you are.

The boy I slept with kicked me out the minute we were done. He said to hurry up, his mother was coming home soon. I ran toward home but instead snuck over to the lot next door to my house. I had to be careful because my parents didn’t like me going over there. They said it was trespassing, but that didn’t stop me. I visited the horse all the time; it comforted me to watch him.

That afternoon when I entered the stall, the horse didn’t move from where he lay, just looked up at me with those sorrowful eyes. I felt the urge to measure him from hoof to withers, as I had done to the boy, but I didn’t. The horse had lived alone for so long, his only company a block of salt nailed to the stable wall. Part of me was afraid. He might be skittish, violent.

Instead, I touched my tongue to the salt lick, then ran.

What does a salt lick taste like? Like the dirtiest coin.

In our kitchen, there’s a knife from Brett and Rachel’s wedding. They used it to cut the cake, a chocolate-raspberry affair with a dark chocolate ganache and rose petals scattered over each tier. The words Brett and Rachel Brettigan, March 18, 1994, are etched in a florid cursive along the knife’s silver handle. We use it all the time.

A few days after our fight about the lock, I took the knife into the garden and hacked at all the weeds, thinking about Brett and Rachel Brettigan cutting cakes, Brett and Rachel Brettigan naked. Then I replaced Rachel’s face with my own. I had her breasts and her solid runner’s legs, but my brain and mouth. Brett Brettigan was touching me, but I was also Rachel. Brett Brettigan’s hands were large and mannish, and I could smell the muskiness of him under his cologne. I could feel him pressing against my thigh, Rachel’s thigh. He kissed me hard, like that first boy I was with did.

When Rachel got home, she wanted to know why I’d brought the cantaloupe in before it was ripe. She said, “Patience is a virtue, baby,” and snapped her fingers like a beatnik. I told her I’d thrown out the wedding knife. She wasn’t upset; she assumed it was jealousy and was flattered. “The thing wasn’t very sharp anyway,” she said, pushing the hair out of my face.

That year I turned 15, on the night of St. Patrick’s Day, a group of boys snuck into the lot next door and spray painted the horse green. When I awoke the next morning, my mother called me to the kitchen window. “Look at that,” she said. “He looks like the horse from ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ ” I could see what she meant, but it wasn’t true. Unlike that horse, the one next door did not turn from green to purple to blue and back again, but stayed that one awful color. And he didn’t look magical, but sickly and artificial. The paint seemed to swallow him; it was splattered across his flanks and it covered his face, too. He tried to blink away the green on his lashes. He did it again and again.

No one knew how to get in touch with the horse’s owner, so we did nothing. My parents sent me to school, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the horse. I prayed his owner would check up on him earlier than usual. I imagined the sweet relief of hose water against his hide. How good it would feel, I thought, to be made new again.

I didn’t plan on telling Rachel the horse story. We’d finished talking about the knife and the conversation had turned to something else—animal cruelty maybe, or small-town shenanigans—when it came up. “The horse was dead when I got home,” I told her.  We were sitting in the kitchen by now, across the table from one another. “Some people thought the animal was just old, that he was bound to die that day. Like his death was God’s will or something. But most of us were convinced it was the fumes of the spray paint that did it. Maybe the horse had a hard time breathing with all that paint on his face, or the chemicals seeped into his body and poisoned him.”

I described to her what I saw as I approached my street corner that afternoon, how the horse’s owner stood at the edge of the lot, arms crossed, talking in a low voice to the cluster of people who had come to see what they could do. I described to her how from afar I saw the horse, lying dead on its side at the door of the stall, as though he had thought to go inside to rest, but hadn’t made it. I described to her the truck that came to take the horse away, and how it took four strong men, including my father, to hoist the animal onto its bed. I described to her the way my stomach fell to see the horse’s legs gripped by those hands. And then the truck drove off, and the spectators went home, and the lot was empty.

When I was finished, Rachel asked, “Why are you telling me this story?”

I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t even told her everything. I hadn’t told her about how the next day I discovered that the group of pranksters included that 17-year-old boy whose room I’d been to a week or so earlier. He hadn’t spoken to me since. The boy’s father owned a hardware store, which was where they’d gotten the paint.

I didn’t tell her any of this. Instead I stood from the table and picked up one of the cantaloupes waiting on the counter.  I could have cut it open, as unripe as it was.  Handed her a bland wedge.  I could have lunged it at her like a basketball.

“Why not tell it?” I asked.

“Because it’s so awful,” she said, in a way that made me put down the melon.  I imagined she was thinking of Brett and his various transgressions, even the casual way he called her on Saturday afternoons, how he asked what she was up to.

I thought to open my mouth then and say, “I’ll tell you what’s really awful,” and finish the story. It would be so easy.

But I didn’t. I knew if I did, Rachel might say, “Oh the cruelty of men,” in that breezy tone of hers, that glib little voice she sometimes used to counteract a deep injury.

Oh the cruelty of men.  I didn’t want her to say that.  It was where I’d come from, and where she’d come from, too.  And anyway, that cruelty—it wasn’t true.  Not always.

And so what if it was?

It was where, we both knew, I would eventually return.

by Edan Lepucki

Originally published by the Los Angeles Times, October 2006.

By Steve D Owen

Author of fifteen books of fiction, most recently the story collection Fugue State, and the novella Baby Leg, winner of the O. Henry Award for his short story “Two Brothers,” the International Horror Guild Award for his story collection The Wavering Knife, and the ALA/RUSA prize for his novel Last Days, Brian Evenson has quickly become one of the most important American writers of our time. Questioning the epistemology posited by Enlightenment philosophers, Evenson’s oeuvre can be taken as a critique on the traditional values of a realist-dominated American literature. While many of his contemporaries simply assume the possibility of human rationality—endlessly repeating the formulaic (and profitable) clichés of free will and epiphany—Evenson takes the epistemological dilemmas delineated by postmodernism seriously. With a jarring brand of intellectual horror, he explores the problems of human perception, language, and the unconscious, and breaks the artificial boundaries between so-called literary fiction and genre.

Steve: Reading Altmann’s Tongue, my first experience of your work, I knew I’d discovered something unique in the literary world—the dark mystery and humor, the visceral use of language to create startling effects. This was powerful writing that unapologetically shocked with inexplicable violence yet ran deep in its epistemological subtext, that respected genre and employed it to its full intellectual potential. What’s it like to be the inspiration of a whole new generation of writers?

Brian: I don’t know how to answer this exactly. I feel at once flattered and a little afraid, like the next step will be for me to be ritually executed and eaten. It also makes me feel older than I want to feel, but maybe that’s a good thing in that it suggests that I might be too tough and stringy to eat, even ritually.

Steve: Unfortunately, stringiness has never been sufficient reason to escape ritual execution, or eating. But I can promise you that your apostles will attempt to tenderize your flesh before taking their first communion.  Fortunately, a mallet solves most spiritual problems.

Brian: We should move on.  All this talk of food is making me hungry.

Steve: I see your work holding a broken mirror up to reality. I say “broken” because it seems, in principle, your characters have no logical possibility of accessing an objective reality or truth, Kant’s “thing-in-itself.” They are blocked by perception, language, the unconscious. Do you consider your work a critique of literary realism?

Brian: Broken mirror is a nice way to think about it. I think my work has a lot of the qualities of mimetic fiction but that there are irreconcilable differences that exist between us, and that I’m more interested in the way the reflection is fragmented or compromised than I am in what’s reflected. I suppose my work is partly a critique of literary realism, but I also don’t think all that much about literary realism when I’m writing: a good story interested in doing its own thing by whatever means necessary. I’m very interested in trying to sort through the way that consciousness works and the way that perception works, but also interested in intensely questioning epistemology. I guess I see that as being more part of an embodied philosophical conversation than of a literary conversation. One of the reasons I’m not all that interested in literary realism is that I think it rarely approaches issues or questions that I find all that interesting. The good realistic writers do approach such questions. I’m very fond, for instance, of a couple of William Trevor stories, but I’d also argue that their realism is somewhat beside the point: a story like “Miss Smith” is able to do something remarkable with narrative sympathy and do it in such a way that I don’t much care whether the story is realistic or not.

Steve: Part of what makes your fiction epistemological is the prevalence of enigma. Mysterious names, settings, diction, and inexplicable acts of violence all work to defamiliarize readers from their everyday reality. Why is this an important aspect of your work?

Brian: I think if you’re a writer interested in a skeptical notion of epistemology, one in which you come to feel that nothing can ever be truly or completely known (which is what I very much feel), then defamiliarization becomes an important part of the work. It functions on a number of different levels in my fiction, from the simple disorientations of strange names to a more intense questioning of the basic reality of the situation itself. I think that the basis of my work as a whole is a skepticism about “reality,” though that skepticism is sometimes expressed directly and sometimes is simply integrated into whatever is happening.

Steve: Your work destabilizes the enlightenment notion of free will, problematizing the traditional assumption that reason is absolute. John Gardner famously (or infamously) claimed that writers who deny “that human beings have free will can write nothing of interest. Stripped of free will … human beings cease to be of anything more than scientific and sentimental interest.” What’s your response to this argument?

Brian: I actually do think my characters have free will but, as you say, it’s severely destabilized and often they find themselves unable to act, unable to commit one way or another. And obviously if your notion of the world is something subjective and suspect, it puts severe limitations on free will. I guess, I feel that Gardner’s basically a humanist despite his interest in existentialism, and that I tend much more toward nihilism than he does, though I think there’s room for a productive element in nihilism that Gardner probably would not acknowledge. In the Gardner/Gass debates I much more often come down on the side of Gass.

Steve: Can you elaborate on the productive element of nihilism?

Brian: I mean in the way that some contemporary philosophers, Deleuze for instance, talk about positive desire, about thinking about desire as not being something based on a lack. Nihilism too doesn’t have to be based on a sense of absence or lack or negativity, but can be a kind of intense productive force when embraced head on, when you accept that anything you do is built on nothingness and any sort of subjectivity you have is secondary rather than the primary foundation, one that is founded on a void. Either you worry like hell about the fact that you can’t ever know anything for certain and that the ground below your feet is unstable or you try to avoid thinking about it and develop ethical formations on top of it, or you accept the instability and learn to enjoy it, and even learn to deepen that instability in what you’re writing. I think that’s closer to an absurdist anarchistic impulse than to existentialism.

Steve: I think we can safely call Fugue State deeply psychological. Your novella Baby Leg, as well. However, unlike traditional psychological realism, where insights and epiphanies are assumed possible—the traditional narrative arc where characters find solutions, grow and change—your characters become lost in an in-between space of thought. Do you agree that after Altmann’s Tongue your stories have begun to focus more on an exploration of interiority, albeit poststructural?

Brian: Yes, I think that I’ve become more and more interested in interiority. In Altmann’s Tongue I very deliberately didn’t have much interior space, but as my stories have developed and expanded I think they’ve become more reflective. It’s a weird interiority, one that doesn’t accept very much of what many people take for granted about the mind, but it’s still interiority. Or consciousness at least. But whether consciousness really exists, or how it exists, is a very complicated question. I think there’s an argument about the ways that the mind and the world work that develops over the course of Fugue State, but doesn’t develop straightforwardly—the collection provides more of a texture or a structure than an argument.

Steve: Your style of interiority exploits the problems of either-or thinking to great comic effect. I like to refer to it as a comedy of confusion, or a farce of the in-between, and it seems to reflect rather well your general thesis about consciousness—a kind of anti-Cartesian view of the mind—nothing is ever very clear or distinct. It’s not just perception that fails us, but language and logic, too. Furthermore, faith is an artificial solution, leading only to further complication. Since certainty isn’t a realistic option, your stories seem to suggest the best answer is to accept the unknown, embrace absurdity?

Brian: Yes, everything fails us ultimately. And it’s not just that the best answer is to accept the unknown and embrace absurdity—it’s the only answer: ultimately that’s what dying is, despite what we and our religions like to think. There’s just the question of how long you want to put off acknowledging it, and then the question of whether you can effectively acknowledge it and use it as a model for living that can be in some senses positive rather than negative. I’m very anti-Cartesian, but many of my characters, at least initially, are not.

Steve: Many writers privilege realism as the foundation of good storytelling, authentic literature. They believe it’s wise for new writers to study in realist programs (rather than experimental) in order to provide the fundamentals an innovator may wish to later deviate from. Putting aside the controversial notion of “foundations,” do you believe realism is a necessary, or at least pragmatic, starting point for burgeoning irrealists?

Brian: No, I don’t. I think that’s a false notion that comes to us from the visual arts, where it might be slightly more relevant (but even there I’m suspicious of it). I think realism is a genre and that it can be learned from, but I do not feel it has any more significance than any other large-scale genre. Only if you decide in advance that realism should be privileged will it seem all-important, but I’d also think, if I were a young writer, about what the cultural forces are that are telling me that realism is the most important genre, and about how else they’re trying to funnel my work and my thinking. All my early training, in terms of reading and, before I got to college, in terms of gaining ideas about writing, was in the fantastic (Kafka and Poe on the one hand and Michael Moorcock and Gene Wolfe on the other) and I think that was incredibly useful. Later when I was an undergraduate, the most important writers I read in terms of my development as a writer were probably Samuel Beckett, J.G. Ballard and Donald Barthelme (though there were other people that were also important). I think I could make a convincing but specious argument based on that for the importance of reading writers in college whose last name begins with “B”, and it’d be just about as valid as the argument for the primacy of realism that people tend to make…

Steve: I know quite a few poets and neo-Platonists who would find your B argument quite compelling…

But I think the idea of control here is important. Many young writers today, in my experience, are naïve or apathetic to postmodern notions of ideology. Of how certain cultural forces, as you say, benefit from passing themselves off as natural or absolute. For example, although the epiphany works well functionally—creating a certain brand of narrative movement—the ideology behind the form, both religious and economic, is problematic. In a recent article in The Writer’s Chronicle, “Odds on Ends,” Molly Giles admits quite blatantly the commercial and ideological reasons behind the enduring support for the epiphany (and positive endings, in general):

Fiction is supposed to be, forgive me, less shitty than life. Better than life. It is supposed to make more sense than life. That’s one of the reasons we read, one of the reasons we write. We want to feel we are forgiven and that there is hope, and the ending of choice in today’s fiction is the ending that offers both. Redemption is and always has been a staple of American fiction and—and not to sound too cynical—it is oh-so marketable. A good end—in my family, we’ve always said, “No one comes to a good end”—is supposed to be spiritually uplifting.

Giles’ honesty is quite admirable, but I believe she is more cynical than she thinks. Do you find it shocking to see the profit motive and Redemption posited so easily in the same sentence? Do you think Giles inadvertently sheds light on the reason so many MFA programs are realist in orientation, prescribing the “manual techniques” that you so humorously satirize in “Story Barkers: A Report from the Field?”

Brian: I think one of the banes of fiction is the stylistic trick that works well and remains unquestioned for a whole generation of writers, whether that’s the Modernist epiphany or the slightly uplifted lyrical ending that minimalism offered or whatever. I think it’s good for writers to learn how to write and use certain techniques, but when a writing workshop becomes a forum for turning out not only a certain kind of writer but a certain kind of story, over and over again, it’s very problematic. There’s nothing wrong with epiphany, but nothing right about it either: in some contexts it’ll still work and I still read writers who surprise me by making it work. But it’s something that I think should only be used with a great amount of skepticism on the part of the writer.

Steve: Many of your stories are about people who commit extreme acts of violence. “Gravediggers” comes to mind, as does your novella, Dark Property, and of course, your novel Last Days. The violence your characters commit, although disturbing to the reader, often seems disconnected to them, matter of fact, banal. It seems to function the opposite of the violence found in Flannery O’Connor’s work—in her world violence is a kind of ontological slap in the face that opens up the possibility of epiphany—in your world, violence typically begets more violence, leads only to further dehumanization. It’s a kind of Hobbsian world through Poe’s eyes. Is this your view of the world?

Brian: I’m incredibly skeptical of epiphany as a notion and yes, my view of the world, despite my being a fairly happy person, is that we’re rarely more than a few degrees of separation away from being disposable characters in Lord of the Flies. I do think that violence is something that replicates itself endlessly and dehumanizes us severely in the process, whether we’re the recipient or the inflictor. I think my fiction is also interested in trauma and in how humans respond in extreme situations—extreme situations tend to strip away all the niceties that we use to protect ourselves and allow people to react more nakedly. I haven’t thought extensively about Hobbes being an influence, but certainly I’m sympathetic with his thinking on religion. Poe was a big influence, as was Meryvn Peake, Kafka, Beckett, Cioran, the absurd tradition, etc.

Steve: Depicting acts of violence in a frank and graphic manner is a controversial issue in American literature. At the recent AWP in Denver, a panel of speakers on violence in fiction argued that imagined or implied violence, a minimalist approach to violence, was preferable to a maximalist, ornately detailed style. This view appeared to be motivated by the odd presupposition that there is something inherently immoral, inhuman (anti-humanist) about fictional depictions of graphic violence. Of course, the panel had a hard time explaining the essential morality of Cormac McCarthy’s work, and throwing their hands up at the contradiction, recited the unfortunate cliché: “I know pornography when I see it.” While I appreciate the humanist distaste for violent “pornography,” I also feel a minimalist approach may inadvertently sanitize violence, neuter horrific acts into a more consumable, conservative form. Isn’t there a literary and ethical value in discomforting readers?

Brian: I’ve done both things in my work, had stories that approach violence fairly minimally and had other stories that approach it fairly graphically, and everything in between. Dark Property has some extremely graphic moments, but they’re told in a style so odd that the effect is very strange. My “Gravediggers” is pretty explicit in terms of the way that it describes the main characters trying to force the body into a hole. Some people who like my other work were somewhat put off by that story. Other pieces of mine very deliberately pass over the violence or shorthand it. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way to do violence, but I do think it’s something that should feel justified or necessary in the context of the piece itself. Otherwise I think the risk is less that it feels pornographic than that it’ll feel boring. I’d say the same about any theme or, really, any element of fiction: for instance, there are some stories I read that benefit from thick, lush description and that I love precisely because of that; other stories only need a suggestion or shorthand of that. Same with character. Same with plot or mood. The rightness or wrongness of such things cannot really can be determined outside of their immediate fictional context, outside of how they work in a different story.

The other thing I’d add specifically to violence—and I’ve talked about this extensively elsewhere so won’t go into it in great detail here—is that the dilemma is a very complicated one. On the one hand there is a profound difference between a representation of violence and actual physical violence; on the other if one is trying to do work that is intensive, as I am, part of the premise of the work is that reading is in some sense an experiential and phenomenal activity and that you can, to some degree, allow a reader to experience a dampened-down version of violence and trauma. If there’s not something at stake for the reader in what’s being represented—as implemented by style, rhythm and all the other ways in which a textual event is conveyed—then what’s the point?

Steve: Your style is often compared to Poe, Bowles, Kafka. How do you view yourself as a writer within the context of American literature, world literature? Who are your biggest influences?

Brian: Kafka and Beckett were probably the most important writers for me, partly because they’re both excellent and partly because I came to both of them at just the right time. Bowles I read pretty late, but very much admired him and I find we seem to have a similar worldview. Poe I read early and I think he was important to me, but not in ways that I realized at the time. Thomas Bernhard was extremely important to me, and still is. But also writers a little farther off the beaten track have been important to me, people like Leonardo Sciascia or Marie Redonnet or Antoine Volodine or Dambudzo Marechera. Also genre writers like Philip Dick and Dashiel Hammett. Peter Straub comes to mind, as does Henry James, Emmanuel Bove, and tons of other people.

I guess I’m much more likely to think of the community of writers as something that exists outside of national boundaries rather than thinking of myself as an American writer. That’s partly because I think that many of my concerns don’t fit well with the dominant trend of American fiction, at least as it’s understood by the New York Times and the establishment, and partly because the writers I feel closest to are often from elsewhere. That’s not to say I don’t admire a lot of American writers currently writing today.

Steve: Who are some of the current American writers you admire?

Brian: Any time I start mentioning American writers I leave someone out by accident, so this is a very provisional list. Cormac McCarthy was very important to me at a particular moment, particularly his novel Outer Dark. I’m always interested in what Shelley Jackson and Kelly Link are doing, as well as people like Gary Lutz and Ben Marcus. There’s a young writer named Brian Conn with one book out, called The Fixed Stars, that I think is amazingly good. Also Blake Butler, Joanna Ruocco, Paul LaFarge, and many, many others.

Steve: While many postmodernists come off as overly experimental or esoteric, you have the unique ability of churning theory into entertaining fiction. How do you make philosophy stimulating rather than abstruse?

Brian: I think it’s because I never start with an abstract idea. I never sit down with the idea that I’m going to use a piece of fiction to convey something theoretical. The fiction is not an illustration of a theoretical idea but rather an embodiment of things that I think about and am obsessed with, with my phobias and fears as well as with my own philosophical and pseudo-philosophical notions of the world. I tend to extrapolate from my own sense of the world and experience, so see the work itself as something that’s affective and intensive, and thus anything that’s theoretical has to be embodied, has to come naturally from the world of the fiction itself. I’d like to think there’s something really at stake in my fiction, and that what’s at stake is far from being academic.

Steve: You create a unique brand of black comedy, blending distinct elements such as horror and farce. Your novel Last Days is an exemplar of this hybrid style—you masterfully weave a journey narrative together with threads of horror, noir, farce, as well as a subtext of religious extremism. Other than demonstrating the literary potential of genre fiction, what are your primary interests in hybridization?

Brian: I think that my mind has more of a tendency toward synthesis than toward categorization, and I think Last Days serves as a pretty good reflection (with cracks) of some of my different reading interests. I do it, I guess, because it feels natural: it’s less a theoretical interest than a mode of working. I’m glad you feel it works well in Last Days. The novella is my favorite form (the short novel’s pretty good, too), and I think that something about the economy of the form in relation to the novel allows for a kind of tight philosophical exploration that you rarely see in the novel and that you don’t have room for in the short story.

Steve: Are certain genres (e.g., horror, noir, the detective story) particularly apt forms for exploring epistemological issues?

Brian: I think (as Brian McHale mentions) detective and mystery fiction already has a natural inclination toward epistemological issues, though most often the destabilizing potential of this isn’t fully tapped except in writers that are operating on the edge of the genre, such as Leonardo Sciascia or Carlo Emilio Gadda or Marie Redonnet. I’ve been playing with the tropes of detective fiction since my first book, which included “The Sanza Affair” and find it an extremely productive forum for epistemological and even ontological issues.

Steve: Peter Straub mentions in the forward of Last Days that a film may be in the works. I would love to see your work brought to the screen. What projects are in discussion or development?

Brian: Things are still possible for a film of Last Days, but my experience with film is that it takes the right combination of luck and fate to make something happen. There are several short films out there: a short film of “Altmann’s Tongue,” two of “Hebe Kills Jarry,” one of “The Father, Unblinking” that’s very nicely and very professionally done, a few others. Someone is working on a screenplay for “An Accounting.” Someone else is doing a treatment for The Open Curtain—what I’ve seen of it so far, I very much like.

Steve: I’m still hoping for a Lynch/Evenson collaboration, but I’ll definitely try to find the short films you’ve mentioned.

Brian: Some are tough to find, but they’re out there. They occasionally pop up on You Tube.

Steve: Thanks for taking the time out for an interview with Flatmancrooked, Brian! It’s been an honor. I can assure you that your fans will be anxiously looking forward to your next collection/novel (any word on your next big release date?). And that we probably won’t try to cannibalize or tenderize you until you’ve passed on, or at least lost the ability to type.

Brian: You’re welcome. I’m working on a novel right now, though it may be a while before it’s done, perhaps a year or two. I’ve got more than half a collection of stories done as well, and some contract work out soon. And I hope it’ll be a while before I lose the ability to tpye tyep type.

___________________________________________________________

more at http://xkcd.com/

———-

From: Shannon Walkley
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 9.15am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Poster

Hi 
I opened the screen door yesterday and my cat got out and has been missing since then so I was wondering if you are not to busy you could make a poster for me. It has to be A4 and I will photocopy it and put it around my suburb this afternoon.

This is the only photo of her I have she answers to the name Missy and is black and white and about 8 months old. missing on Harper street and my phone number.
Thanks Shan.

———-

From: David Thorne
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 9.26am
To: Shannon Walkley
Subject: Re: Poster

Dear Shannon,
That is shocking news. Luckily I was sitting down when I read your email and not half way up a ladder or tree. How are you holding up? I am surprised you managed to attend work at all what with thinking about Missy out there cold, frightened and alone… possibly lying on the side of the road, her back legs squashed by a vehicle, calling out “Shannon, where are you?”Although I have two clients expecting completed work this afternoon, I will, of course, drop everything and do whatever it takes to facilitate the speedy return of Missy.
Regards, David.

———-

From: Shannon Walkley
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 9.37am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Poster

yeah ok thanks. I know you dont like cats but I am really worried about mine. I have to leave at 1pm today.

———-

From: David Thorne
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 10.17am
To: Shannon Walkley
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Poster

Dear Shannon,
I never said I don’t like cats. Once, having been invited to a party, I went clothes shopping beforehand and bought a pair of expensive G-Star boots. They were two sizes too small but I wanted them so badly I figured I could just wear them without socks and cut my toenails very short. As the party was only a few blocks from my place, I decided to walk. After the first block, I lost all feeling in my feet. Arriving at the party, I stumbled into a guy named Steven, spilling Malibu & coke onto his white Wham ‘Choose Life’ t-shirt, and he punched me. An hour or so after the incident, Steven sat down in a chair already occupied by a cat. The surprised cat clawed and snarled causing Steven to leap out of the chair, slip on a rug and strike his forehead onto the corner of a speaker; resulting in a two inch open gash. In its shock, the cat also defecated, leaving Steven with a wet brown stain down the back of his beige cargo pants. I liked that cat.
Attached poster as requested.
Regards, David. 

———-

From: Shannon Walkley
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 10.24am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Poster

yeah thats not what I was looking for at all. it looks like a movie and how come the photo of Missy is so small?

———-

From: David Thorne
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 10.28am
To: Shannon Walkley
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Poster

Dear Shannon,
It’s a design thing. The cat is lost in the negative space. 
Regards, David.

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From: Shannon Walkley
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 10.33am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Poster

Thats just stupid. Can you do it properly please? I am extremely emotional over this and was up all night in tears. you seem to think it is funny. Can you make the photo bigger please and fix the text and do it in colour please. Thanks.

———-
From: David Thorne
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 10.46am
To: Shannon Walkley
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Poster

Dear Shannon,
Having worked with designers for a few years now, I would have assumed you understood, despite our vague suggestions otherwise, we do not welcome constructive criticism. I don’t come downstairs and tell you how to send text messages, log onto Facebook and look out of the window. I am willing to overlook this faux pas due to you no doubt being preoccupied with thoughts of Missy attempting to make her way home across busy intersections or being trapped in a drain as it slowly fills with water. I spent three days down a well once but that was just for fun.
I have amended and attached the poster as per your instructions.
Regards, David.

———-

From: Shannon Walkley
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 10.59am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Poster

This is worse than the other one. can you make it so it shows the whole photo of Missy and delete the stupid text that says missing missy off it? I just want it to say lost.

———-
From: David Thorne
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 11.14am
To: Shannon Walkley
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Poster

———-
From: Shannon Walkley
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 11.21am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Poster

yeah can you do the poster or not? I just want a photo and the word lost and the telephone number and when and where she was lost and her name. Not like a movie poster or anything stupid. I have to leave early today. If it was your cat I would help you. Thanks.

———-
From: David Thorne
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 11.32am
To: Shannon Walkley
Subject: Awww

Dear Shannon,
I don’t have a cat. I once agreed to look after a friend’s cat for a week but after he dropped it off at my apartment and explained the concept of kitty litter, I kept the cat in a closed cardboard box in the shed and forgot about it. If I wanted to feed something and clean faeces, I wouldn’t have put my mother in that home after her stroke. A week later, when my friend came to collect his cat, I pretended that I was not home and mailed the box to him. Apparently I failed to put enough stamps on the package and he had to collect it from the post office and pay eighteen dollars. He still goes on about that sometimes, people need to learn to let go.
I have attached the amended version of your poster as per your detailed instructions.
Regards, David. 

———-

From: Shannon Walkley
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 11.47am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Awww

Thats not my cat. where did you get that picture from? That cat is orange. I gave you a photo of my cat.

———-
From: David Thorne
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 11.58am
To: Shannon Walkley
Subject: Re: Re: Awww

I know, but that one is cute. As Missy has quite possibly met any one of several violent ends, it is possible you might get a better cat out of this. If anybody calls and says “I haven’t seen your orange cat but I did find a black and white one with its hind legs run over by a car, do you want it?” you can politely decline and save yourself a costly veterinarian bill.
I knew someone who had a basset hound that had its hind legs removed after an accident and it had to walk around with one of those little buggies with wheels. If it had been my dog I would have asked for all its legs to be removed and replaced with wheels and had a remote control installed. I could charge neighbourhood kids for rides and enter it in races. If I did the same with a horse I could drive it to work. I would call it Steven.
Regards, David.

———–

From: Shannon Walkley
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 12.07pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Awww

Please just use the photo I gave you.

———-
From: David Thorne
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 12.22pm
To: Shannon Walkley
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Awww

———-

From: Shannon Walkley
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 12.34pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Awww

I didnt say there was a reward. I dont have $2000 dollars. What did you even put that there for? Apart from that it is perfect can you please remove the reward bit. Thanks Shan.

———-
From: David Thorne
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 12.42pm
To: Shannon Walkley
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Awww

———-

From: Shannon Walkley
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 12.51pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Awww

Can you just please take the reward bit off altogether? I have to leave in ten minutes and I still have to make photocopies of it.

———-
From: David Thorne
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 12.56pm
To: Shannon Walkley
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Awww

———-

From: Shannon Walkley
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 1.03pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Awww

Fine. That will have to do.

_______________________________________

David Thorne is a graphic designer and humorist responsible for 27bslash6.com (where this originally appeared) and sent Flatmancrooked the longest authors bio we’ve yet recieved (it can be read at the AUTHORS page).

by BL Pawelek

(an FMC original)

Describe Dr. Polidori’s Sketchbook in ten words (no more, no less).

CR: Lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies and drawings.

Five Questions Here:

1. Polidori had a quick, short life. What is his saddest fact?

CR: Byron called him Polly-Dolly (although I’m not sure that’s how he would have spelled it.) Wouldn’t that make anyone happy to die young?

2. So what is so bad about the Skeltonic form?

CR: You can’t write a limerick in iambics.

3. Are you trying to make the chicken hawk a popular haircut?

CR: The Chicken Hawk is a direct copy of innumerable bad haircuts on ancient busts of Caesar Augustus, but generally considered an improvement on Julius Caesar’s comb-over. At least Russell Crowe seemed to think so in adopting it for “Gladiator”.

4. What is your best line from The Vampyre?

CR: “It was then that I found myself the object of the gaze of a predator whose hungers had never been denied.”

5. You had rather I didn’t what?

CR: It out-Bartles Bartleby. Pray you avoid it.

Five Questions There:

6. What is the best and worst thing about the Romantic Period?

CR:

— The best thing: “Christabel”; the worst thing: virtually everything Wordsworth wrote after “Lyrical Ballads.”

— The best thing: “Don Juan,” which is hardly a Romantic poem at all, though written by the man whose life is supposed to be almost prototypically Romantic; the worst thing: rhapsodic solipsism.

— The best thing: rhyming Blake; the worst thing: non-rhyming Blake.

— The best thing: JMW Turner; the worst thing: that oaf Shelley and his skylarks.

7. If you had to choose, are you a writer or artist?

CR: I suppose my writing is considered more accomplished (or should I say less unaccomplished?) than my art, if that’s a criterion. If number of years I’ve spent with one or the other is a criterion, then writing wins again. If the amount of time I spend NOW is the criterion, or the pleasure I have in doing one or the other, then drawing is the clear victor. I haven’t chosen, have I? I suppose if anything I have done is still remembered in ten years, it will most likely be a piece of writing.

8. What is the hardest part of a self-portrait?

CR: Accuracy. In every sense.

9. What one piece of art do you wish you created?

CR: “Discreet Music” by Brian Eno. Oh, wait, that’s music. “Do the Brown Nose” by the Dead Milkmen. Oh, wait, that’s music too. The famous bust of Nefertiti? “Starry Night”? Any one of a zillion unfinished sketches by Michelangelo? You ask hard questions. One of Rothko’s enormous canvases? Can I have “Discreet Music”?

10. Besides a skylark, what is your favorite songbird?

CR: There is something raucously charming in the rackety squawk of a green parrot building a nest on top of a telephone switchbox in suburbia.

In ten words (no more, no less), describe your next project?

CR: Lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, Malta, knights, werewolves.