17. HEIR

Champagne, please! Tonight is the release party for my short fiction collection, The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales, out now from Brooklyn Arts Press! Click HERE to order it.

Included is a piece of flash fiction called ‘Heir’, which I adapted into a broadside printed on a manila envelope. The story’s young narrator stalks her uncle at a Salvation Army thrift store and pores over a collection of increasingly haunted objects until she encounters an old woman who may or may not be her grandmother’s ghost.

If you live in Iowa City, drop by the Paper Nest tonight between 5-7 pm, where the 'Heir' broadside will be on display. OR be one of the  first 50 people to order The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales from the Brooklyn Arts Press website, and receive a free letterpress broadside of one of stories featured in the collection. ORDER NOW to get yours!

16. LARAMIE & RUDYARD

As embarrassing as it is to admit, many of the pieces included in The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Stories are love stories. ‘Laramie & Rudyard’, though, is on the more lustful end of the spectrum: a courtship/seduction story.

In the tradition of athletic camp (read this for more details), Laramie agrees to accompany Rudyard to a football game. He meets his straight-acting love interest at his house, where he takes inventory of Rudyard's waterbed and trophy shelf. Once they're at the game, though, Rudyard leaves to buy beer, and Laramie identifies vaguely with Cleopatra as he wonders if he’s been abandoned. To find out what happens next, order The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales HERE.

14. PLUCK

‘Pluck’ is a story that first appeared in Beecher’s 2, but you can also find it in my forthcoming fiction collection, The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales. Brooklyn Arts Press is letting you pre-order it for only $15.95—just click HERE!

The story grew out of my desire to explore the narrative behind some illustrations I made for the 2009 male sex workers art show curated by Kirk Read, Formerly Known As. I later added color to the drawings—see them below—and installed them as part of the 2012 San Francisco queer art festival, Best Revenge.

12. THE ONION’S TALE

‘An onion rolls into a natural foods store …’

Thus begins ‘The Onion's Tale’, a flash fiction piece included in The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales, a book you can pre-order HERE.

‘The onion is really cute,’ the story goes, ‘I mean really cute, its face smushed together, one of its eyes squeezed shut in a wink. It even has the most darling little hands, just beginning to nub out from between its skins.’ An ongoing crowd favorite, ‘The Onion’s Tale’ was inspired by a panicky experience inside the smug and predatory lifestyle behemoth, Whole Foods. I also adapted the story to a broadside, which you can read more about here. And GUESS WHAT? The first fifty people to pre-order The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales from the Brooklyn Arts Press website will get a FREE limited-edition broadside from a story in the collection—yours could be 'The Onion's Tale'!

10. I AM SO ALONE

In 2009, Lindsay Lohan granted an interview to Us Weekly where she aired her emotional vulnerability in a way that felt shocking. You can read the full text of the interview—and it really is worth reading—here.

In the interview, Lohan brags about collaborating with J. C. Penney's, admits to getting into it with TV C-Lister Drea de Matteo, and acknowledges being devastated by her breakup with Samantha Ronson. Her career was more freshly in the toilet at the time: it felt like a terrible step to open up to a publication that had thrived on pointing out her every misdeed since she started out as a stage-mom–dominated child star. 

This was the point where I first acknowledged that Lindsay is delusional. I sat down to write a story that encompasses her desperation, and titled it after the Us Weekly cover: ‘I Am So Alone’. Here’s the broadside I adapted from what I wrote:

What sort of world had been built for Lindsay, I wondered, and then I used Millions of Milkshakes as a launchpoint. The planet of ‘I Am So Alone’ consists of a surface made of helium balloons suspended from a central cherry-pit core. The strings that connect the balloons to the pit form the planet’s mantle. By the story’s end, a disoriented narrator (Lindsay) performs a sexualized parlor trick Dina probably taught her at a young age.

Pre-order The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales—the collection that features 'I Am So Alone'—HERE! The first fifty people to order the book from the Brooklyn Arts Press website will receive a free limited-edition broadside adaptation of a story from the collection—and yours could be 'I Am So Alone'!

8. TOY STORY

‘Toy Story’ relates an interaction between two classic toys in their break room. I adapted it into a broadside, which you can learn more about here.

'Toy Story' is also included in my forthcoming Brooklyn Arts Press collection, The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales, which is now available for pre-order. The first 50 people who order from BAP's website will receive a free broadside adaptation of 'Toy Story' or another piece!

Monchichi, based on the early 1980s anthropomorphic monkey-doll phenomenon (spelled Monchhichi), has recently had her heart broken, and melodramatically pokes at her chef salad as she attempts to recover. Here she is in happier times:

Meanwhile, her stickler co-worker, Madball, regales her with libertarian propaganda. His political philosophy is a natural extension of his upbringing as a popular toy that tried to be as gross as possible:

Pre-order The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales HERE.

6. THE HARE

I never noticed how much Angelina Jolie's acting relies on posing until watching The Tourist on an airplane. I was too cheap to buy earphones, and the postures were probably heightened by the lack of sound: the silence made me conscious of how much the actor's striking appearance must limit her range. I haven't seen Salt, which came out around the same time, but it seems to be essentially the same role. Turn down the sound and see:

It’s a face that wants to be static—when she has to move and talk, it feels a little like someone made a puppet out of a Vogue cover. Thus, she becomes the default Woman of Mystery, someone remote enough to never emote. So is Angie Jo an extremely well paid character actress? 

Intrigue is essential to everything she does (at least, in recent years). And when I sat down to write ‘The Hare’, I tried to harness—and satirize—the emotions that filmmakers set out to evoke when they do intrigue: the frisson of realizing things aren’t what they seem, the heart-sink that comes with betrayal, the childish thrill of being chased.

‘The Hare’ first appeared in BOMB, along with the above collage. The story is just one of 22 featured in my forthcoming collection, The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales. Click HERE to pre-order it. 

1. SPIEL

I’ll spend the next couple months posting about the 22 stories featured in my forthcoming fiction collection, The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales (which you can pre-order HERE!). 

The first story on deck is called ‘Spiel’, and it first appeared in Wigleaf. I made an accompanying collage that employs the dreaded Comic Sans—the perfect typeface to embody that place where kitsch becomes so sickly, the sugar self-combusts and an unexpected bitterness creeps in. Perfect for a shopkeeper narrator with a cynical relationship to her wares. Read the story here. And stay tuned for more …

'Socialites' featured at matchbook

Check out 'Socialites'—the short story I just featured on a letterpress broadside—over at matchbook, a journal dedicated to brief narrative.

LOOK!

My broadsides are now for sale over at Big Cartel. Go get 'em here!

Finally: 'The Taco Group' Slide Show

I created a page last year commemorating a performative reading I gave of my short story 'The Taco Group' at the Headlands Center for the Arts. I went a little batty, though, trying to sync up its slideshow, so I posted a transcript as a placeholder, then forgot about it. Well, I finally had time to struggle through iMovie and make the slideshow, as well as tidy up some of the page's design. Here's a description of the project: 

'The Taco Group' tells of infighting among the members of a sinister kaffeeklatsch, a group whose goal is to build a utopia out of the remnants of the post-functional city in which they live. As I wrote the story, I realized my aim was similar to that of my characters': I was doing a lot of scavenging in an attempt to make something perfect. I processed this a little in an artist's statement, and used recycled materials to construct slides of the utopian city's streets, as well as fixings for a taco buffet. I also letterpress printed the Taco Group's progress report. All these elements came together to form a not-quite-reading/not-quite-installation. 

Check out the updated page here. The story will be featured in my fiction collection forthcoming from Brooklyn Arts Press, so stay tuned.

'Where you are right now is in a gift shop.'

My short story "Spiel" is up today at Wigleaf! It explores the aesthetics of the mom industry.

New story in > kill author's final issue!

After three years, it's time to say goodbye to the online journal, > kill author, and I'm excited to be included in its farewell. Click here to read my very short story, "Dawn In the Afternoon," and listen to a recorded reading. The rest of the work included here is really great, so be sure to stop a second and look around!

Flash Wednesday.8

Here's one last June installment of Flash Wednesday! I made a broadside of this story, which is the title piece for my art show this Friday at James Rowland Shop. Check out the broadside here. 

Shifts

My shift starts at 8:30. Belladon’s starts at 11. Sometimes we trade shifts, but always, always, we stay within the realm of our own.

The way Belladon does his job is like this: he struts. He’s majestic in his brown paper briefs, a grease spot marking the very nose of their slope. My uniform—which I wear even when I work the 11—my uniform is more modest: a burgundy velvet cloak. The way I do my job is still unclear.

Sometimes working the 11 makes me feel foreign, Belladon tells me. And when we trade shifts, it feels like I’m coming home. Belladon lies a lot. That’s how he gets me to take his shift.

The cook is sorting through tubs of coleslaw with a Sharpie, hastening their expiry dates with crunching strokes of his wrist. Is it a wrist? No. It’s the graceless place where his hand meets his arm, a collision.

Lately, we’ve noticed groundcherries poking out from between the tubs of coleslaw, finishing off their growth with husky bobs. Belladon says it’s because we’ve stopped ordering sauerkraut. The stink kept the weeds at bay.

I’ve never felt foreign, exactly, here inside my cloak, but then I’ve never felt the urge to strut either. Whether I’m the 8:30 or the 11, it’s always been Belladon’s body that explains my own.

**********

Belladon has stopped wearing his briefs. Are you working the 8:30? I ask. He tells me no. We’ve created a new shift, he says, to fill in the gap between the shifts that already exist.

And there’s no uniform?

More like there’s no copyright. We’ve bumped up its expiry date. The sight of a naked man has finally surpassed being embarrassing.

I shuck a groundcherry and pop it in my mouth. I study Belladon’s penis, which is thin and craggy, like a long shred of cabbage. The cook unloads chestnuts from a grease-stained paper bag. The place where his hand meets his arm crackles.

I reach around inside my cloak for my penis. All I can feel is forest, cicada shrieks, the lusty smell of dusk. I stagger, I tear at the night. I brush past a halo of pubic hair, push into the thicket, further until I trip on a freshly cut stump. Horror is lush in my throat. This, I think, is the nature of doom: the restless mortar between plastic tubs of slop.

Flash Wednesday.7

If last week's Flash Wednesday was (allegedly!) about Tom Cruise, this one's (allegedly!) about Lindsey Lohan. To see a letterpress broadside of this story, click here!

I Am So Alone

When I walk, my feet squeak between the balloons that form the surface of this earth: blue and pink and milky yellow. Squeak. Sometimes I fear I’ll fall right through, and feel the slime-coated grit of the stone in the middle, the cherry pit to which the balloons are tethered. I work my tongue around inside my mouth, trying to make myself a map. What else can I do, when beyond each step lies a bog—cleavage squeaking—a bog that longs to absorb what’s left of my career? Squeak.

Toothpaste. Sometimes I find it clinging to the ground, dulling the colored mounds as I stumble my way toward the club. I wonder if I forgot to rinse. My gums taste dry: some blood, maybe, a speck of cocaine. But no sign of mint. I work my tongue around some more. I run my fingers—squeak—along the chalky gunk on the ground. Tastes like melted ice cream. Wait. That’s not the club I’m headed toward—it’s the soda shop. And who’s that outside smoking? Fuck, it’s Drea de Matteo.

BAM! She puts out her smoke on a pink balloon, right at its apex, where all its color gathers in a nipple. It shrivels and gasses down a crevasse, and the whole front corner of the soda shop—which was built on this pink balloon—the whole front corner crashes, fizzes, crumbles in a pile. I wait for her to say Come at me, bitch—this is what she always says when she sees me. Instead, she sneers and tells me the power’s out. I watch the empty calories—sorbets, goo ripples, sickly speckled mint—flow out from the rubble in rivulets, pastels veining out across the blistery land.

The thing is, I think I’ve almost got it. My tongue learns from its mistakes, working nonstop, cartographing a path of minimal humiliation. Come at me, bitch, Drea finally says, and to stall for more time, I tell her I’ve been approached by JC Penney to create a fashion line. What the fuck did you just say? She’s so quick to judge. Just like every other person on this earth, she’s planted herself between my happiness and me. In a flash, I envision the pulp, the place between the pit and the skin, the mantle made up of thousands of tautly white strings. This is where the vitamins are. I place my lips in my palm, pucker them so as to birth a map. As Drea claws at my hair, I hold out my hand with a look of triumph. Lying in my palm, cradled by the graceful swoop of my lifeline: a cherry stem in a perfect knot. 

Flash Wednesday.6

During June I'll be posting a piece of flash fiction—500 words or less—every week. 

No One Is Perfectly Cast

The Order decided he would be the one. Short in stature, sadly, but loved by many, the glare of his teeth blinded them to the shit on his breath. Funny now, from where we stand: a midget sock-sliding across the floor in his briefs. But it’s hard for us to fathom the temporal nature of influence. In his own maniacal minute, he was god.

A wife, ordered the Order, and this is where they faltered. Model after long-legged model, each surpassed him in her glamour, clawing up fame with nails like shrimp tails until she had enough to make it on her own. And the irony: the least towering of the prototypes went solo from the start. Shortly after she hatched, the Order watched her stagger away into the night. She settled in a mossy northwestern town: mysterious villagers, weird diner, a possibly esoteric past.

Years later, a location scout stumbled on this town. Perfect, he told the casting director over a slice of pie. But when she showed him a headshot of the actor she’d picked for the part of the werewolf, the location scout balked: He reminds me of the one. A synthesizer riff hit them both at the nape of the neck, lovingly shoving their faces toward the stage. There she stood, the least successful of the one’s potential wives. She’d found work at this roadhouse as its chanteuse. And even now, from where we stand, her song is wax, is isinglass, is wary.

Flash Wednesday.5

It's the return of Flash Wednesday! During June I'll be posting a piece of flash fiction—500 words or less—every week. This one's based on real-life work experience selling tee-shirts.

The Drift

Try to think of something different, Hazel said.

We’d been surrounded by the same slogans for so long, calling out the same prices, answering the same questions, it was really the tallest sort of order.

At this point, as you can imagine, the tee-shirt stand seemed about the extent of the world, let alone the fair. The two of us weren’t a big enough staff to allow for breaks.

I tried to describe to Hazel the former planet of our lives: a cheap, uncrowded coffee shop; a landlord willing to wait till mid month; bi-weekly unemployment checks. As I remembered this planet, though, I began to doubt we’d ever walked its terrain. This, I decided mid sentence, was the planet we hoped to get to, the one that would spin up to meet our feet in the instant we finally got paid.

As I manned the table, fetching sizes, engaging in chatter, my feet became wet with carnival muck. The soles of my boots, I realized, had split.

On the sixth day, the air began to purple, the shadows curled in a fetal sort of way. The rides were being dismantled, tents were sinking in on themselves as if starved. All potential shoppers shifted their interest to the sky.

They should’ve thought of this before, Hazel said. They should’ve manufactured us some pinholes to sell.

I must have known somewhere deep that the moon was now in front of the sun.

Hazel sighed as, for the first time all week, she sat. It felt strange to not be working, the sun now so dark and bright. Like a bomb had gone off, like going blind. I echoed Hazel’s sigh and also sat. I could hear the prize-winning chickens, the only sound now in the otherwise silent weight of the eclipse. I could hear their voices gather in the chambers of their beaks.

I thought about buying a corndog, a bag of roasted nuts. I thought about the golden way such things give upon first bite, the satisfaction when they split. I thought about how much of my check would go toward a new pair of boots.

Boots be damned, I thought, the carnival muck by now such a normal part of having feet. Because: as our new planet spun into view, I began to have time to mold its continents into temperate shapes.

Monkeybicycle features new short story!

In "Columbus Was Named For the Dove," a teacher has an introspective moment in a (haunted? by Thomas Kincaid?) faculty lounge. You can read the story over at Monkeybicycle!

New Work in The Collagist!

Issue 33 of The Collagist is out today, and it features three pieces of my flash fiction. One of the stories, "Tammy and the Amaranth", inspired the collage below. I'm excited to be included in The Collagist once again! To read my story "Warmth" in the December 2011 issue, click here.

Flash Wednesday.4

For the month of March, I’m posting a piece of flash fiction—500 words or less—every Wednesday.

Dawn In the Afternoon

Victorian Steve, who was quite a cooling commodity out there in the endless desert, had stopped by sometime around morning snack and offered to build her a doll factory, and as he sat down to his tedious work, she put all her youthful energy into willing him into a trance in which he lost every last irritating itch of time. She was determined to have Victorian Steve to herself for a very long while. And it must have been hours now, she thought, as she tracked her guest’s progress from the corner of her eye: a sound yet delicate foundation, so sugary, it couldn’t help but give fruit to several storeys. This was an unheard of attention span for the normally scattered Victorian Steve.

All the adults, of course, were at the government building, at work, for all she knew, on some updated, even more ruthless, breed of bomb. Something, maybe, that so plumbed the depths of murderousness, it was almost pleasant. Like a tall, cool glass of waterthorn tea, only contaminated, of course. She wished she had some sort of refreshment to offer Victorian Steve. She sat in the small patch of shade at the foot of the lanai, and as she watched him, intently bent over the parts he’d spread across the outdoor carpet, her mouth shriveled to a sour little void. Where did such a feeling come from, she wondered. It wasn’t quite angry, but certainly wasn’t joyful either, considering the typically calming and coveted presence of Victorian Steve. She was too young, of course, to be aware of the low-frequency unease she currently felt. Separation anxiety was a term she was on the brink of discovering and identifying with.

The book she was in the midst of reading then was something required for every child in that arid region. It discussed the point during childhood at which one first individuates. In a vaguely melancholy tone, it bemoaned the loss of the communities of imaginary friends that occurs around this time. Such creatures begin to solidify into socially accepted archetypes: princesses (pink), pixies (slender), vampires (cloaked). The book referred her to a crisis line in case she found it difficult to navigate this change.

She looked, once again, at Victorian Steve, who seemed so much paler and pointier of tooth than he had in the past. Judging by his shifty eyes and the faint sweat he’d broken, which surrounded him now like a mist, his attention was starting to shift. Having just read what she did, this came as a relief. But although the return of such typical behavior was a comfort, beneath that comfort ran a terror. As Victorian Steve got up to leave, the doll factory’s crank and masher only half complete, she lost her normally staid composure. In a wavering voice, she asked if he was ever coming back.